by David Mason
The Big Fight, as it is now commonly referred to in the Canadian trade, erupted over a point in our constitution which stipulated quite clearly that only persons who were full-time booksellers could be eligible for membership.
For years Hoffer had agitated for a new constitution for the ABAC, having convinced himself in one of his many authoritarian moments that the way to make things work smoothly was to make more rules and laws.
I was strongly against this. Our original constitution was very loose, based on the legal obligations provided by the laws of Canada, as per our charter. I believed (I still do) that by sticking with this constitution we were free to do pretty much anything we liked, and that we could deal with problems or change as it came up and pass bylaws to enable us to go in any direction we wanted. During my tenure on the board, some twenty to twenty-five years in every capacity, we have passed quite a few bylaws. The problem—perhaps typically—was that we lost all the files containing the minutes of all those meetings, so nobody seemed to remember, except me, what we had done. Often at our annual meeting a problem or a suggestion would arise and I would point out that we had passed a bylaw twenty years ago relating to it, only to be faced with blank stares. No one else remembered.
Finally Hoffer wore us all down, so it was agreed that we would form a committee to draft and submit to the membership a new constitution.
The committee was composed of Jerry Sherlock, Gail Wilson—then the President, I believe—Larry Wallrich, Bill Hoffer and myself. Bill arrived at the first meeting with a draft constitution which he had put together and printed at his own expense and we started to fight it out.
My first problem was that Bill’s submission was pretty much an exact copy of the constitution of our American colleagues’ association, the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA), with only a few rules based on the most glaring of the differences between American and Canadian law changed. This irritated me. I didn’t think that we, as a country which followed the precedent system of the British common law, should be imitating a constitution which was based on U.S. codified law. I felt that his approach would burden us with needless barriers and restrictions. The main area of contention—and the main area of disagreement between Hoffer and everyone else—was the basic qualification for membership. In the U.S. anyone who met the criteria of being a bookseller was qualified, as opposed to ours, which clearly stated that one could only be eligible if one were a full-time bookseller.
I refused to compromise on this point, as I had a fair bit of knowledge about the problems our American colleagues had faced because their law didn’t allow such discrimination.
While I had been President of the ABAC, I had been privy to a good part of our American colleagues’ problems with their own association. The Americans had been sued by a man who was not full-time, and worse, had a terrible reputation as a slippery crook, although with no record of legal charges relating to his conduct. They had refused him membership based on several objections resulting from his conduct. But he sued, based, I believe, on U.S. Restraint of Trade laws that hamper Americans in so many professional areas.
As I remember it, the ABAA opposed this man, spent some $13,000.00 in legal fees fighting him, and were then informed by their attorneys that they could spend a fortune and would still almost certainly lose. They capitulated and the man, despised by all, was allowed into the ABAA. I saw no reason why we should put ourselves in the same position, where we could face such lawsuits, and if I remember correctly so did everyone else excepting Bill and his followers.
After several contentious sessions, we submitted our hammered-out draft; it was voted on, and passed.
Long after the new constitution was passed there would still be rumbles of dissent regarding the membership requirements. Finally it erupted again when a librarian in a western university who had purchased an established antiquarian bookshop in Victoria applied. We assumed that someone would have pointed out to him the constitutional requirement that he be a full-time bookseller, and assumed therefore that the constitution was to be tested. It should be obvious why we had instigated this requirement. If another requirement in the rules was to be effective, that a bookseller needed to be in business a minimum of three years, how could working evenings and weekends for three full years to qualify constitute that minimum period? And how could that mesh with the experience of a person who actually had run a business full-time for the three years? An obvious problem.
But the real basis of that rule was the belief, shared by me and most of the dealers I discussed it with, that only a man whose whole public livelihood, and hence his reputation, was involved in his business would guard his reputation by acting honestly. If your book business was some sort of hobby business, you might be more prone to succumb to one of the many temptations which occur when you’re dealing with people who don’t know the value of what they have. A man with a day job to fall back on was not going to be as careful with his reputation as someone whose whole public face was in his book business.
But this librarian applied anyway and after being turned down, applied again later, with his wife named as the owner. Again the application was turned down as improper. Hoffer proposed a constitutional amendment to change the terms of requirement. And the uproar began again. The amendment being proposed was defeated after much exchange of argument and literature.
However, Hoffer continued to pursue it. Indeed, I heard from a friend that he was present when Hoffer boasted to the applicant that he personally would ensure that the man was accepted into the association.
The amendment was proposed again, and then a third time, the rationale being that so few members had bothered to vote that even the majority was a minority. This in spite of what the common law says: that the failure to vote in such cases implies a vote against. The anger continued to fester.
