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MIDWEST
ANTIQUARIAN BOOKSELLERS ASSOCIATION: NEWSLETTER
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Newsletter:
April 8, 2008
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Ann
Arbor Book Fair Celebrates 30th Anniversary
by Jay
Platt
The
Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair is celebrating its 30th
anniversary this year. Begun as a three day fair with
fourteen dealers in July of 1976 and held in conjunction
with the meeting of the Rare Book Conference of the American
Library Association, it has grown to a one day fair with
forty dealers. The inspiration for the fair came from
Bob and Ruth Iglehart of Hartfield Books. Together with
Tom Nicely of Leaves of Grass Rare Books and Jay Platt
of the West Side Book Shop a committee was formed to plan
an antiquarian book fair in order to sell hundreds of
books to the hundreds of rare book librarians coming to
Ann Arbor.
A
room in the Michigan League Building was secured and a
few other Michigan bookdealers were persuaded that this
was a grand idea. A wine and cheese reception was planned
for the opening evening. The librarians came, drank the
wine, ate the cheese, bought a few books, and left. The
next two days were spent in the heat and humidity of the
un-airconditioned room staring at each other's books.
There was no fair in 1977.
By
1978 hope was revived and another fair was planned. Going
to the other extreme, February was chosen, and the venue
moved to the Michigan Student Union. The fair continued
to grow and was moved from the modest Anderson Room to
the spacious and grand ballroom on the second floor.
During
the early years the planning for the fair was often done
with the aid of a bottle or two of wine. Therefore there
were two 8th annual fairs in a row and the fair this year
is actually number 31. Officially, though, it’s
number 30.
The
Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair now hosts nearly forty
dealers annually in the month of May and runs concurrently
with the Ann Arbor Book Festival. The William L. Clements
Library of the University of Michigan now co-sponsors
the fair along with the Ann Arbor Antiquarian Bookdealers
Association. Each year the library benefits from the gate
of nearly five hundred attendees.
The
30th Annual Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair will be held
Sunday, May 18th, 11am – 5pm in the ballroom of
the Michigan Student Union, 530 S. State St., Ann Arbor,
MI. There is a $5.00 admission. For more information contact
Jay Platt c/o the West Side Book Shop,113 W. Liberty,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104, 734-995-1891, jplatt@provide.net.
The
Third Cup on the Tray
a review by Joel Hyde
Out
of Print and Into Profit: A History of the Rare Book Trade in
Britain in the Twentieth Century
edited by
Giles Mandelbrote. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2006. 414
pp., hb. $55.00.
(Note:
since I wrote this review of Out of Print and into Profit,
a second printing has come out (2007), “with a few minor
corrections.” Also, I’m sorry to report that
Roy Meador, co-author with Marvin Mondlin of Book Row, died
in early 2007. I reviewed their book in the
August 2004 MWABA Newsletter, and I found myself still thinking
about their book when I wrote the conclusion of this new review.)
In
1918 Bertram Rota was taken into the antiquarian bookselling
business by his uncles, London booksellers Percy and Arthur
Dobell. Soon after, he found himself at an estate auction, charged
with executing their bids. Young Bertram was about to bid
on his first lot, when:
Suddenly
he felt an excruciating pain in his foot. He looked down and
found that one of the Joseph family [also London booksellers]
was standing on hi toe. “You do your bidding in the
public house afterward, young man, and if you’re lucky,
you’ll get a poached egg on toast with your tea.”
(From Bertram’s son Anthony’s autobiography, Books
in the Blood, quoted in one of the essays in this book,
Marc Vaulbert deChantilly, “Booksellers’ Memoirs: The
Truth about the Trade.”)
This was
Bertram Rota’s introduction to ringing, the practice--then
legal--whereby prominent British booksellers colluded to deny
the owners of private libraries a fair price for their books,
and auctioneers a fair share in the profits from the sale of those
books. The most valuable books in an estate were bought for a
song by dealers who agreed not to compete with each other at the
estate auction. The same books were then resold at a second auction
or knock-out held only among the dealers, often at a
nearby pub. Participants in the ring were reimbursed for items
purchased at the estate auction, and the participants also distributed
among themselves the difference between the prices realized at
the estate auction and at the knock-out. Though made illegal in
1927, ringing persisted through most of the century, especially
at provincial auctions, where booksellers encountered little competition
from collectors.
