by David Mason
Browsing in the Holmes Book Company in San Francisco one day Stillman came across a book called A Treatise on Language, or the Relation Which Words Bear to Things, published by the author in New York in 1836. On investigation Stillman came to believe that this obscure self-published book by an unknown man—a banker in Utica, New York—was perhaps the most important contribution to philosophy by an American, including even William James.
It was a treatise on semantics but was published a century before that subject even became generally recognized. Two things seem important to me here: that it was discovered in a used bookshop, not offered to him by a rare book dealer, and, more crucially, his appreciation of it was as perfect a case as one could find of the educated instinct in operation.
The average person, even the average dealer—and possibly even the specialist science dealer searching for known authors and titles—would have passed right over it. Without taking the time to examine it closely or without the scientific knowledge to understand its significance it had already rested in obscurity and its author in anonymity for a hundred years till Stillman happened on it.
Stillman Drake went on to assemble a collection of all this man’s books and pamphlets. His name was Alexander Bryan Johnson, and thanks to Stillman all of Johnson’s books are back in print—his status assured—mostly bearing introductions by Stillman, and his great contributions are now part of the historical record.
So we find a scholar, browsing through a grubby disordered used bookstore, who has added to the sum of scientific knowledge, but only because the right sensibility encountered a key book and had all the necessary equipment to realize what it was.
Every dealer has hundreds of anecdotal stories about the serendipity offered by browsing in used bookshops, but this remains my favourite example of the scholarly rewards which can ensue.
Chapter 17
Employees
After all these years it’s hard to even remember all the employees I’ve had. A curious contradiction of the book trade is the fact that no matter how poor a dealer may be, he must have employees, almost from the first, if for no other reason than that he would otherwise have no life at all outside the store. So poor was I when I started that my infant son would mind the shop beside me, sitting in a sloped children’s holder, observing the eccentric habitués, while my wife worked a part-time job to help pay the bills. Then, at home after work, along with her usual home duties she also did the invoicing and typed the catalogues while I manned the shop until the last customer left, sometimes very late. It all seemed quite natural at the time, even fun, for we were working for ourselves; we felt we were creating our own future.
Many beginning dealers, having no money, only time, stay open long hours, often 9 am to midnight, seven days a week. Even living over the store it doesn’t take long to discover this kind of life is impossible to sustain, so a young dealer finds himself an employee, paying minimum wage or slightly above it. This person ends up earning a wage that the owner can’t count on earning himself.
These early poverty-induced lessons served me well in many areas as I was constantly trying to figure ways to increase sales with the only means I had at my disposal: new ideas. But there was no escape from time.
Recently I found my earliest ledger, which revealed that I was almost a year in business before my gross sales for the month reached $1,000.00. That’s gross sales, all of which had to pay the $300.00 rent, replace stock, and feed my family. Still, gross sales in those days were actually net sales, for no new business
at that level needs to contemplate such ordinary concerns as taxes. The normal advice from older dealers to newcomers then (and maybe now) was to not even submit a tax form until you had been in business for at least five years. This had nothing to do with honesty but was simple common sense. When you consider that it would be at least that long before any actual profit would be possible, it was thought that it was better to be under the radar with any government agency. Actually, that still holds. It’s no accident that all small businessmen distrust and avoid bureaucrats. One learns very early that these people live by their own rules; they don’t care, probably can’t even understand, that a new business which has a $25.00 or $50.00 fee or penalty imposed may result in a family poorly fed. One comes to avoid all contact with government, which I still do. I am responsible for everything I do. Why would I want to have to reason with someone who takes no responsibility for their actions, having a barrier of inflexible rules to protect them from needing to consider the consequences of their legalities? One comes to despise even the attitude of such people. But curiously, after a few years of always paying for your mistakes one comes to take an inordinate pride in doing so, even getting to the stage of not envying the affluence of such cosseted bureaucrats compared to your own financial straits, when you see what their security really costs them.
On the whole I’ve been pretty lucky in the employees I’ve had, or maybe it’s just that I’ve mercifully blanked out the unfortunate memories of the few failures.
Question the prominent booksellers of today and you will find an intricate web of associations leading back to the major dealers of the previous generation; that is how learning and tradition passes on in the book trade.
Of all the booksellers who worked for me before starting their own businesses, and there are now a few of them, my favourite is Yvonne Knight, the proprietor of St. Nicholas Books. St. Nicholas specialized only in children’s books. Yvonne retired and St. Nicholas is defunct so some of you may not know of it. I’d like to tell you how St. Nicholas came to be. Yvonne came to work for me around 1971 and was my first full-time employee. I encouraged her to specialize in children’s books, a part of my stock that I had been consciously building up for a long time.
My store then was in a converted house on Church St., and adjoining the entrance to the washroom was a small alcove which I had shelved, leaving only a narrow aisle for access to the washroom. When shelved this space was hardly larger than a closet, and that’s where we put the children’s books. Yvonne had started working for me in April or May. In January of the following year she came to me and told me she had to return all the money I had paid her for the entire previous year, some six or eight months. It turns out that her husband, who is a doctor, had been told by his accountant that her having a job was going to mess up his tax return so badly that it would cost him more than her total earnings. To avoid that mess he told her to return all her pay.