Finally, everything exploded after the third vote when the board of the ABAC, which contained Hoffer’s most sinister
acolyte Bill Matthews, as well as Hoffer himself as Secretary, issued a proclamation suspending all members who had not voted. They then stirred things up further by announcing that these suspensions would be reviewed at a Director’s meeting just prior to the Toronto book fair, with members who had not voted being subjected to expulsion if their excuses didn’t measure up. This, of course, meant that affected dealers who were not reinstated
would be ineligible to participate in the fair the next day.
These authoritarian pronouncements of the Comintern were contained in a letter by Hoffer to his fellow directors, where he pontificated in such a manner that he appeared to be using the royal we—I choose to do this, I do not choose to allow that. It was an incredible mix of authoritarian bombast and blackmail. One of those directors leaked it to us ordinary members. The result, directed at a bunch of natural anarchists, was equally explosive.
At the annual meeting, which preceded the book fair, once we had covered the multiple motions proposed by irate members, motions which ranged from Hoffer’s expulsion to several demands that the entire board of directors resign, the whole nonsensical business was thrown out—although Hoffer’s non-expulsion and non-resignation, even from his position as Secretary, caused two public resignations from the ABAC. One of those was Marty Ahvenus, one of the earliest members and a man so gentle and amiable he was universally beloved by all his colleagues; the other, Larry Wallrich, the proprietor of About Books, who was highly respected, having dealt in books in four different countries before moving to Canada.
Friendships were shattered (some remaining so twenty years later) and grudges were held which, I expect, will end only with the deaths of the participants.
Finally, it seemed to me, Hoffer seemed to arrive at some understanding of all the damage he had inflicted on what had heretofore been a group of used booksellers, once mostly friends and now antagonistic foes.
Anyway, not too much time after that, he closed h
is business, shipped his stock down to Peter Howard in Berkeley and took off for Russia, his family’s place of origin, where he married a Russian woman and apparently took up the collecting of Russian folk art.
Well along with these attempts to put Bill into the proper context, I made contact with the Canadian poet Norm Sibum, who had been a long-time friend of Hoffer’s. He graciously sent me copies of his long correspondence with Bill after he had given up books and moved to Russia. Those letters, along with a memoir which Sibum himself penned on Hoffer, provided me with a view of Hoffer which was so different from my own experience—and I have to add that of many, many, other people who had to deal with him—that I was astounded.
The Russian letters show a very different Hoffer. Gone was the abrasive, confrontational, messianic madman. The prose was still Bill’s; all those unlikely words and phrases he habitually employed, those clever phrases which could shock you with their brilliant juxtapositions of words not expected in normal pedestrian prose—which I came to realize were part of the vocabulary of the religious outsider attempting to impose his vision—were still apparent. But what was missing, seemingly, was the rage. These letters were entirely sane, philosophical even, as though his demons had deserted him. Later he succumbed to cancer and came home to be treated by his father, Abram Hoffer, Huxley’s old colleague in the famous LSD experiments, who then was treating various maladies, including cancer, with mega-vitamins.
I later saw copies of letters from Bill when he was sick and probably knew he was dying. They showed same measured calmness.
It seemed as if he had attained that philosophical equanimity that we all would hope for at such time, and which we all are virtually certain would fail us.
He died at fifty-seven, and we were finally spared his constant disruptions. But, as I’ve found so often with other people who caused me so much trouble, I sort of miss him and the startling brilliance mixed with insane outbursts which certainly made things lively.
Some time after Bill’s death, John Metcalf wrote an interesting and provocative piece about Hoffer, which appeared first in Canadian Notes and Queries (CNQ) and then in a slightly revised form in his An Aesthetic Underground: A Literary Memoir (Thomas Allen, 2003). This caused me a lot of trouble. John had allied himself to Bill’s rather contradictory vendetta against the Canada Council. The primary function of the Canada Council, formed by the Canadian Government to further the arts in Canada, was issuing cash grants to artists and arts organizations, to enable them to relax a bit while they created what was to be the basis of a Canadian cultural heritage. This is not a bad idea, but both Metcalf and Hoffer independently came to believe that such largesse really only fostered mediocrity, allowing every hack in the country to publish their self-indulgent maunderings.
Metcalf in his memoir said several things which led to further writings by others, all of which seemed to be blamed on me by several of Hoffer’s cronies and disciples. Metcalf’s memoir was both affectionate and laudatory, but John didn’t shy away from recounting several things about Bill which offended Hoffer’s friends, a predictable result encountered amongst humourless pedants everywhere who only deal in black and white terms.
One of Metcalf’s assertions was that Hoffer was, to use a politically correct euphemism, hygienically challenged. I never noticed that, although he was never my house guest and in those days I smoked between eighty and a hundred cigarettes a day (yes, it is possible!), so perhaps I just never noticed. Hoffer certainly drank way too much, especially for a diabetic, and this caused him considerable problems. I remember that he once spent four or five days in hospital in Toronto during a book fair due to a combination of excess alcohol, near-sleepless nights and the frenzied activity which marked a book fair week, at least when we were all young enough to get away with that.
