by David Mason
A bookseller comes to see how important tradition and continuity really are. And all small businessmen come to know that all actions cause reactions and that there are consequences to everything one does. Trite, no doubt, but true for all that, and inescapable. It’s a good lesson to learn.
Bookselling is a vocation, not a job, and the numerous cases we see of dynasties are almost all in Britain, where up till recently a young man, having to choose between his father’s bookshop or the factory, would sensibly become a bookseller. Some of those people became very good booksellers too. I don’t know what that means.
The other exception would be the old Jewish dynastic booksellers, where such people as Barney Rosenthal can point to four or five generations of booksellers in both branches of his family and relations all over the world in the trade, scattered by marriages within the tribe, and later by the Nazis.
So, usually, the business dies with the bookseller. Debbie being twenty years younger than me will carry on. My son, like most of his generation, is more interested in movies than in books.
She will inherit a large and wonderful stock, the best in Canada I believe. I like to tell her that that was a small price to pay for relinquishing her virtue, but seemingly she doesn’t agree, having taken in the last few months to dramatically proclaiming that I have ruined her life, she having sacrificed her best years to a world so corrupt that only a diminishing few treasure books any longer. She seems certain that the book itself will die about the same time I do, leaving her with massive overheads to house books that no one wants.
I hope that’s not true.
If Yvonne Knight was my favourite employee, Reg Innell has been beyond any doubt the most singular. Like me a lifelong reader and amasser of books, I knew Reg as a collector and customer for twenty-five years before he came to work with me.
Reg Innell is an Englishman in the mold of Edwin Harris—both were opinionated free-thinkers (for this type of Englishman that means an aggressive atheist), lifelong socialists and ever ready to take offense at any perceived challenge to any of their assertions. These were the sort of Englishmen who refused to bow to Hitler when most of the rest of the world had counted them out. This moral certainty in the rightness of their opinions may have saved western civilization, but it also tends to make them difficult to deal with on the personal level.
Reg worked his whole career for the Toronto Star, where he was a bit of a legend.
Debbie and I attended the party at the Star when Reg retired and were not surprised when every single speaker recounted stories of scenes Reg had caused, usually in the parking lot, when some hapless innocent made the error of parking in restricted spaces. The favourite at the retirement party seemed to be the time he called the police on some man only to find that the man was parked in Reg’s spot because he was catering a party in Beland Honderich’s office and had hot food. Prestige and position meant nothing to an aroused Reg.
His greatest public fame came when he accompanied Pierre Trudeau on his trip to China.
Reg, who has a bushy beard, had taken to wearing a tiny peaked Mao cap, which indeed gave him a startling resemblance to Karl Marx. At the welcoming ceremony for the Canadian Prime Minister, Zhou Enlai, Mao’s second in command, noticed Reg in the front rank of photographers, and exclaiming, “That man looks just like Karl Marx!” He came over to Reg and chatted, and then posed for pictures with him, which appeared in newspapers all over the world. A smug, smiling Reg Innell and a delighted Zhou Enlai upstaged Trudeau and adorned the front page of the Star. Reg, never overburdened with modesty, considered it only his due.
As a bachelor, Reg lived in a basement apartment in Yorkville, the only window completely covered by a blow-up of one of his photos of the Beatles from their first Toronto concert. Reg claimed this was a very effective attraction for the young women who frequented Yorkville in those days. He also boasts of providing free publicity photos for one of the young female singers who started in the Yorkville coffee houses in the sixties—Joni Mitchell.
As the assignment photo editor at the Star, he invariably assigned himself to meet whichever visiting celebrity interested him. He invariably met the literary ones, and I have been slowly acquiring some of those photos by a combination of flattery, whining, and even payment over the years. Reg usually refuses to sell his work in spite of the endless queries I receive regularly from people who see the portraits I have hanging in the shop of Auden, Leonard Cohen, Aldous Huxley, and John Fowles. Once, when Jake Zeitlin was visiting Toronto, he came in with Stillman Drake and seeing the one of Huxley (whom he knew well) acknowledged that it was the finest photographic portrait of Huxley he’d ever seen. When Jake turned eighty I managed to wheedle a copy of that photo from Reg and presented it to Jake. Jake loved it. I never told him of the humiliation and shameless begging I had to stoop to to get Reg to part with it.
Reg often made life difficult for booksellers too. He would become quite angry with booksellers who were as much as five minutes late in opening their stores, especially the hapless Norm Hart, who was habitually late opening, as was Joyce Blair at Abelard.
The rest of us became quite sick of Reg’s impassioned lectures on the iniquities of people who posted shop hours but didn’t keep them precisely. Reg’s wife and daughter refused to even enter public stores with Reg because any lapse in decorum would arouse his acute sense of propriety and he would demand to see the manager, whom he would then berate about proper business practices, grossly embarrassing Reg’s womenfolk.