I didn’t know how to respond to that, except I knew I couldn’t allow her to work for nothing—even though she said she’d be happy to do so. I finally thought of a solution. Which was, that I gave her all my children’s books and the space they were in. She had an instant business. We thereafter referred to her first shop, beside my washroom, as the world’s smallest bookstore, contrasting it deliberately to the World’s Biggest Bookstore in downtown Toronto. I continued to buy children’s books and paid her with them, which suited us both. She ran her little shop while still working for me for a few years, until its size became impossible, about the same time she felt ready to become entirely independent. She moved her business into the third floor of her home where it went from being the smallest bookstore in the world to certainly the loveliest children’s bookshop in Canada.
Yvonne and I remained close friends—we shared booths at international book fairs several times and some of my best kid’s books came from her. Yvonne sold her books too cheaply and she also over-described—to over-describe means that a dealer notes all defects with such detail that it often results in a book’s condition sounding way worse than it is. Which means that if you ordered a book from her that she had described as good you would be delighted because it would invariably be in fine condition. Obviously her customers loved her and she sold a very high percentage from her catalogues.
After she left my store I would only see her stock when I visited, when she issued a catalogue, or at book fairs.
This often resulted in my buying some of my best children’s books from her without even needing to leave my booth at a fair. Once, at a Los Angeles fair, she had mounted a lovely display in our shared glass display case. As soon as I saw it I wanted to buy over half the books in it, but especially a very ornate set of tiny nineteenth-century
children’s books in a special wooden bookcase. It was beautiful and, as usual, too cheap. I wanted the set badly but Yvonne asked me not to buy anything until the fair had opened, because she didn’t want to ruin her display. Out of deference I agreed, but later, still before opening, a dealer I quite disliked, a guy who had a reputation as a vulgar bully with his colleagues, came up and tried to buy the books. It looked like being accommodating to Yvonne meant I would lose my treasure. But he wanted 20% off, which luckily gave me an out. In those days the standard discount was just 10%, which means he was being pushy again. Yvonne wasn’t in the booth and I told him he’d have to come back and ask her. When he left I promptly took the set out of the case and hid it. When I told Yvonne why, she wasn’t angry because she didn’t like this man either. I paid her the full price and then had the pleasure of telling the pushy bully, when he came back, that it had sold. I didn’t tell him it had been sold to me. I just told him it had been sold to a dealer who didn’t try to beat her down. But, sure enough, this guy was so dumb that he didn’t even get the point of my insult. I still have this set and it’s still beautiful.
Another anecdote is more painful. Visiting some recent friends and clients once in their home I saw one of the great rarities in Canadian literature, a first edition of Anne of Green Gables. After expressing surprise that they had such a rare book, I asked if they could tell me where they got it and how much they had paid. They told me that they had bought it from Yvonne Knight for $400.00. $400.00! I almost cried. Even then that was grossly underpriced; Yvonne simply hadn’t thought to mention it to me, so I had missed it. Which is as good as an example as you’ll ever hear as to why it’s a good idea to visit used bookstores regularly. Some years later, I bought it off my friends—for a bit more than $400.00; in fact I paid them $9,000.00 for it, and sold it for $10,000.00 the same day. If you’d like to have a more detailed account about that you will find the whole story in an essay on my website entitled “Anne’s Adventures on Her Way Home.”
Aside from Steve Temple’s periodic stretches working for me when he was in financial trouble, two of the best booksellers now active in Canada worked for me in their early years: Robert Wright, and Debra Dearlove, who still does.
Some time after Wright left to go on his own I also hired Janet Fetherling (previously Inksetter, and now Inksetter again).
After a couple of years Janet Fetherling came to me one day and told me she had bought a bookstore, Annex Books, and would be leaving. The old syndrome again—if they’re any good they will want to go out on their own. I could only be gracious and wish her well but I was pretty sick of hiring people, spending an intensive couple of years teaching and training them, only to lose them.
Of course much worse were the ones who, after all that effort, didn’t work out.
This time I resolved to try and be a real businessman and conduct proper interviews and consider carefully all applicants before I hired one. I began to question friends and clients who had done extensive hiring on how to do this. One librarian friend, David Kotin, in the upper levels of the Toronto Public Library, depressed me by saying it was all a crapshoot.
“The best employee I ever hired, Dave, had the worst qualifications and the worst mistake I ever made had two or three degrees.”
This made me even more depressed. To make matters worse, I was living in my store then, having had an abrupt parting with the woman I’d been living with, so I had no home, no lady, now no employee and worse, I couldn’t even type.
One Saturday I started chatting with an occasional customer, Debra Dearlove, and on telling her my problems she responded, “Why don’t you hire me?”
