Technically Speaking ...

Yesterday morning found us cruising along at 6:45 headed to a tiny burg with the delightful name of Novelty. I thought initially it was in Amish country, but then realized I’d confused Novelty with the town of Charm. At any rate, traffic wasn’t bad and the drive was fun -- until we got lost. Up and down the same road we flew more times than I can count, each time passing a small sign with the street name we needed. Usually you can just look for the estate sale sign, but there wasn’t one, which catapulted me into a panic thinking I’d read the ad wrong and the sale was actually Saturday, not Friday. But, then, just at the brink of implosion, the elusive street announced itself, we hung a relieved and grateful left, and were soon greeted with the usual line of cars.

For a house so beautiful and filled with so many treasures the turn-out was astoundingly low, but the offerings were largely contemporary which excluded most of the antiques dealers. Books abounded though, as did art. Had I been an art dealer I would have been sending up burnt offerings to the art gods, but as a book dealer, within twenty seconds I knew that no pyrotechnics would be required. One of the deepest pleasures of an estate sale is the lack of technologically enhanced buying, so I was amazed at the sight of two scanners waving their magic wands painstakingly, book by book, over such rarities as pop medical books from the 70’s and Bonanza reprints. I left them to the task and repaired to the lower level, scooping up the boxed case of Sotheby’s catalogs for the Duke and Duchess of Winsdor’s auction on the way. At first glance the downstairs offerings proved to be a mirror of those upstairs. But then I saw them – four beautiful technical titles in a row, snuggled together on the shelf waiting for someone to claim them.

Oh, how I love technical books and not just because the right ones can fetch good prices. I love them for themselves, which is crazy given my strong literary proclivities. I don’t know what is, but the sight of those drawings showing cross-sections of tires and blast furnaces and pages littered with mathematical equations call to me like the sound of Angelus bells. It’s a secret world, magical in its single-minded complexity, a world in which I am a traveler from afar leaning on my walking stick in a sort of bemused wonderment. I took them out one by one and cradled them like babies. They turned out to be as good as I expected too, especially the one about superplasticizers. Of course I haven’t a clue what superplasticizers are, but they have something to do with concrete and I’m all for concrete.

The reason I’m telling you this story is because it points out the need to expand our horizons, step out of our comfort zones, and learn something new. Technical books may not be your Mecca, which is perfectly okay, but try to find something else that leaves you a curious stranger in a strange land (with a nod to Heinlein of course). Maybe it will be books on chess, golf, Netsuke, or Noh theater  – it doesn’t matter. Just immerse yourself in strange waters and see what lies beneath. It could very well be the nucleus of specialization.

By the way, remember The Hot Rolling of Steel? (If not, see the post Angle for Success, February 15, 2011).The goal was to see if I could force a sale with book magic as I did earlier with the angling book and its predecessors. Once again – voila! – sold it this week a little over a month from start to finish.

Humoring the Book Gods

I had planned to post yesterday, but it didn’t happen thanks to eleven large obstructions on my family room floor. Perhaps you will recall my comment that the book gods were highly amused that I’d used an e-reader ad to make a card for the gift basket I’m taking to the Akron Antiquarian Book Fair next month. I also said that I was expecting a big pay-off for having provided them with so much frivolity. Well – GUESS WHAT? I got my pay-off and it was almost immediate. I posted the comments on Saturday and Sunday night Eric called from Michigan to tell me he’d just bought eleven large wooden crates of books from a dealer at the show who was liquidating his inventory due to health issues. The squeals of delight from Ohio could be heard in Siberia.

Even the four figure price tag didn’t faze me because of where they came from. The show’s focus was history and antique firearms, so I knew the topics would all be guns, fur trade and Rev War – and that’s exactly what they are. I especially love gun books – not guns, gun BOOKS. I’ve sold so many of them over the years they’re like old friends when they turn up. Immediately I spotted Hutslar’s Gunsmiths of Ohio: 18th and 19th Centuries, Winant’s book on Pepperboxes, and several of Wilson’s Colt books. The thing with gun books is after awhile you can gauge their value by sight even if you’ve never seen them before. So I immediately got excited over A Treatise on Ammunition and Scottish Arms Makers. Had there been any floor space left I’d have been whirling, twirling and throwing confetti.

The downside was I had to wait a whole agonizing day to finally see them. Normally Eric would have been home Monday morning, but he stopped in Sylvania to help our younger daughter paint the upstairs of her house so they can sell it, as they’re moving to DC in June. All day I felt like a Mexican jumping bean, so when he finally got here I actually followed him in and out of the house like a puppy eleven times! Of course when you get that many books at once the temptation is to cherry pick the very best off the top. But if I’ve learned anything in all these years it’s that cherry-picking is the biggest mistake you can make. What happens is you pull off the good stuff and the middling books become chopped liver by comparison and the low end ones never get dealt with at all. So I refrained. It wasn’t MY fault that a few good ones “jumped the gun” (ha-ha) and landed in my hand.

Monday night we just generally looked them over, but by yesterday it became evident that they had to be dealt with ASAP unless we wanted to pick our way to the furniture, Eric’s office and the back doors indefinitely. So first thing in the morning I got to work and sorted everything into three fluid categories – online, antiques mall, and store. I say fluid because checking online prices even for familiar items meant that the piles shape-shifted and not always in expected formations. It took all day, but I finally can walk through the room again. Eric hauled the store stuff out this morning and I have the antiques mall stuff stashed in the closet and the online stuff up in my office. We won’t discuss the intricate maze this created in said office, but I did list and shelve ten books yesterday. They were easy though because they’re already in my database. All I had to do was change the price and/or description where needed and reactivate them.

I can’t wait to get over to the antiques mall with the new goodies, but will exercise some self-control and deal with the leaning tower at my left elbow first. Besides, I hear thunder and – ohmygod-- the warning siren as I write this. But the book gods did great and deserve a shout-out for their efforts. In fact, I’m wondering if maybe I should perfect a stand-up routine to keep them laughing all the time. Ellen DeGeneres, move over.

The Art Part

Eric is in Kalamazoo working a show this weekend, so time either weighs heavily or passes in a blissful blur -- the choice is mine. I can clean the house, list the new books from Thursday’s sale and do the laundry. Or I can sit on the basement floor, search through three enormous Tupperware bins filled with scraps of ephemera and make of my choices something new and surprising. The dust bunnies demanded attention, the laundry did too, but in the end I answered the plaintive whispers of the paper.

Of course, workaholic that I am, I had to justify giving myself over to art (do I dare call it that?), but this time it was easy because I actually needed to make something. In about six weeks it will be time for the Akron Antiquarian Book Fair and I have promised to bring a gift basket for the drawing at the end of the show. I decided to build the basket around Basbanes’ book Patience and Fortitude which I discussed here last week. My friend Nancy and I are co-conspirators in basket-building -- I’m the assembler and she the consummate shopper. I’ll form a fuzzy theme and she’ll grab hold of the scraggly ends of it and somehow together we’ll weave whole cloth. And that is exactly what happened yesterday when we hit the stores. There were a few things we couldn’t find so I can’t show you the whole basket yet, but I thought I’d give you a glimpse of the card I made.

I began with a vague notion of books and antiquity, but had no clear picture of what this could actually look like. As always, I chose way more items than I could use which meant a wrenching return to the bin for the enchanting tidbits that didn’t make the final cut – it turned out to be most of them. Once I choose a scrap I’m in love with it, so I have to force myself to remember the old adage about less being more. But in the end self-discipline won and the card is made from only one half sheet of cardstock, fibrous art paper, paint, a piece of corrugated, a torn piece of old Chinese money, small portions of the cover of a Banana Republic catalog, and – I love this! – a fragment of an ad for e-readers! The book gods were so tickled over that last bit they fell over laughing, so I’m counting on being handsomely rewarded for their amusement in the not-so-distant future.

In the end, the card pleases me too, though niggling thoughts of what else might have been created snip around the edges of my satisfaction. It’s always like that for me. When I’m making it I love it, but when it’s done the contentment falls away a chip at a time until eventually there’s nothing left but a sad disappointment. I hope I don’t feel that way when it’s time to take the basket to the show, but it’s likely, so I will try not to look at the card too much until then. The ultimate disappointment though is that I don’t allow myself much time with the paper and paints, even though I love them. For me creating “art” is not really about product anyway because at heart I’m a process junkie. What I groove on is dwelling in that pure suspension of time where anything is possible and the work is both surprise and enlightenment. For one brief afternoon heaven meets earth and nothing else matters.