After his stay in the hospital, I kidded Bill. “Did you castigate those Toronto nurses for tending to you so well, Bill?” Or, “Bill, don’t tell me a Torontonian saved your life?” And, “Imagine if you had died in Toronto, Bill. What would that have done to your reputation?”
Bill drew himself up in the manner he commonly used when he was about to pronounce something in stentorian fashion. “The wrath of the entire country would have descended on them,” he intoned, a slight smile showing. “And the entire international book trade would have demanded retribution—draconian retribution. On Toronto,” he added, the smile broadening.
Bill’s constant reference to military terms in his campaigns was not just silly; it was a measure of the punitive nature of his rage and frustration. And many of us found his practice of referring to his supposed enemies, in whatever campaign he had thrown himself into that particular week, as “war criminals” particularly offensive, as such ill-thought-out misuse of very emotionally charged words debases the language.
I have come to believe that Bill was really a portrait in frustration, and at the risk of appearing to play at pop-psychology I will elucidate my conclusions. Hoffer, to my mind, is a perfect example of a type fairly common in the twentieth century, one who having lost religion and even political philosophies as a solution to this implacable impulse towards purity, searches compulsively for some cause to which they can pledge their allegiance. Hoffer, I think, sincerely loved literature, indeed, probably all art, so he chose to apply his messianic impulses to attacking the perceived enemies of the art world, envisioning the world as he thought it should be. That he followed in the path of all those other absolutists who have so damaged the human race by attempting to impose arbitrary and harsh rules on people in the name of their vision is to my mind his great tragedy. For he was a brilliant man; but, I think, another sad case of one of those perverse twentieth-
century examples of one whose passionate vision caused way more harm than good.
Or maybe I’m just trying to grant some measure of forgiveness to a man who, for all his seeming insanity and troublesome propensities, really did care about what I care about.
Chapter 20
Selling Civilization
The sale of the Church Street building meant another move and I, of course, knew where I would be going for sure with this one—to Queen Street, where more and more of my friends were moving and which was rapidly becoming not just the Charing Cross and Fourth Avenue of Toronto but the centre for a whole group of near-penniless young entrepreneurs in all sorts of businesses. I even knew what location I wanted.
Charles Pachter, the artist, had been buying up buildings in that area using, I think, leverage from the banks and nerve, and he had bought the building at 342 Queen Street West where first Temple, then Volume One run by Lockwood and Joyce Blair and operated by them as Abelard Books was located on the first and second floors. Abelard Books had needed the second floor only for extra space so they hadn’t bothered to fix it up.
The second floor was dusty and grimy and painted a dingy grey colour, with rugs that sprayed dust with every step. Still, I believed that it had great potential, with its enormous curved front windows facing Queen Street. It had hardly been cleaned, it appeared, since the place was built in 1880.
Pachter had rented the main floor of 342 to an art supply store, but the second and third floors were still available, both of them being around 2,000 square feet. Both of them were for rent at $1200.00 per floor and I would have liked to have both, but moving from $500.00 on Church for store and home to $2400.00 for store alone was more than my business could manage.
I took the second floor, which had its own separate entrance, and began my move. It took an entire month, but my previous moves had taught me enough that I avoided many of the errors I had committed earlier. I had learned that one emptied several sections, took down the shelves, moved and erected them, then put the books back on them. Otherwise one would work in increasingly less space, until it became impossible to move for all of the boxes and shelves.
This new system worked fairly well, but I hadn’t counted on my natural p
ropensity, based on the economics of necessity, for using every possible inch of space. This meant that I had crammed way more books than one would think possible into Church Street. It was hard to get everything into Queen in the end, even with twice the space and a closing sale on Church, but eventually I did. But two things happened to complicate things. Trying to get moved and opened before the double rent syndrome caught me, I concentrated solely on the move. For that reason I left the filthy ancient rugs in place even though I knew logic demanded I get rid of them before shelving. I had hired a guy to paint the gloomy grey walls with a couple of coats of white and, as I expected, it changed the appearance radically, white expanding the size, and cleaning making things more cheery.
Putting up shelves, I decided I would have to deal with the floors at the end, stupid as that was—time was more important.
In an incredible bit of luck, when I did come to deal with the filthy carpets by ripping them out, I found not plain old pine boards or worse underneath, but full hardwood floors, which were, of course, filthy with a hundred years of the stains which had seeped through the rugs. But a simple washing of that filth revealed that the original floor was perfect, saved from even a scratch. My time-based stupidity had, for a change, not cost me.
As I had pictured it, fresh paint and proper lights rendered it cozy and beautiful.
I was home again.
And, as has happened every time I’ve been kicked out of a beloved store, as soon as the horror of the move was over I saw that it had been time, anyway. Having had my future decided by others it seemed my subconscious was not only prepared, but adjusted perfectly to the new situation.