Turns out she had worked in insurance, hadn’t liked it and returned to York to do postgraduate work, but discovered that she didn’t care for the upper levels of university life and was dropping out.
In spite of all my newly mustered intentions, I trusted my instincts and offered her the job. I doubt that those proper methods would have worked anyway. Every dealer I’ve ever spoken to hires in the same manner I did, just as most of them entered the trade by happenstance as well. Whenever you read a bookseller’s biographical note or question him, almost everyone in the trade seemed to enter it by accident. I’ve heard variations of the same story countless times since I read it in David Randall’s Dukedom Large Enough (New York, 1969) and the similarities are a bit eerie. A university student, usually an English major (although there have been engineers, pre-meds, etc.) finds himself spending more time in the library or in bookstores than at lectures, finding the attraction
to books irresistible till he finally finds himself both hoarding and scouting. At first thinking it was merely a sort of new hobby, then becoming increasingly involved, until his preoccupation with books becomes an addiction and the fascination transfers itself into an all-consuming compulsion, and another bookseller is born. There are many variations of this theme, my own case being one, starting at fifteen, but not realizing my vocation till I was thirty. But all those years of travelling, reading, talking, I now see, were preparation for what was my certain destiny from the age of four or five or whenever it was that I first learned to see order in the hieroglyphics of our language. The clues can always be found if one looks.
How could someone who believes in his heart that he was born knowing how to read have become anything else but a lifelong lover of books?
I hired her on the spot and she is still here twenty-five years later—in fact, pretty much running things now. It was later before I realized that working in my bookstore was dangerous in an entirely new way for both of us. By that time it was too late. I was truly seduced, and I still am.
For, within a few months, life took over and I broke the first rule of business, which is, of course, never mess with your employees. We began seeing each other on a personal level as well. Her father, who himself had owned and run a company, put it succinctly when he was told of the complication: “Well it’s not like she’ll lose a job that’s paying her any money.” He’d already learned a few things about the book business.
Debbie was a natural. Already a collector of the work of George Gissing, she understood the essence of the collecting instinct, which quickly translated into her becoming first a natural bookseller, then a very good one. Friends enjoy kidding me over this. “So, David, you finally got a perfect employee and you think marrying her will keep her from leaving. This time if she leaves you’ll lose everything.” (Actually, it’s most often Debbie herself who points this out to me, and the most chilling part is that it’s true.)
Merging our personal and professional lives wasn’t easy in the beginning for obvious reasons. It wasn’t just that I was the boss, it was that I knew things she didn’t (I still do, although she might not admit this). In other words, I had the obvious advantage of always being right, inevitable and proper in a teaching and boss/employee situation, but neither desirable nor even possible in a personal one.
That we pulled it off and are still doing so twenty-five years later says something about us, I think. These days I make up for my early vulgar crassness of always being right by now always being clearly wrong. I’m still not sure if we need another twenty-five years to even the slate so that we’ll simply be equals.
But in spite of joking and the pointed comments of our friends, it has worked—so much so that I must admit I couldn’t run things without her. It is a demonstrable truism in the book trade that partnerships don’t work and invariably fail, often disastrously. But it seems that those forged in marriage or personal bonds can and do.
I have often been thankful for whatever instinct caused
me to refuse Jerry Sherlock’s offer of a partnership before I went on my own, for I now realize that our friendship might not have survived. It’s one thing to find a person’s eccentricities amusing when they cost you nothing, but when ludicrous business practices take the food from one’s family’s mouth, so to speak, they are less so.
Debbie and I compliment each other well in the business—almost like good cop, bad cop (naturally, I am the good cop, although she would contend I’m really a fool and a sucker)—and with the great gift that we both share in everything, our near constant verbal bickering seems to evaporate almost instantly, leaving the air clean of resentment and anger.
This is no small thing, for as every person who has grappled with the obsessions of addiction knows, resentment is one of the most insidious and destructive of all human traits.
All this means that I have also solved the great dilemma facing all older booksellers—what will happen to the business when the founder dies. I have now seen many, many cases where book businesses simply evaporated after the owner died. Warren Howell took over after the death of his father and it is said he was a much better bookseller than his father had been, but on his death John Howell Books was liquidated. Jake Zeitlin tried elaborate schemes for many years where he would hire the sons of his wealthy clients, the idea being that Jake would teach the young man the business then sell it to the father, establishing the continuance of his business. Jonathan Hill was supposed to do this, I believe, but instead set up in his own business, perhaps motivated in the same way I was when I turned down Jerry Sherlock’s offer of a partnership. When Jake died, Zeitlin and Ver Brugge disappeared as well. This saddens me but it affords yet another example of what I have come to believe is a necessary consequence of being a bookseller. It offers fuel for the philosophic position which I believe is an inevitable consequence of being a bookseller: seeing in everyday mundane occurrences philosophical implications far more profound than those afforded in normal occupations. And why would that surprise? How can one, after a lifetime immersed in records of human history, the noble and the foolish, think otherwise?