P.S. In answer to a reader's question, the book on the left is raised and was made entirely by me from a small piece of cardboard which is on top of the larger raised portion which gives the card three "levels". The spine binding on the big book wraps around to the side of the card and even has a title box. The brown book labled "Poe" was also made by me with corrugated providing the spine bands which I gilded. The other books came directly from the e-reader ad.

Are the Book Gods Irish?

Lest you think I actually wrote a post about a day in which there were no books involved, let me clear that misconception up immediately. We began our St. Patrick’s Day merriment at 7 a.m. yesterday at Sully’s where the Guinness flowed like the waters of the River Liffey. At such a tender hour even the lighter Jameson’s or Harp didn’t entice me, which could I suppose, call my essential Irishness into question. Now THERE’S a disturbing thought. Let's not dwell on it. I more than made up for it in my enjoyment of the music anyway. There's nothing like a rousing chorus of Finnegan’s Wake to get the blood dancing a Haymaker’s Jig in your veins, no matter what the hour.

Later in the day we stopped off at the antiques mall to bring some new books and tidy up the place a bit. I dragged over a 19 volume set of mysteries written from the 40’s to the 60’s primarily for two reasons – A.) if I listed them online someone from Europe would be dying to have them shipped for $14.95 air mail and B.) the bright red bindings called out like the blast of a siren song at two a.m.. We displayed them on the top of a bookcase where I hoped they would grab some attention over the weekend. But guess what? They won’t be there over the weekend, as they turned up on the sold list last night. Amount of time in the store – a record six hours. Had I known they’d be THAT popular I’d have hauled them over strapped to my back in in the frozen depths of January.

By late afternoon we were off to the rural wilds of Ohio to a book sale of dubious distinction. We got there early to find exactly one person in line, an ebay seller who wondered what he’d been thinking to have made an almost two hour trip to such a hole in the wall. By starting time the line had grown to a magnifcent fifteen people, only five of whom were dealers and that includes both Eric and me. Seconds before the doors opened a very nice man made an announcement – no scanning allowed. Oh joy! Oh rapture! Oh sublime bliss! Never mind that one guy cheated and scanned on the sly – the atmosphere was so rare that someone truly should have snapped a few photos for the Smithsonian archives just to prove that at least once in 2011 a book sale occurred at which the participants were polite, calm, and even jovial.

As for the books, they didn’t immediately blind me with their light, but because the crowd was small and the atmosphere that of a neighborhood diner it was possible to go slowly and really look at the offerings. The prices were crazy good so Eric loaded up on lots of nice new-looking books for the store while I, like Ramona Quimby’s cat, was, even more  picky-picky than usual. Nonetheless, I wound up with one fairly big box full to the top, seven books of which are headed to the mall. None are WILDY good, but all are good enough and these days that alone is impetus to pay homage to the book gods. My favorites are the three pictured above on my Connemara blanket purchased in Ireland in 1974 – a first edition Daddy Long-Legs from 1912, a 1956 facsimile of the first edition of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol published by Columbia University Press with color illustrations and a slipcase, and A Yankee Trader In the Gold Rush; The Letters of Franklin A. Buck, a first edition from 1930. And get this – we parted with only a hundred dollars and acquired 77 books.

In all these years it has never occurred to me to question the ethnic heritage of the books gods. If pressed, I would have said Greek or Roman, but after last night I’m beginning to think they may have formed from the eerie mists of ancient Connemara on the night of the summer solstice. Either that, or I was blessed with the luck of the Irish on St. Patrick's Day.

Irish On My Mind

It’s damp and drizzly today and as gray as old underwear, the perfect weather for St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow. I’m in an Irish frame of mind today – a sort of melancholy racousness that wants to party and at the same time cry in a pint of Guinness (well, pinot grigio). That’s how it is with the Irish though. We’re a strange people – forever laughing on the edge of desolation.

Anyway, tomorrow is the big day and for once we are going to do something celebratory that I didn’t make myself. My husband, God love him, will never be accused of being a party boy (we SO would never have gotten together had I known him in high school), so to drag him to a crowded, noisy bar to hear Irish music would be the equivalent of tossing him in Mountjoy Gaol with poor Kevin Barry who was hanged as a rebel. A few times when the kids were little we trekked up to Cleveland for the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. Though Eric found it palatable,  I am not as enamored of it as I was when I was a kid and marched in it dressed in my embroidered Irish dancing costume. The sleight of time’s hand cruelly diminished my memory of its pageantry and I’m still pouting about it.

When the girls lived at home I made St. Patrick’s Day myself from corned beef, cabbage, colcannon, and soda bread (with raisins) garnished with what we always called a “hooley in the kitchen”. This consisted of cranking up jigs, reels and hornpipes on the stereo and dancing in front of the sink. Well, I danced and sometimes Catie danced with me, but Moira and Eric were content to watch (with pleasure of course) in their mutually quiet way. My set piece was the hornpipe (hard shoes a la Riverdance), one step of which invariably brought the house down even though the secret to its success was just to stomp as hard as possible on the two opportunities to do it.

Don’t laugh. I took Irish dancing lessons for years and used to compete in the feis (pronounced “fesh”) in Chicago, Akron and Toronto where I won enough medals to at least keep my head up. My grandfather was an extraordinary Irish dancer who could make his feet sound like a typewriter. When I was four he started teaching me in the basement of his house on Saturday afternoons to scratchy old 78 rpm records cranked up on the Victrola. The reward for learning “the baby reel” danced to the tune of The Girl I Left Behind Me was a tiny glass of beer ringed with pink elephants and the admonition to keep its existence to “meself”. I know, I know … but it didn’t kill me. I’m still here, aren’t I?

Since the kids flew the coop I have occasionally danced by myself just to make sure I still have the old Irish mojo (I do), but that’s been about the sum of St. Patrick’s Day these last years. When I was a child though St. Patrick’s Day officially dawned with a sunrise Mass at the old Carmelite monastery in Akron. The mystical chanting of the monks singing plainsong (Gregorian chant) in the dim chapel redolent of incense haunts me still, as does the memory of my grandfather dressed like the lord of the manor with a carnation in his lapel in remembrance of his mother and wafting fumes of Cashmere Bouquet talcum in his wake. After Mass we’d head to breakfast at the Ancient Order of Hibernians and then to Cleveland for the parade. Most of the time I had to “dance out” in the evening (which was what we called performing at various venues), but a few times we partied hard and late at either the Hibernians or the West Side Irish American Club in Cleveland. All of it now seems far, far away, as I am no longer Catholic, nor enmeshed in the Irish culture. Of course the fact that it WAS long ago and far away may have something to do with it too.

But this year, I have found a way for Eric and me to celebrate St. Patrick's Day that he will actually like and I won't have to concoct out of potatoes, flour, corned beef and recorded music. Tomorrow, dressed in kelly green (me at least), we are heading down to Sully’s Irish Pub early in the morning for their big Irish breakfast. There will be live music, little girls dancing as I once did, and hearty Irish fare washed down with a cuppa or two. Maybe -- if I get very, very lucky -- I'll even glimpse that Celtic magic, that in the end, was the good part of the bad old days of my childhood.

Salvador Dali's Golden Cookbook

Let’s pretend we’re in kindergarten and today is Show and Tell. I’m in the front row sitting cross-legged on the floor, hand flying in the air, (“Pick me! Pick me!”), so excited I’m coiled up tighter than a Slinky. What I brought today is gold and shiny with bright colorful pictures and big words that make grown-ups laugh. I’ve been holding this treasure for several years and have never listed it because I refuse to pay anyone a commission on it. Last spring I took it to the Akron Antiquarian Book Fair where it garnered numerous admirers, some of whom visited it multiple times, but, alas, it found no takers, due to its bright, shiny price tag– which is actually reasonable at $350. Even though I still don’t plan to list it, I do think it’s high time I shared the outrageous glory of the thing.

The book is Les Diners de Gala by the one and only Salvador Dali, published in France in 1973 and named for his wife Gala. The art is a Muligatawny stew of drawings, paintings, collage and photos, each more jaw-dropping than the next. Collectively it leaves even the most psychedelic reefer dream ever recorded dusty and gasping for breath at the side of the subconscious. By his own admission Dali loved “everything gilded and excessive”, so the book more than fits the bill of fare from its glittering golden dustjacket to its back endpapers which explode with visions of wine bottles, grapes, apples, oranges, cherries, lettuce, bones, and body parts. Interesting body parts.