This was
not the genteel world of British bookselling depicted by Helene
Hanff in 84, Charing Cross Road. In her defense,
she was viewing the trade from a safe distance--and even close
up the British bookseller may not be easy to get to know. The
American collector Robert S. Pirie (in his contribution to this
book, “Reminiscences of a Book Buyer”) recalls,
on his first visit to a London book shop, being shown to the
office of one of the owners, where the rare books were kept.
After half an hour he had just gotten around to asking the price
of a book, when a tea tray was brought in, with two cups on
it:
“How
pleasant,” I thought, but Mr. Harris’s partner arrived.
I was told the price, agreed, and then was asked to leave so
they could enjoy their tea. It was several years before a third
cup appeared on that tray.
The authors
of the twenty-two essays in this book--compiled and introduced
by Giles Mandelbrote to celebrate the centenary of the ABA--are
all insiders, all long-time British booksellers or their long-time
customers. They admire but refrain from sentimentalizing the
British antiquarian book trade. The twentieth century saw convulsive
social, economic, and technological changes, not to mention
two devastating world wars. Yet the trade adapted and persisted.
Throughout
the twentieth century, the most catastrophic circumstance that
the British antiquarian trade had to deal with--for its purposes--was
the gradual drying up of its source of books. At the end of
the nineteenth century, an agricultural depression deprived
the landed gentry of the rents that were their chief income.
Early in the twentieth century, inheritance taxes rose precipitously,
and the First World War cost many estates their potential heirs.
These circumstances led to the sale of many private libraries,
some of them accumulated over hundreds of years--with the result
that, early in the twentieth century, the antiquarian trade
was swimming in books. A 1902 catalog of Pickering and Chatto—described
by David Pearson (“Patterns of Collecting and Trading
in Antiquarian Books”) as “typical...of the kind
of catalogue issued by the upmarket London firms of the day”—lists
6,014 items.
But with
the decline of the landed gentry, the British antiquarian trade
also lost its chief customer base. Books which, in the nineteenth
century, might have come up for sale in the British market again
and again, were in the twentieth century often shipped abroad,
mainly to American and (late in the century) Japanese buyers.
Many books were sold to and tied up in college and university
libraries, which grew rapidly in number and size with the widening
of access to a higher education. The wholesale exportation
of books and their immurement in libraries helps explain why
a Maggs Bros., Ltd. catalog issued in 2000--and devoted to books
similar to those in the 1902 Pickering catalog--lists only 99
items.
There
is another important difference between the two catalogs, though,
which suggests how the trade changed to meet its changed circumstances.
Where the 1902 catalog lists an average of fourteen items per
page, the 2000 catalog devotes an average of two full pages
to each listed item. As its supply of books dried up, the trade
became better at describing the books it had, and better at
placing them with knowledgeable buyers willing to pay a premium
for the right books.
The trade
and its customers also began to redefine what sorts of books
might be considered collectible. In the mid-1930’s, Ian
Fleming asked the scholar-bookseller Percy Muir to help him
purchase what the two men came to refer to as “milestones
of progress” (as reported by David Chambers, “Dealers
and the Specialist Collector”). Fleming’s collection
eventually provided the core of the “Printing and the
Mind of Man” exhibition of 1963, which advanced the idea
that first editions of Copernicus or Darwin were as collectible
and might be as valuable as those of Shakespeare or Austen.
Fleming
and Muir were not the only collector-dealer team to help open
up a new avenue for bookselling. George Lazarus teamed
up with Bertram and later Anthony Rota to form complete collections
of the works of thirty of Lazarus’s favorite contemporary
writers, especially D.H. Lawrence. Bertram once described the
guidelines followed in assembling the collection:
Gather
every separately-published work by each chosen author. Buy the
first edition, wherever printed, and the earliest issue,
whatever its form. Insist upon fine condition. Try to enrich
each author collection with original manuscripts, letters and
interesting association copies. (Quoted by David Chambers, essay
cited.)
Today this
would be considered standard procedure by the many dealers in
and collectors of contemporary literature. At the time the project
was considered eccentric.