In spite of Reg’s difficult personality he and I became close friends, and when he retired from the Star he came to work with me, running the store himself on Sundays and with me on Saturdays. We continued also, until his recent health problems, to go on scouting trips together. Reg has a wonderful library which he refers to as a “workingman’s” library, by which he means not that it reflects the working classes but that it was built by a
workingman on a workingman’s salary. A good loyal socialist workingman, too, and no one was ever allowed to forget it.
Reg’s original great love was Shelley, more for his personality, I have always believed, than his poetry—by which I mean it was Shelley’s defiant atheism which Reg loved most. Whenever some hapless young man, enamored of Reg’s lovely daughter, would come courting he would be greeted at the door by a scowling Reg who would first demand to know if the young man was a believer.
But Reg’s interests were much deeper than that. His obsession with Shelley was gradually transferred to Hazlitt, the essayist. It has never been necessary for me to seriously immerse myself in Hazlitt because Reg has bombarded me with countless quotations (these days mailed in letters, for, like me, he disdains that ubiquitous upstart, the computer). But several shared passions—Clarence Darrow, T.E. Lawrence, George Orwell and Mark Twain amongst others—indicates some shared heroes and probably hints at why we became such close friends. His passion for William Morris is also deep, although it is more attuned to the philosophy—he never had the money to indulge himself by buying the Kelmscott Press editions. No doubt he could have in the early years, but he probably felt his other passions would suffer if he did.
But Reg’s greatest passion is arguably for one book, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. If Reg has a favourite book it would have to be that one. It became a great joke in our shop that no matter what book some innocent seeker might inquire after, within five minutes Reg would be passionately selling them one of the many editions of Burton’s Melancholy. We found it almost impossible to keep it in stock due to Reg’s belief that his mandate in life is to save the world by introducing the young to Burton’s genius. Burton and good old-fashioned English socialism would be our salvation, if only we could see it.
His colleagues at the Star had many stories of his outrageous behaviour, but I have thousands; like the very famous Hollywood star who, posing for Reg, said, “I think I’ll take this pose,” only to be curtly
ordered by Reg to shut up. “You may be some big deal in those movies,” he said, “but here I’m the professional. You’ll do what I tell you and you’ll pose as I tell you to, or there’ll be no bloody picture for you.” She obeyed (I think it was Jane Fonda, but it might have been Audrey Hepburn). Reg did, and does, swell with pleasure whenever someone describes him as an outrageous curmudgeon.
I have literally hundreds of anecdotes about my old friend—my favourite scouting one having nothing to do about books.
One day some years ago Reg and I headed down to Hamilton to do the bookstores. Half-way there Reg exclaimed, “Bloody hell, we’re almost out of gas,” turning into the first gas station.
“It’s some sort of bleeding self-serve place,” he said, outraged. “I never use those, I need someone to do it. Do you know how to load it up?” he said apprehensively.
I didn’t drive then, and I was equally ignorant. “No, I don’t, Reg. But we’re grown men, surely we can figure it out. I see women doing it all the time,” I said confidently.
We formed a plan. Reg would put the nozzle in (surely all that experience, what with the Beatle’s photo in his Yorkville window, would have taught him that), and I would monitor the panel so we would know when to stop. It seemed to be sensible.
Reg opened all the little caps, inserted the nozzle, then said, “Okay, it’s a go.”
I pressed the lever, my back to the car while I watched the dials.
The panel numbers began to rotate when Reg bellowed, “Bloody hell! Outrageous!”
I turned. Gasoline was spraying out all over Reg. He was wearing a good camel hair topcoat and by the time I turned he was already completely soaked in gasoline: his coat, face, hair, beard. He had not pushed the nozzle past the small protective cover of the tank, instead placing it up against the plate and almost half a gallon of gas sprayed him before he had the sense to yell so I would release my grip on the pump. He was deeply affronted and even more so when I couldn’t control my laughter.
But he calmed down and the gas, which had looked like it had destroyed his expensive coat (“Serves you right,” I couldn’t help saying. “Who ever heard of a socialist in a camel-hair coat?”) finally evaporated, leaving only the odor.
We continued to Hamilton. In the first bookstore we entered the stench of gasoline first frightened, then confused the owner. When we explained, he promptly ordered all his other customers to put out their cigarettes (this anecdote occurred in more civil times). “There’s important books and stuff here,” he stated. “We don’t want to be burning down the bookstore, do we?” As a good bookseller he was more concerned about his books than he was about Reg and me.
In another store we were almost kicked out. The proprietor thought we were rummies who must be sniffing something. We explained, but only my business card saved us from expulsion. We were looking at shelves in the rear of the store when a man entered, sniffed and started yelling, “I smell gas. Fire! Fire! It’s going to explode. Call 9-1-1! Get out!”
The proprietor calmed him.
“It’s okay. It’s only those two guys over there.” The man ran out anyway.
So, what you have here are two modern men, their homes bulging with books, the records of man’s triumph over nature and ignorance and stupidity, who can’t even manage between them to fill the gas tank of an automobile.
Just as with the regular customers, bookstore employees tend to become friends, and when they go out on their own, equals, valued colleagues.