But diners and cooks do not live on images alone. They also need  prose, in this instance ladled up in great splotches of purple and oozing rivulets of honey and vinegar. Chapter Two, les cannibalisms de’latiumne, begins, “The Crayfish of Paracelsus has to be served along with the heads or torsos of small hot-blooded martyrs as a gesture of homage to Gilles de Rais (Giles of Retz) whose most delightful ejac….” Well, let’s just let it go at that.

This IS kindergarten, after all.

Lights, Books, Camera!

I know I’ve been quiet, but except for one loooooooong lunch at Sully’s Irish Pub with Cheryl I have been buzzing like a worker bee trying to wear out my little red Nikon camera. These new slim digitals seem like toys to me -- give me a camera with heft any day. I guess that goes back to my first newspaper job in the 70’s when I not only wrote the stories, but took the pictures too. In those days you lugged around a camera that not only meant business, but entered the room before you did. Every time I look at this lame little thing (and its many counterparts) I feel like it ought to say Made by Mattel. But this isn’t about camera technology – it’s about photographing books, a job you either love or hate.

I actually don’t mind snapping the images. I don’t even mind putting them on my own website because it’s so easy and you don’t have to rename them so they can be matched with the right books. On Advanced Book Exchange , however, you DO have to do this and it’s a tiresome and laborious process. I know it would be easier if I sent the file via FTP which I could do if I knew how, but the truth is I don’t really have much desire to LEARN. Control freak that I am, I want to see those pictures actually attach so I know the job is done and done right. Of course it would be a fine thing to get all these images on every site I sell on, but I am not inclined to do it. First of all, the small sites are disappearing faster than Borders stores -- ABE just snatched Choosebooks and will soon be absorbing it which means I’ll have one less place to upload to. I suspect there will come a day where the 3As not only dominate, but will be the last book sites standing other than the personal sites of indies like us. I wouldn’t even be surprised if Amazon alone ultimately stood on a heaping mound of books waving a spear like a victorius warrior king -- unless of course ebooks totally obliterate the physical book in which case they’ll give booksellers the heave-ho faster than you can say “Ahoy, matey!”

Actually, I am to the point where I really don’t care much about what happens online. My goal is to pare it down to Advanced Book Exchange, my own website, and my secret site. Yes, that means goodbye Biblio and alibris. I don’t really have anything against them – I just don’t think they fit my new business model. I do sell older things on them from time to time, but their buyers seem wedded to the almighty ISBN. ABE, for me at least, rules. So I’m thinking maybe I need to focus on just the three sites and give them my all instead of spreading myself so thin I’m like the last of the peanut butter clinging to the jar. There’s no question that the antiques mall has played a huge role in shaping my thoughts these days. I know it’s not for everyone, but even with the theft of my postcards, I am madly, crazy, over-the-moon in love with it.

But getting back to pictures, I think it’s imperative that we upload images, especially for books that don’t get matched with a stock photo which is about ninety per cent of my inventory. I have been doing it (some) for the past year, but am really ramping it up now. As I mentioned before, I am also in the process of paring down my inventory to get rid of books that have worn out their welcome. I would rather see a tight, controlled, small inventory than a sprawling, unfocused mess which is what time has left me holding after fourteen years. Once I get rid of all the dead wood and photograph everything that’s left it should be easy to keep in A-1 condition as new books come in.

There’s no question that photos sell books. When I sold on ebay I shot photos with merry abandon and managed to achieve and keep power seller status for three years with an inventory that never maxed out at more than 350 books and usually ran around 250. I realize that ebay draws from a huge pool of buyers, but that doesn’t mean you could just coast either. Photos and detailed descriptions were what sold the books.

So, if you haven’t already become a shutterbug you might want to give it some serious thought. Actually, forget thought. As Nike would say, “Just do it.”

The Only One In Ivy

Alas, the book gods said no. No, you cannot have a reasonably good collection at a reasonably good price. In fact, you can’t even have a reasonably good collection at ANY price. You are not in ivy, so don’t even think about clover, missy. The only living thing in ivy around these parts is the deer.

Yesterday’s trip to view the “collection” has to rank as the all-time worst ever. Before I tell the story you have to know that I always ask questions before we agree to look at books. Also, the first thing I tell sellers who phone is that I buy very little fiction and NO popular fiction. I also buy very few books with ISBNs unless they are significant and focused. In other words, I do not buy the equivalent of Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About American History In One Complete Volume. To be sure we were on the same page I even asked this owner a second time if the books were older and he assured me that they were. I asked, too, how many books he had and was told “a lot.”

So imagine my amazement when the second we walked in the door piles of novels -- Mary Higgins Clark, Stephen King, etc. – greeted us from both the floor and the table. The few old books included a handful of Harvard Classics, a libretto from the Metropolitan Opera, and four cheap novels from the turn of the century by a no-name author. There were probably a hundred items in all if you count a small box of Harvard classics and a partial set of Annals of America as two. Oh, how I hate when this happens, especially when the sellers are so nice and have two cute dogs and share my liking for the color blue. I hate being the bad guy who says, “No, I’m afraid these won’t work for me.” As always, they were amazed – stunned even -- that their treasures were found lacking. Eric, sensing my anguish, offered them fifty cents apiece for the fiction for store stock, but they declined, figuring they’d sell it themselves online. All I can say is, “Good luck” and I am not being sarcastic. I would bet the house that this will not prove to be a fun new hobby for them.

All the way home I lamented the whole fiasco and tried to analyze how it even happened. In the end I came to the conclusion that it’s all relative. I say older and he thinks they ARE older. Good grief, some of them are twenty years old! I say antiquarian and he thinks, yep, I got some of those too – those Harvard Classics are dynamite. I ask how many volumes there are. He thinks “a lot”. But what really is a lot? This time “a lot” was a hundred, though when pressed earlier he thought it more in the neighborhood of a couple hundred. One time "a lot" turned out to be about a dozen, but that was okay because the owner brought them to the store. And of course I will never forget the one memorable time when “a lot” meant 35,000 volumes. (Oh, to have THAT happen again!)

So what to do? Frankly, I don’t know. In the past I have asked for actual titles, but very often the seller doesn’t know any because the books were Grandpa's and they’re now at Aunt Gladys’ house and she lives the next town over. Even when exact titles are available it can sound promising and still turn out be an utter failure due to condition. Sadly, condition is also a relative thing. I say I need them to be in good to very good condition. They think, well, they smell a little bad, but old books smell bad. Just last week a woman told me that very thing and was confounded to find out that mustiness is not endemic to the species. I think that without alienating the seller before we even connect there’s very little I can do beyond what I’m already doing, which means of course that some days I’ll land in ivy and some days it’ll be scorched earth.

Like it or not, the price of doing business is sometimes having to say no to nice people with cute dogs who share your fondness for the color blue.

Patience & Fortitude

As I write this it’s pouring rain and we are under a flood watch – again. The last one, a few days ago, proved uneventful for us, but not for everyone. Having experienced flooding up close and personal a couple years ago the very word fills me with anxiety. But instead of wringing my hands and gnashing my teeth – my usual modus operandi for anything upsetting – I am choosing to shift my focus to Nicholas Basbanes’ amazing book Patience and Fortitude; Wherein a Colorful Cast of Determined Book Collectors, Dealers and Lbriarians Go About the Quixotic Task of Preserving a Legacy which I bought in hardcover in 2001 when it debuted, but never read because it was so beautiful I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not long ago though I found a reasonably broken-in paperback copy, so ten years later I’m finally lost in its pages.


I got up at five this morning to read it, peaked outside at the rain, and immediately locked eyeballs with an enormous deer who kept sentinel duty while his two companions made breakfast of our English ivy. We see deer in the backyard a lot – we even see them strolling down the sidewalk in the middle of the day – but this one startled me. I observed him for awhile and then settled in with Basbanes and his stories of booksellers past and present. As I read about one who at age nineteen borrowed $40,000 from his parents to buy a fabulous collection which immediately launched him as a major player I got to thinking about how books are a lot like deer. They used to be much rarer than they are now. Of course rare books still surface – it’s just that rarity is rarer these days thanks to the internet.

Yesterday though a guy called the store and asked Eric if he would be interested in a first edition of The House of the Seven Gables. The first printing was limited to slightly more than 1600 copies and yet a relatively significant number are available on Advanced Book Exchange alone with prices beginning at $3000-plus and working their way downward to $1500. Eric called me around noon wondering what he should look for in ascertaining its validity as a first edition. I wish I could say I knew, but having never seen one, I had to drag out the reference books and explore the internet. Once I had the date, the particulars about its appearance, and its points of issue I phoned back and gave him the details. This stuff fascinates me no end. I love doing sit so much that the outcome is almost immaterial to me -- just learning about it is a trip. In fact, I was so caught up in the scholarship of it that I never called to find out what happened and didn’t hear the verdict until he came home last night – carrying the book.