Another
useful change in the antiquarian book trade came with the growing
influence of the ABA (as described by Anthony Rota, “Defending
and Regulating the Trade: A Hundred Years of the Antiquarian
Booksellers’ Association”), which encouraged its
members to be better informed about books and more ethical in
their buying and selling practices. Not that the trade
consisted only or even primarily of ABA members, or even of
people whose activities were capable of regulation. Michael
Harris’s contribution to this collection, “The London
Street Trade,” describes the Dickensian world of dealers
who made a living selling the leftovers from book auctions and
other rejects. These dealers set up shop on city streets and
sold their books off carts. Among them was George Jeffery
III, an ex-paratrooper who inherited the business from his father,
and who combined a comprehensive knowledge of books with physical
strength and occasional ferocity:
Attempts to quibble over prices were met by a stony response
and even—if pursued—by violent intervention as books
were torn in half and thrown over the wall onto the Metropolitan
Railway line, 30 or 40 ft. below.
For
much of the century, provincial dealers had almost no market for
better books, except for the occasional London dealer on a buying
expedition. According to Paul Minet (“West Country Book
Shops in the 1960s”):
In
the provinces we operated far more remotely from the rest of
the trade than dealers do today…. One applied experience
to the pricing, often experience learned the hard way by once
selling a book too cheaply….I do not wish to paint a picture
of some ultra-rosy past, but rather the reverse. We were to
some extent trading in the dark, although we were aware that
the major London dealers at that periodwere making some serious
money from American dealers and librarians.
The lot
of the provincial dealer improved with the formation of the
Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association, which began holding
book fairs in London and other major cities. At these fairs
dealers could sell directly to high-end customers and, by viewing
the booths of more experienced dealers, could get a painless
education in the pricing of books. Internet bookselling offered
similar benefits, and late in the century it was embraced by
many provincial booksellers.
It is interesting
to note, in Paul Minet’s essay, and in fact throughout
Mandelbrote’s book, the absence of an elegiac tone. The
sense of loss is reserved for individual people. This is James
Thin remembering “Old” Ainslee, who presided over
the “second-hand” (as opposed to “rare”)
part of Thin’s shop in Edinburgh:
[Ainslee]
liked to think that he knew all his customers personally....“Who’s
that fellow who has just bought Osbert Lancaster’s Draynflete
Revealed?” “I don’t know,” I
replied “he just paid for it and went out.” “That’s
no good,” he said. “Who is he?” Where does
he live? What does he do for a living? What are his interests?
Bookselling is all about books and people—nothing else
matters.” (Quoted by Elizabeth Strong, essay cited.)
Old friends
are missed by these writers--but not the bygone world they inhabited.
In these pages there is little or none of the nostalgia that
pervades Marvin Mondlin and Roy Meador’s Book Row,
an equally informative account of the book trade which I reviewed
in a previous MWABA Newsletter, and in which the rather amazing
story of the survival of the Strand almost gets buried under
all the regret for the many Manhattan book stores that went
under.
Maybe its
refusal to succumb to nostalgia and sentimentality is the most
important lesson that the Old World of bookselling has to offer
the New. The antiquarian book business, in Great Britain as
well as here, is currently passing through its latest crisis,
with the arrival of internet bookselling (a subject treated
only in passing in this book—and worthy of its own volume
of essays by writers of this caliber). One can mope over all
that has been lost, with the coming of electronic bookselling,
or one can try to profit from it and otherwise just deal with
it. This book offers reassurance that the present crisis also
will pass, and sheds light on how we might weather it.
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Members
of Midwest Antiquarian Booksellers Association are welcome
to submit articles for the online newsletter.
Submissions
to the MWABA Newsletter should be original material. Material
borrowed from other sources might be considered for publication,
but only if we can obtain the proper permissions. Direct quotations
and paraphrases from other sources must be attributed.
Submissions
can be of any length, from brief announcements and other notes
to full-length articles and reviews. Original photos, photo
essays, cartoons, comic strips, and other original artwork
are welcome, but should be submitted in web-ready format,
for example, as jpeg or gif images. Submissions should be
related to the antiquarian book trade and/or the work of this
organization.
Items accepted for publication will be published as close
as possible to the date when they are received. There will
be no submissions deadlines. Time-sensitive material should
be submitted early enough to allow for possible corrections.
We
would prefer that submissions be e-mailed, but we will accept
typed manuscripts if necessary. Submissions should be e-mailed
to Joel Hyde at: everyotherbook@onecommail.com
Or
mailed to:
MWABA Newsletter
c/o Joel Hyde
Every Other Book
3208 Crescent Avenue
Fort Wayne, IN 46805
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