Reading Sheila Markham’s wonderful A Book of Booksellers one sees clearly the incredible network of apprenticeships, a clear indication of how intertwined the history and the workings of the book trade are and always have been.
It also demonstrates the serendipitous manner in which so many booksellers found their vocation.
One of Markham’s interviews, which missed the cut for the book, contains perhaps my favourite description of how so many dealers have entered the trade.
It is with a bookseller I don’t know named Fern Poel, and begins: “I’m just like any other misfit in the trade. At some point you become unemployable and end up going into your hobby.”
Amen.
Chapter 18
Crooks and Cranks
The book business has always sheltered many eccentric people of Honsberger’s sort.
Though perhaps it’s not that bookselling attracts the crazies so much as it is that long-term bookselling makes otherwise sane people crazy. I use crazy here because most booksellers don’t fit my personal definition of eccentric. If you are rich, you can pass as eccentric; if you’re poor, you will be viewed as crazy. Whatever the definition used there are lots of noticeably strange people in the book trade, one of its more endearing aspects. My own opinion is the more the merrier.
Booksellers are often loners; bookish loners, with strong opinions and usually very independent characters, and as they get older, often very cranky ones.
There’s something about spending many years starving to death, offering the great works of civilization to people who don’t give a damn—while the friends one started out with become affluent or at the very least secure—to make a man take refuge in his own view of his social importance. There’s a great sense of freedom which comes with having nothing to lose, and when you mix that with having read thousands of books, by and about the innovators, rebels, and misfits of every sort and the geniuses who have left us so many stunning examples of creativity, moral courage, and obstinate defiance, it’s not surprising that the result will often be a cranky eccentric who doesn’t really care if you buy a book or not.
I was once in a bookstore in New York on the day before the New York fair, a shop which gradually filled up with visiting booksellers wanting to buy books. It was early morning, pouring rain outside, and the two elderly proprietors were viewing the hoard of hungry scouts with increasing suspicion and truculence.
One whole wall was covered with a clear plastic drape, protecting their latest catalogue—just being printed we were informed. The old men in charge didn’t like all this activity, we could tell: dealers greeting old friends loudly, water dripping from the new arrivals, the anticipation of great buys causing a lot of boisterous enthusiasm. We waited to see which of us would have the temerity to ask to explore the stock behind the plastic curtain. A friend of mine saw on the proprietor’s desk the very scarce and very desirable five-volume catalogue of the George Arents Collection on Tobacco now in the New York Public Library.
“Is that for sale?” he courteously inquired of the old man who was eyeing him suspiciously.
“This is a bookstore isn’t it?” the crusty proprietor replied.
Even more politely my friend inquired, “May I ask how much it is?”
“It’s $450.00,” the proprietor barked, glaring at my friend.
“I’m a bookseller, you know,” my friend said gently, knowing the proprietors were aware that everyone in the store was a bookseller, but stating that just so there would be no doubt that he expected the customary trade discount.
“It’ll be 20%,” the man said, now noticeably angry.
“I’ll take it,” said my friend.
The owner softened a bit, but not much. A nice sale assured, my friend, feeling he had established his credentials as a serious man, notched things up.
“Could I take a look under the plastic, at the new catalogue?” he essayed tentatively.
“No,” said the old man bluntly. “And in fact we’re closing now—for lunch. You’ll all have to leave.” It was about 10 am.
And with that he threw us all out into the downpour, around fifteen dealers, hungry for books and with our bank accounts still full of money. Many potential sales lost, but they didn’t care. No noisy, snotty young punks were going to get away with such pushy tactics in their store. There was no way they were going to let us get away with giving them $20,000.00 or $
30,000.00. My friend paid for the Arents (he sold it an hour later to another colleague for $750.00) and we slunk out. We all knew better than to protest at such arbitrary craziness; there was probably not a one of us who hadn’t done a similar thing for equally stupid reasons, defying normal economic sense, although certainly not with quite those financial consequences. We’ll sell the books to someone else sooner or later, they no doubt felt. We didn’t starve for fifty years to put up with those smart-alecky punks now that it no longer matters.
And this sort of behaviour is not uncommon either, perhaps another of the many reasons booksellers die broke.
From Barry Young—my first employer, selling new books, who, “on principle,” would spend all day in court fighting $2.00 parking tickets while he paid me $3.00 an hour to mind his shop—to Norm Hart, who drove the owner of Acadia, Asher Joram, near-crazy by ignoring the posted hours of 10 am to 6 pm, arriving later every day until his personal hours were from around 4 pm until midnight or so—bookstore owners are often as eccentric as their scouts and customers. Once Norm was found in the shop at opening but only because late the previous night, reaching for a book on a shelf in a narrow back hallway, he’d pulled the entire shelf off the wall, burying himself in books. Pinned to the floor by the shelf but entirely unhurt, Norm spent the whole night there, the shop lit up, the door unlocked, his only complaint that he was buried in books but couldn’t read one because of the weight pinning him. Naturally, no one bothered to enter the unlocked store the entire night, for even burglars know the futility of bothering to rob a used bookstore.