Together Eric and I cover all the bases of bookselling, but we are not the same kind of seller. We both love books and love selling them, but Eric is not a stickler for condition and doesn’t really care all that much about editions. What excites him is putting books into the hands of people who want to read them. I like that too, but I care very much about condition and I love old books and paper far more than I do their slick, shiny counterparts. Last year, on a hunch, I bought an early Mark Twain not knowing the points of issue for the first edition. All I knew for sure is that it was possibly right and that the condition was excellent, both of which made me feel reasonably sure that I would make a profit even at the fairly steep asking price and even if I ended up being wrong. Turns out it WAS a first and I sold it handily at the antiquarian book fair in Akron the following week.

The House of the Seven Gables, however, would win no awards for beauty even if it were the first printing, which it was NOT. The spine leaned like a skateboard ramp, there was evidence of previous insect damage, and the corners were frayed to the boards. But the REAL problem was that even though the previous seller had written first edition on the front pastedown it failed the test on EVERY point of issue. There were no ads bound in, the endpapers were the wrong color and the broken type on the last words of the first two lines of page 149 was not broken at all, but rather misaligned as per the later printings. Unlike Eric, I wouldn't have bought that book at ANY price. In fact, the only thing that kept me from passing out cold in the kitchen was the fact that  I knew without even asking that he'd gotten it for a song, which he did – pocket change and the owner even took it out in trade.

In Patience & Fortitude, however, even in the early days of their bookselling careers, dealers skipped right over purchasing a significant book every now and again and went straight to buying enormous collections of very fine books for sums of money that would make your hair curl tighter than a New Year’s Eve noisemaker. In every case they had to go into grievous debt to do it, but the gamble invariably propelled them into the antiquarian game like cannonballs. Of course all of that was a long time ago, all of it occurred in or near major cities, and for every one who succeeded so easily there were probably a dozen wannabes who either washed out altogether or found themselves forever mired in the second or third tier of sellers. Even in my wildest fantasies I don’t anticipate ever routinely handling four-figure books. But tomorrow we ARE off to see a collection which I hope will be reasonably good.

It seems to me that over the years I've demonstrated a tremendous amount of both  patience and fortitude. My expectations do not exceed my grasp, and my knowledge, while not stunning, is likewise reasonable. So to ask for a reasonable collection at a reasonable price seems  reasonable to me. Now if only the book gods agree I'll at least be in ivy tomorrow, if not in clover.

Petty Postcards

In a world where internet fraud is rampant I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve either been a victim, or an almost-victim. The latest of course was the would-be attempt the other day on a five year old sale (see Who’s Confused? in the blog archive), but in the end all it took was one call to ABE and a firm note from me and the whole thing disappeared.

Some years back though a scammer posing as a children’s book dealer from Great Britain ordered a set of My Book House saying he would be sending a check via his American bank account. Not a problem, except that when it arrived it was for $5000 when the total sale including shipping was a little over $200. This was in the early days of the infamous scam where the perpetrator tells you that his secretary made an error and requests that you cash the check, take what’s owed you, and send the rest back to him in a check drawn from YOUR account. Even though I’d never heard of this ploy then, it didn’t take an MBA to recognize larceny outfitted in a sandwich board. I phoned the bank from which his check was drawn and asked for the fraud department. Sure enough, he had no account there, but they were very familiar with him and asked me to forward all communications from him via email. I don’t know what happened in the end, but the funny part is he kept writing to tell me how safe it all was which meant of course that the bank and I carried on an extended and lively correspondence!

I did, however, fall victim to fraud on three wide-spaced occasions. The first time was in 1997 the first year I opened my business. I sold a book to a professor from an Ivy League university who immediately after receiving it ordered another and asked me to please send it ASAP as he needed it yesterday. In those days ABE did not collect payment so it had to be handled between the dealer and the buyer (I’d still rather have that way actually). I took credit cards, so I hesitated for a second when he said he preferred to send a check and have it and the book cross in the maiI. Something told me not to agree, but I ignored it because we’d successfully done business by check the first time. I think you can guess the sad outcome.

My second encounter was for a book on pop music, the title of which eludes me. This order came through via TomFolio and was to ship to Singapore. As luck would have it, t arrived early in the morning as I was getting ready to go to a book sale. I had a little time and figured I might as well process the card, wrap the book, and ship it on the way along with the previous day’s orders. While standing in line at the sale a long-time dealer asked if anyone had gotten an order from Singapore through TomFolio. I said I had and he replied, “Well, whatever you do, don’t ship it. TomFolio sent out a warning about it right after I got mine.” Turns out it was a stolen credit card. The book, the shipping, and the bank fees exceeded $100.

Sadly, my third situation was a repeat performance of the Great Singapore Scenario. A guy from California ordered The Vincent Price Cookbook, which at that time sold for $150, and called me with his credit card number. I found him very personable and remember chatting a little about cooking, so was totally blindsided when I got notice that this credit card was stolen too!

I tell you these tales because this week I experienced the downside of retail in a whole new way. Monday night I took a box of books over to the antiques mall as planned. It was late, they were about ready to close, so I quickly tidied up the books that had migrated and shelved the new ones. But just as I picked up my empty banker’s box and started to leave I caught a glimpse of the small chest on which I showcase special small items. A couple weeks ago I had noticed that two hand-colored real photo Japanese postcards from the 1940’s were gone and figured they’d been purchased. When they failed to to show up on the nightly sold list I filled out a missing item report thinking that perhaps a buyer had changed his or her mind and returned them to the wrong booth, a very common occurrence. Once we found two of our books on a table down the aisle and another time discovered someone’s huge trophy sitting on our ephemera table along with a second dealer’s stereoptican cards.

So, what was missing this time? Postcards again -- three -- and from the exact corner where the Japanese cards had been. I used to call it my lucky corner because I sold several unusual and hard to find local interest cards from it before the Japanese ones disappeared. I tried to ignore the feeling that washed over me, telling myself that they were local interest cards just like all the ones I’d sold, and they’d turn up on the nightly list. But of course they didn’t. The total for the five very uncommon and highly desirable cards is $80. Dealers work harder than ever these days to get unusual items and pay more for them in terms of both cost and overhead, so a hit like that stings.

But oddly enough, the money matters less to me than the fact that someone took them knowing that mine is a small business. I also have the sinking feeling that the same person filched them all which makes it even worse. I think I’d rather have five random people snatch five postcards than one person take two and then deliberately come back later for three more. I know it’s not really personal, but it sure feels that way.

Letting Sleeping Books Lie

Wow – I feel like I’m back from the dead. I know I wrote on Friday, but even that seems like a long time ago. I’m doing better, but am still not on top of my game. I just decided today though that enough is enough. The plan is to finish this post, add a handful of books, upload them to all my venues, and go to the antiques mall with the box of books I’d planned to take last Monday before I got derailed. It’s amazing to realize that I have not set foot outside the door in eight days!

I was just thinking about that when the phone rang this morning and a bookseller friend whom I haven’t talked to for three weeks since she had knee surgery called to let me know she was finally home. Listening to her story of surgery and rehab jolted me back to the reality that when it comes to having something to complain about I’m not even in the minor leagues. I’ve had spells of being out of the groove before of course, but this one not only knocked me for a loop but seemed to come out of nowhere. Still -- no whining allowed. It could be much worse.

The weekend brought us a visit from our oldest daughter and her family which means we had our grandsons, ages seven and 20 months, from Saturday afternoon through Sunday. I love when the kids are here, but I really didn’t have what it took to be the granny with the “mostest” this weekend. Normally I run around, play a million games, pick up the baby, dance with the baby, make homemade muffins, scrambled eggs and fruit salad for Sunday breakfast and spend pre-breakfast hours with the oldest doing whatever he dreams up for me. This time I had to really push to do anything and even then was a pale shadow of my normal self – which means the kids made their own fun, especially the little one who learned to turn on both the dishwasher AND the DVD player, examined the contents of every drawer and cupboard on the first floor, and pulled as many books off the shelves as he could possibly wedge out. He had both parents flying around like bats in the summer trees, while I sat back chuckling to myself at how much interference I normally run without even realizing it.

Sales, however, began to drop by mid week and remained lackluster from there forward. I had two fairly good ones though – one for a four volume set on the history of nursing from 1903 (my secret site) and one for a half dozen Mazo De La Roche Jalna novels in the Whiteoak edition WITH the dustjackets ( ABE). The latter should have been a slam dunk since they were headed to the author’s native Canada, but the buyer refused the required postage despite the mention in the listing that extra shipping was required for a multi-volume set. If this is happening now – and it is with greater frequency, or so it seems to me anyway – I hate to see what will happen this spring when the new rates kick in. Thankfully, the one thing that still churned out sales with consistency was the antiques mall – I had a very good week after a lackluster start to the month.

It has been my experience that to keep online sales active it’s necessary to list at least every other day. The more you slow it down, the slower sales will be. The thing is, it doesn’t take much to get the whole shebang going again. Add a couple today, add a couple tomorrow and in a day or so you’re firing on all cylinders again, wither you sell the new stuff or you don’t. I know this, I even planned to DO this, but somehow never forced myself to follow through. Partly it was because I was a little gun-shy from screwing up the magazines the morning I woke with the flare. I thought for sure I’d get into something over my fuzzy head and opted instead to let sleeping books lie.

But now it’s time for sleeping books to wake up and get cracking. So I am off to try my hand at rousing them and then head over to the antiques mall. I missed you all very much, but had nothing to talk about. Truly nothing, which is highly unusual for me. I could talk to a post about anything most of time. This time I couldn’t even post.

Who's Confused?

As I write this, winter rages outside the window – yet AGAIN. I am so tired of the relentless bad weather and this never-ending fibro flare in which I find myself. Ever since my last post I have worked very little and feel almost as though the outside world is something separate from me, sealed off by a veil of snow. Sales have taken a dive too which is not surprising because if you don’t keep listing you can be quickly out of the game. But I almost don’t mind because I haven’t the energy to deal with anything anyway. I’m here now only because I miss being here and can’t believe how long it’s been since I last wrote. I actually even found something worth telling you about which is pretty amazing given that the only other big news is that I read Anne Tyler’s The Amateur Marriage.

An odd, odd thing happened though during my sojourn on the couch. I have been checking email only twice a day because in a flare my muscles get very tight and can be easily injured which compounds the problem greatly. One summer I stepped down off the porch and pulled a muscle in my leg and couldn’t walk for over a week. Then a couple weeks later I climbed up on the bed to dust the top of a window and did it again to the other leg! Anyway, on Wednesday I came up around four to check messages only to be greeted with an email informing me that I had sent someone the wrong book. Given my current state I could certainly believe it, so I clicked on it with a deep sense of resignation. But wait! HUH? The book, The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, was a two volume set in facsimile edition, brand new in the publisher’s shrinkwrap. Immediately I remembered its size, heft, and navy blue cloth cover and knew exactly where it had come from and when. I bought it in 2005 in a lot of almost 4000 books, all of which were new, from a man who sold historical books at shows, but had had to quit due to debilitating fibromyalgia. (How’s THAT for irony?) There had been three sets, but a quick look at my database showed that the last one sold in 2006!

The buyer provided an ABE PO number, so I went over to search for it and drew it up immediately. The books sold to him on July 27, 2006 at which time he’d also purchased the set of Lee’s Memoirs in the same edition, also new and in shrinkwrap. But here’s the shocker – in the current email he told me that he had ordered the Grant and I had sent him the Lee. According to ABE’s records (and my own which I also dragged out and checked) he had bought both sets only to return the Grant the following week. Now he wanted to send the Lee back in exchange for the Grant which of course I don’t have. He also told me that he had reported the problem to ABE which added greatly to the oddness given the fact that I had had no communication from ABE about it at all. I tried phoning them, but they were closed due to a storm in British Columbia.

Eric and I chewed it over that evening and I finally wrote him a note sharing my findings and my amazement that it taken FIVE YEARS to note a problem if one occurred. I was polite, but certainly not exuding warm-fuzzies. Given how upset I was though I think I sounded like a bookseller channeling the Dali Lama. I hit the send button and went downstairs to wait for the scathing reply. None came

But the next morning I forced myself to call ABE anyway and explain the whole tiresome thing just in case they harbored the notion that he should be refunded. The poor woman who answered the phone was so baffled that she was certain I had the wrong PO number. When I finally convinced her that the sale had indeed occurred in 2006 she said, “Oh, I think this is man is very confused.”

Well, that’s not the word I would have used, but okay, we’ll go with it, especially since she said that the statute of limitations had run out. ABE has a 30 day return policy. She also told me I should impart that information to him and suggest that perhaps he could buy the Grants from another ABE seller. I managed a weak laugh at that, but did exactly as instructed and have still not had a response from the buyer. Something tells me I won’t either.

He’ll be too busy ordering his new set from another ABE seller.

A Flare of Stupidity (Mine!)

In bookselling, as in life, we sometimes get what we want at the absolute worst time. Today is a case in point. You have never heard me talk about this and I will not be talking about it much in the future, but I have had fibromyalgia since childhood. It’s much worse in the summer than the winter , but even then, most of the time I cope very well, flying up and down stairs like a banshee many times a day. I do get brought up short every once in awhile though, which is one of the reasons why book sales make me so crazy. I am much better walking than I am standing for hours and the constant noise, stress, and sensory overload they produce can leave me in a dull, glassy-eyed stupor by the time I’m done.

However, now it’s winter. It’s cold, there’s snow on the ground again, and I did not overdo anything, nor have I been unduly stressed. Winter is supposed to be my best season. And yet I woke up this morning in a full-blown flare, every muscle screaming, dead tired, and with a gazillion other little symptoms too tedious to mention. It wouldn’t be a problem except Eric left Friday for an historical show in Indianapolis where he sells books and won’t be back until tonight. Because it was a long weekend and the post office was closed today for President’s Day I let all the orders go figuring I’d wrap them this morning in one fell swoop. VERY bad idea as it turned out.

I will do it – I HAVE to do it – but things got so much worse this morning I feel at this moment like I’m too incompetent for the job. Around nine I got an order for an issue of one of my favorite vintage magazines, The Architect. One more order shouldn’t be a big deal I reasoned, so I happily replied in the affirmative to the buyer. An hour later along came an email wanting to know what other issues of The Architect I have available. Under normal circumstances I’d be dancing on the ceiling with Lionel Ritchie over this turn of events, but today I literally dragged myself to the storage closet, hauled out two heavy boxes of stuff so I could pull out the enormous box of magazines and unpack them all. After I had them all out and stacked in a leaning pile I sat down on the floor and sorted them by years – 1926, ‘27, ‘28, ‘29, and ‘30. Many, many magazines fit that big box, but I dutifully wrote down all the dates, months and years and emailed back. I have to wrap the one anyway, so what would another one or two matter, right?

Right. Except she wants them all. Only she wants three now and the rest next week which sounds like a good thing, but didn’t turn out to be. The first thing thing you notice about The Architect magazine is the extreme similarity of the covers – black Pirenisi drawings against cream paper – and one of the typical things that causes cognitive difficulties during a fibro flare is an abundance of the same thing differentiated by only a slight variant. In this case I had to identify three issues with three different months and three different years. It should have been a snap and yet I screwed it up twice and took photos of the wrong issues. Then when I finally got that right I invoiced only for the two she had added, forgetting the original ABE order which meant I had to cancel the paypal money request after I sent it to her and do it again. By this time I was so upset that I actually told her why I was being so dense, something I have never done before and for some reason wish I hadn’t done now. I also told her that I would have my husband recheck everything tonight just to be on the safe side. The whole thing leaves me  feeling like I can't walk and chew gum at the same time.

This is so crazy I can’t even believe it. I have been a bookseller for 14 years. I’ve worked through many flares, two broken wrists with surgeries involved, and a rotator cuff injury two years ago. Never have I done anything this repetitively stupid.

On days like this I think I need a nice simple job. Let me know if you hear of any openings for envelope stuffers. As long as they all get the same insert I’ll ace it -- even in a flare.

All You Can Do Is Laugh

The picture above is the cover of a current Harvard University Press catalog and has absolutely nothing to do with anything other than the fact that my husband brought it home from the store last night. He gets a lot of publisher’s catalogs, as he sells new books as well as used. Mostly I never lay eyes on any of these  publications, so I was surprised when he handed it to me.

“What does this remind you of?” he asked, pointing to the half-dead damsel on the front.

For a few seconds I stared at it, then burst out laughing. “Me! After a book sale.”

He flashed me his very best Sister Martha Mary smile and stuck his head in the refrigerator. “I thought of you the second I saw it.”

I could see where he might.

No, no -- don't panic. I am not set to embark on another meltdown about book sales even though I went to a so-called good one last Friday and endured a loud argu .....We all know that I hate them with a passion as purple as my new antique office chair, so the last thing I want to do on this bright, sunny Friday morning is revisit THAT topic.I bring up my husband’s little joke only because it reminded me of something else that’s funny -- or not -- depending on your frame of mind. Sometimes bookseller descriptions make me want to stick my head in the oven (and the oven's electric) and other times the very same ones send me into hysterics. For awhile now I have been collecting the best of the worst, so I thought I’d share some of them with you. Grab a cup of coffee and check out these winners.

“Last ten pages missing, but it’s still a pretty good book.”


“Book is really ugly but at least you can still read it”


“Pages are kind of yellow, but you have to expect it. It’s thirty years old!”


“It used to be better, but I dripped a little coffee on the cover.”


“Shows definite wear and may show some markings inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers!”


“I don’t know anything about this kind of stuff, but there are cool pictures of furnaces in it and they sure are fancy!“ (I bought this one and sold it for four times the asking price.)


“There’s no date, but I know it’s old. I got it from my grandmother.”


“Book is very good, so little more is needed to describe it. It’s also worth much more than this.”


“Book has been in my mom’s basement for a lot of years, so it has an old book smell to it."

"Book smells musty, but will be shipped from a pet-free, non-smoking home."


“Binding is a little broken, but for the collector it’s a REALLY GREAT antique book from 1958."


“The front cover is yellow in color. All pages are in tact.”


“I would call this new if it weren’t for the slight writing on the cover – only three letters though.”


“Pages are an antique off-white. Not really on the pages of yellowing pages. This quality and color of paper are in average, near above average, very near pristine condition. All is in a very superb, beautiful condition.”

“I don’t know why this has highlighting on it cause its just a story, but it does. It’s pink, but not as pink some pink markers.”


“The spine’s sorta flat at the top like it got run over.”


But the grand prize winner, both for honesty and economy of words, goes to this entry:

“Pictures don’t lie! It’s crappy looking.”

Rough Around the Borders

 

 
The news that Border’s declared bankruptcy is flying around both the internet and Twitter at supersonic speed today. It’s not that anyone’s surprised – it’s more of a morbid fascination of watching a giant felled. I’ll be blunt – I have no love for the megastores which left so many dead independent bookstores in their wake. The deaths came so swiftly, and sometimes so suddenly,  there wasn’t time to give any one casualty a proper burial. All that could be done was toss them over the side of the ship one by one, throw in a couple thousand roses, and let a few lone buglers play Taps. Now, ironically, here we stand with one of the giants themselves lying on the deck gasping for breath.

I will have to say though that of all the megastores Border’s was, and is, the least onerous – which may very well be the reason they find themselves in such dire need of emergency care. Border’s seemed to show up late to every party – late to get online, late to cash in on used books, late with the e-reader – late, late, late for every important date. Several years ago in this blog’s first incarnation I wrote about the new Border’s opening in Medina and how underwhelmed I was at the prospect. As it turned out, I’m STILL underwhelmed by the Border’s store in Medina with the exception of one employee who runs around like the Energizer Bunny. I don’t know his name, or I’d mention it, but this guy knows books, loves books, is unfailingly cheerful, and even recognizes me when I walk in. I could almost – with the emphasis heavily on ALMOST– believe I was shopping at an indie, at least for a second. I hope they appreciate him because you can spin a lot of book racks and never turn up an associate that good.

The problem with the Medina store, aside from the fact that it’s a bland and sterile desert of wide aisles, few books, and a café so lonely you want to order a latte just to keep it company is that its very existence played a role in the collapse of the West Market Street, Akron store. I have to admit that there was a day when we’d go there on a Saturday night, browse through shelves crammed, piled, and heaped with goodies, grab a coffee at the café, listen to the live music, and invariably go home with at least one book, if not many more. I loved their low ceiling, crowded bookiness and other people did too. So what did Border’s do? They let that store slowly disappear until one day it’s a Hobby Lobby and Border’s Lite in Medina remains in all its slick barren splendor.

Yet all that being said, I almost want to chain myself to the Medina store just to keep it alive and well because the thought of no bookstore at all is too terrible to contemplate. According to the latest news, 200 Border’s stores are scheduled to be axed and I have every reason to think Medina may be one of them. I knew in January when I renewed my discount membership thing that I may never reap its full benefit, but felt almost morally obliged to re-up it anyway. Call it an act of faith, or an act of folly, but I can’t give up on Border’s. Just last week I popped in to buy a novel for a fellow bookseller who was in the hospital having knee replacement surgery and ended up buying one for myself too, again as an act of faith. Obviously, one extra book won’t buy a band-aid for a paper cut on the sickly giant’s thumb, but this store, banal though it may be, is OUR store.

When we moved to Medina in November 1987 the Village Booksmith sold all the latest titles and special ordered anything you wanted but didn’t see on the shelves. Now, twenty-four years later, we have Borders.

Maybe.

*******

P.S. After finishing this post my internet went down for about an hour. When I was able to log back in the list of stores on the chopping block had been posted online. As I feared, the Medina store made the top two hundred.

Angle For Success

I wonder if anyone remembers my challenge awhile back to select a slow-moving title from your stock and try to create a little book magic with the time-honored bookseller superstition that if you touch it, change it, do something, (anything!) with it, you will sell it. I’d been on a bit of a roll with this and decided it was time to up the ante. So I selected Charles Thacher’s Angling Books; A Guide for Collectors which came out in 2006. At the time of issue I had had two copies and sold the first one handily for $200 in 2007. The second one, however, sat like it had been adhered to the shelf with Gorilla glue. If you want to refresh your memory of this check the archive for December and click Christmas Challenge.

I had checked prices once over the years and dropped it to $125, but that had been awhile, so it was time to get serious. Secretly I had hoped that taking its picture and talking about it here would be enough to convince the book gods to bless it with a pair of wings for flying out the door. But just in case, I also put my lucky stones on top with a stick of Indian incense. The end result was a very nice picture.

Soooooooo, I looked up the price again and – oh yeah --down, down, down we go! But I had very little invested in it, so I saw the $90 lowest price and dropped mine to $80. I’m not crazy about doing that and don’t usually, but I figured it was all for the good of the Great Experiment. The result, however, was a resounding silence. Okay then, on to Plan B. My youngest daughter, the marketing major with a minor in e-commerce, pushes me constantly to use social media outlets, so I facebooked, twittered, tweeted, and whistled Dixie. The result? Nada. Unless you count the two people who “Liked” it.

Finally, I made the decision Monday to haul it over to the antiques mall. I doubted very much it would sell there, but it was the only other thing I could think to do. DID it sell there? No, it did not, and I doubt it ever would have. It sold on Alibris Tuesday. Of course we all know that it shouldn’t have still BEEN on Alibris which is why I stormed around the kitchen for the duration of Eric’s breakfast filled with the righteous indignation of a woman who KNEW she’d marked it sold in her database and was marching upstairs right this minute to prove it. It was marked sold all right, but there’s a pesky little catch -- you still have to upload it so alibris knows to ditch it. Had I done that I’d have spared myself the angst of ignoring the order all day, fearful that with my luck it would have sold at the mall. But when I went over at 4:30 there it sat, the word Thacher so huge on the spine it beckoned me like a billboard.

The challenge began December 21st and it’s now February 15th, a total of 56 days, or almost two months. I suppose it could well be argued that there was no book magic involved, but I beg to differ, as less than 24 hours had passed from its departure to its sale. At any rate, I’m feeling lucky, so I’m going to give the process yet another try. This time it’s with a book called Hot Rolling of Steel (the sequel to Cold Rolling of Steel of course) by William L. Roberts which is coming up onto a year in my company. I chose it because its title contains the two things it needs to do –  warm up and roll outta here!

Lost In Akron: Part II

When we last left them, Mary had told Bill he was the man for her. Given all his passionate declarations of longing to be with her, one would have thought this news would have had him swinging on the edge of the crescent moon. But, no, apparently not. First he waits weeks to reply and then when he does he rambles all over the place. First he says that when he kissed her it seemed that they were to live only for each other. Then--- EEEEEEEEEE! -- the brakes abruptly squeal and suddenly he’s blathering about how a man his age doesn’t seek love anymore, only friendship and companionship. This is in March 1912 – he turned 25 in January! But never mind that -- he forges on with it, intense as a poet, until suddenly a better idea occurs to him, one which might even be viewed as noble.


“I don’t think a fellow has a right to marry unless he has a good income, which I have not. I look around me and see the fellows who are married and what a struggle it is for existence. What right does a man have to ask a woman to slave for him the rest of her life?”

And now for the zinger -- "Anyhow, no future generations will look at your picture as it stands now. Hoping that you will forgive me and think of me kindly.”

Oh, damn it, Bill! By this point I wanted to toss both him and his letters out the back door. Had it not been for the fact that Mary had obviously stuck around given the number of missives left to be read, I might have quit right then and there. Actually, I carried a little grudge clear up until last night when in another flat I found some additional letters, the most informative of which were written by Bill in 1908 to another girl named Jenny. In those days Bill was still back in rural Ohio doing another thing he loved – working with horses. Oh, how he fancied Jenny, but the crankiest horse in the barn gave him more affection than she did. Next came Annie whom he was certain he’d marry, but Annie, too, let him down. Who knows how many others paraded by before he took up with  the cranky Lillian whose ring he’d lost? No wonder the poor guy got so flummoxed. What would make him think Mary would be any better? After all, she WAS sort of cheating on her steady with HIM, wasn’t she?

Time rolls on, change is as constant as the snow of this winter, and yet the same story plays out all over the world as we speak. Why does it matter? Why do these letters matter? I thought about this a lot after finding the new ones and remembered something else Bill said in the kiss-off to Mary. “I’m sure you will destroy this letter.” She didn’t though and a hundred years later a stranger read it. Is it a sort of voyeurism this dipping into the personal lives of long-ago people? Perhaps, but I also think it’s a kind of preservation -- not just of the details of daily life in a particular era, interesting though they are, but of the driving forces that propel people through their days and end up creating singular lives from common stories.

The letters also remind me not to be so quick to judge without remembering the culture of the times. Bill drops ethnic slurs on the page with the casualness of one tossing dirty socks down the laundry chute. Jews, Hungarians and Germans are all referred to by derogatory names, yet the slurs seem oddly devoid of malice. Which brings me to the strangest one he used -- in reference to himself.

After the firecracker of a letter that had to have left Mary reeling there’s a maddening gap which poses enough questions to hold an interrogation. One thing’s for sure though – the silent months were anything but dull. Mary must have worn him down like the heels on walking shoes because by July “Dear Friend” had morphed into “My dear Mary”. On July 13th Bill popped the question during a humdinger of a rainstorm in Piqua and Mary accepted. He planned to write to her father for permission (after the fact) and bring her a ring when he next saw her. Happiness, which in the past had eluded him, now spilled over the page like errant ink from a leaky pen. Yet, even so, his bread-winning capabilities wore heavily on his mind.

”I wonder what your father will think of me. Perhaps he will knock my block off, as I am nothing but a poor ragged nigger and you could have married some rich fellow.”

Whaaaaaat?

Oh!

Wow.

I don’t know whether I was more surprised that Bill was African American, or that he’d used such an ugly epithet to describe himself. Either way, it made me sad, as by now I was firmly planted in Bill’s corner. Who wouldn’t be crazy about a guy who said, ”There’s nothing I would like to do better on earth than help my folks someday, as I love them more than anyone else on earth, but you, Mary.”

Whatever Mary’s father thought about Billl is never mentioned, but the couple married the Sunday before Christmas of 1912. Within a few days Mary took suddenly ill and had emergency surgery at the hospital in Piqua. (Imagine the horror of THAT in 1912!). Once she was out of the woods Bill had no choice but to return to work in Akron where he wrote by the fire every single night of January, 1913 with their new kitten at his feet. By then “My dear Mary” had become my “My Dear Honey Bunch”

There are two last letters, which I also found last night. One is postmarked 1915 and one 1924. In both instances Bill is home in Akron working while Mary visits her family in Covington. She remains always My Dear Honey Bunch.

Lost In Akron

I was gone all day yesterday. If you peaked in the window you’d say I'm a pathological liar though because there I was from eight-thirty in the morning to two-thirty in the afternoon sitting on the family room floor surrounded by three piles of sorted letters. Somehow I fell into a black hole and wound up in 1911 Akron right at the beginning of a long distance romance. As you know, I love ephemera, so finding a heap of letters all addressed to the same woman from Covington, Ohio penned by a man who’d left rural Covington to find work in the manufacturing cities of Barberton and Akron was like following bread crumbs in a fairy tale. The letters begin in April 1911 and abruptly stop in January, 1913, but do reach a satisfying conclusion nonetheless. I’d bought the flat because of a bunch of other items, not realizing that the scattered letters combine to tell the story of a woman named Mary and a man named Bill, two ordinary people starring in their own private drama

First I sorted the letters into piles by year, and then by month, and finally date, so that in the unlikely event that a story hid in there it would unfurl chronologically. Since Bill wrote all the letters we only have his side of the tale, but he references things Mary said and did and records his impressions of her – “I think a precise person (which I'm not) suits you best as you are of a poetical turn of mind. ” Mary also seems to be of an actively dating turn of mind when the story begins, though she also nursing a broken heart over a mutual friend named George who dumped her for a woman in Michigan he was planning to marry soon. And poor Bill had past relationship problems of his own due to the unfortunate fact that he had given his pin to an ex-girlfriend named Lillian who in return had given him her ring. The problem was Bill lost the ring in Pittsburgh and now Lillian was spitting the blue fire of a blow torch in his direction. So he wrote to ask Mary if she’d explain to Lillian that he didn’t do it on purpose and would give her an even nicer ring if she’d accept it. Mary played go-between, Lillian agreed, and finally sent him back his pin along with “a sassy letter” which made him not care if he ever laid eyes on her again

At this stage Bill’s salutation never wavered. Letter after letter began “Dear Friend.” At first he lived in Barberton across the street from a lake (likely Lake Anna), which was great because hundreds of people “bathed” in the summer evenings and on Sundays he could do what he loved best – drift along the silent, dark water in a canoe under a canopy of Van Gogh stars. Later, when he moved to Akron for a job at a boiler works, he took to the canal, but had to be careful because the launches zipped by so fast they raised the canoe straight up into the air. Bill loved gazing at the stars, sleeping late, reading the Saturday Evening Post, and going to plays, though he thought Akron had “gone dippy” over vaudeville and never got any decent shows. Bill mentioned several times that he had no intention of ever getting married, but so did Mary, even though she admitted she had a “steady.” But steady, schmeady – a boyfriend never stopped her from meeting Bill from time to time in Piqua where she moved to take a job in a law office.

In addition to the relationship’s dramas and traumas, scattered about the pages of Bill’s letters are historical references of note. He mentions that Akron offered men great opportunities in the tire building trade where they could earn a wage of $5 to $6 a day, but, sadly, admits that it’s not for him because it’s “a dirty, unhealthy business and the smell of crude rubber is the most offensive smell in the world.” Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but I did grow up in south Akron not far from the Goodrich plant and the old joke was to take a deep breath and say, “Ahhhhhh! Good, rich air!” Bill also makes casual mention of an auto tooling down East Market Street past his rooming house (he lived close enough to see the Goodyear plant) chiming out the song “How Dry I Am.” I’m not sure how it did that, (did they have car radios then? I doubt it), but he thought the car probably came from Canton because Canton, Ohio was a dry town.

To add to the intrigue, mixed in with Bill’s letters are a couple from other men addressed to Mary. One of these Romeos had just met her (in 1910 -- see photo) and was finding it very hard to keep a lid on his cauldron of roiling emotions. I’m guessing though that Roger, the newspaper reporter, was the steady boyfriend. He definitely caught my interest anyway, probably because in an earlier incarnation I shared his profession. Roger covered the police beat for the most conservative newspaper in Columbus and was actually based AT the police station where he had a desk, a typewriter, and a phone. He’d type out his stories, which had to be disappointingly short, and send them over to the paper by messenger. Roger fought boredom with the one-two punch of Mohammed Ali in his prime, constantly looking for ways to stay awake and snag a big byline. He figured he could wage the battle and still slip in 10 to 12 hours of coursework at OSU while he looked around for a better gig. But I digress here. The story, after all, is about Bill and Mary. Roger is only a bit player.

Bill was a slight man, weighing only 145 pounds, but he figured he’d get pretty fat once he had a real apartment instead of a room and could cook for himself, or maybe sample some of Mary’s bread and pies. He’d “never loved a girl sincerely, he admitted, and had had only a string of relationships “where a guy goes with a girl for companionship.” (Yeah sure, Bill – companionship). What Mary thought about this is lost to time, but one thing is clear – old Bill, like generations of men before and after him, sent out mixed signals. In one letter he chides her for thinking about the other guy all the time and never him and tells her he would like a thousand kisses, only to then say it’s a joke and draws a picture of candy. Then when she womans up and tells him he’s the ONE, what does he do but whirl like a dervish and nearly blow the whole thing!

Fascinating, isn’t it, how the dance of love never changes. Advance, retreat, cha-cha, tango – on and on it goes in dips and spins through time. This thread of human longing and folly is the warp and weft of our humanity. The voices of the past, even those --maybe especially those -- of ordinary people beg us to listen. So we’ll pick up tomorrow -- I PROMISE! --with the rest of the Saga of Mary and Bill. I also promise a couple surprises.

The Little Bookshop That Grew

Snow, snow, and more snow! Usually I like winter best, but this year I’m ready to trade in fireplaces, afghans, my new winter coat, and even homemade soup for an endless ribbon of dry road. Even though northeastern Ohio didn’t get slammed nearly as hard as other areas have the weather's certainly taken a toll on business. For the first three days of February I sold NOTHING at the antiques mall (unheard of!) and one of those days they didn’t even open. Not that I blame them – that day it was more like popping wheelies than driving. Saturday and Sunday things returned to normal, but now there’s lost ground to be made up and- -- ACK! -- it's snowing again as I write this.

Friday Eric and I hauled the new bookcases over and  immediately unloaded one of the original ones along the back wall. We wrestled it out (well, Eric wrestled and I played navigator) and guided in the new one only to realize that the new ones aren’t as wide as the old and wouldn’t completely fill the back wall -- which meant of course that we had to exchange bookcases once again and reshelve all the books. From there it was easier except for the fact that Eric had to keep stopping to talk to all the store customers who came by. I am amazed at how many times we’ve been there and he’s run into one of our store regulars. Though a nice diversion, it kept us at our job most of the morning. We rearranged the furniture, took away two small temporary bookcases, reoranized the books,which meant moving lots of them, added a ton of new stuff and cleaned the whole thing with Pledge and the vacuum cleaner. Eric even touched up a couple nicks on the new shelves with a dark stain.

The sight of that booth all spiffed up with ROWS of new books made me dizzy with joy as if I'd spun in circles and fell down flat. In fact, I was so excited I forgot to take a picture and didn’t remember until we were having a late lunch at Panera (do try that new Thai salad if you like spicy food. Heaven in a bowl!) By then Eric had had it with the mall, so we went home, fired up the gas-log fireplace and sat down in the middle of the day and read our books – he something by Harry Turtledove and I the very weird, very quirky new novel Her Fearful Symmetry which lured me in despite my protests that it wasn’t my thing. Anyway, forgetting to take the picture is my excuse for tardiness here. I’ve had so many excuses of late that the next time I’ll have to borrow Paula Danzinger's title The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, even though I lack both a physical cat and (thanks heavens!) a gymsuit. I actually met Paula Danziger once in a Westin hotel in L.A. when a telegram addressed to her was delivered to me. But that's another story.

In today's story we stopped back at the mall yesterday and got the photo above, but what should have taken a couple minutes dragged into a half hour because I could never find the booth empty of people. Yeah, how cool is THAT? I’m not complaining and I’m not gloating (well, maybe a teeny-tiny bit I’m gloating), but I do think the book gods will close one eye seeing as how I admitted that I’m not yet where I should be for the new month and none of the people bought anything while I was there. The little table in the front of the photo is the French one I got at the auction. I only wish I’d taken a separate picture of it because it’s the height of elegance. But it may well be that its prominent location trumps its Gallic charm. We took it over last Sunday and I immediate adorned it with a miniature antiquarian set of Ruskin and sold the set the very same day after it had sat  unloved on the other side of the booth for six weeks! What I really need though is a small, but sturdy chair (hear that, Cheryl?). I think it’s hard for people to see the bottom shelves which could explain why very little sells off them. But it easier to find a gold nugget under the lilac bush than it is to get a chair because, of course, the chair needs to be an antique.

Which brings me to something else. After we snapped the picture yesterday afternoon we decided to take a mini road trip to check out another large antiques mall that’s quite a distance away. We have friends who have a booth there and there’s also a volume book dealer who's been there for years. Of course now that we sell in a mall ourselves we regard other malls with new and knowing eyes. The first thing I noticed when we walked in was how much nicer our mall is – most likely because of the nothing-later than-1974 rule. As you may recall, I didn’t care for that restriction initially, but I have to admit that this purity is what makes the place sing. The second thing I noticed is that while the volume dealer does have some nice stuff, he or she may be struggling just as hard as we are to get a quantity of high end stock. We did, however, find two underpriced children’s books and bought both – one for the mall and one for online.

As I write this, a strange new thought I’ve had more than once keeps clamoring to be heard. I hesitate to even say it out loud, but here goes -- I think maybe I’m falling out of love with online selling.

The Book Gods Adventure

I hope my last post didn’t seem like a rant, as it truly wasn’t that so much as it was an awakening. For so long I have felt a sense of desolation after returning from library sales, but this time I finally decided to do something proactive. I also don’t want to leave the impression that the weekend was horrible because it wasn’t. In fact, it was downright wonderful once you carve out the rotten library sale.

On the way back from The Very Bad Sale we decided to try to salvage the day. Both of us felt funky and needed a lift, so we took a detour by way of Akron and stopped at an estate sale we’d seen in the paper. We were late getting there of course, but it didn’t matter because they didn’t have any books we wanted. What they did have though was bookCASES – beautiful ones in a dark espresso color that would be perfect with the black ones already at the antiques mall. (Anything that keeps me from painting in the frigid garage is worth working for.) The cases dominated the side wall of the living room, and stood out not only because of their handsome color and arched top shelf, but because row upon row of Franklin Library classics sparkled inside them like the Jewels of the Nile. At $10-$12 apiece these were too expensive for resale and I really didn’t want them anyway, but the sight of them gave me a frisson of pleasure that was sorely needed.

But of course we were there for shelving, not for swooning over books we weren’t buying, so we quickly got serious and huddled in the corner for a little confab. Did we want to just take them at $95 apiece, for a total of almost $300, or did we want to take our chances and come back the next day in hopes of a bargain? I vacillated so many times Eric was about ready to write the check and be done with it, but I finally decided they weren’t the only shelves in the universe, so I’d wait. Believe it or not, I didn’t even obsess about them for the rest of the day either!

That might have had something to do with the fact that my friend Nancy and I sallied forth at 6:30 for a Girls Night Out at Sully’s Irish Pub in downtown Medina. My favorite Irish band, the New Barleycorn, were scheduled to rock the place at eight-thirty, but to get a good seat requires going for dinner and staking out your territory. Dinner was fabulous by the way– shepherd’s pie topped with colcannon – mashed potatoes and cabbage --which always reminds me of my Irish grandmother, Katie. We ordered a bottle of wine and settled in for a long, raucous night that had me so jazzed I could hardly sleep that night. ("No, nay, never! No, nay, never no more! Will I play the Wild Rover, no never no more!")


But the next morning found Eric and me headed back the estate sale in Akron with a phalanx of book gods rattling around in the back of the PT Cruiser all the way. It’s not that they deserted us at the library sale – they were just smart enough not to go in the first place. But in Akron they showed up with both a smile and a sly wink, the latter because we expressed our desire to buy the bookcases seconds before somebody else offered to buy them too. But here’s the good part. Everything under $100 was half-price, so we got them for $47.50 apiece. It did mean going back to get the enormous cube van which we didn’t bring originally because it was at the store which is ten miles in the wrong direction and it made no sense to go through all that when we didn’t even know if the bookcases were still available. So Eric dropped me off at home (what good is a hundred pound weakling with metal in both birdlike wrists anyway?) and set off on Operation Retrieval. He returned an hour and a half later smiling like the Cheshire Cat.

“Guess what? I got some books too.”

“Whaaaaaaaaaaaat? I didn’t want those even at $5 or $6 apiece! Please tell me you didn’t get carried away!”

“No, I just got around thirty-five.”

THIRTY-FIVE! I was about to keel over in a dead faint when I spotted the mischievous grin I always call his Sister Martha Mary smile because it reminds me of a nun I had in high school.

“You did NOT! I almost fell for it too, but I know you knew that I …”

He cut me off in mid protest, went out to the driveway, and returned seconds later hefting a good-sized carton. “ Yes, I really did,” he said, holding out the box for me to peer inside. “There are exactly thirty-five books in here. I know you didn’t want them even at half price, so I didn’t consider it. But when I was taking them off the shelves a worker asked if I wanted the lot for $25.”

Well now! That changed everything, especially once I saw that they had never been opened, and still had their original bookplates laid-in. Immediately I conjured up the sight of them back in their original nesting place, only now in our booth at the antiques mall.

I'm not sure, but I think the book gods giggled with conspiratorial delight.