The Silent Bookseller

Eric is back from Maryland, but together we’re not a whole person. The weekend was busy and social for me – much more so than usual. Five friends in four days and one of them twice! By late Saturday afternoon I had laryngitis – silent as a lamb -- though I still had dinner with my neighbor Linda Saturday night and walked five miles with Nancy in the drizzle on Sunday, whispering all the way. But Monday morning was crunch time. I got up convinced I would never be well again. Actually I’m still not and neither is Eric who has the same thing minus the laryngitis. We sound like a TB ward back in the 30’s over here.

There IS one thing that’s good about it all though – the forced silence. It wraps itself around me like a cocoon and I am strangely peaceful inside it. It’s like melting into a hot bath – complete surrender of body and soul. Most people would say that I am outgoing, talkative – VERY talkative – and I am, but only sometimes. Years ago an Episcopal priest friend asked me if I’d ever taken the Meyers-Brigg personality test. When I said I hadn’t he commented that even though he gave the test, in my case he didn’t need to do it in order know the outcome -- I’m an introvert masquerading as an extrovert. At the time I secretly thought he was crazy, but as the years go by I’ve come to the realization that he was dead-on right. I could easily wind up being one of those old ladies who hide in their houses and get dottier and dottier from lack of social interaction. I’d carry on fascinating conversations in my head, eat popcorn for dinner, read until my eyes crossed, and write endless novels that perhaps amuse only me. Maybe I’d even take up meditation, do a lot of messy art projects and not clean  up for maybe a week, and cook things from Julia Child’s cookbook just to see if it’s worth it.

The other weird thing about where I am at this moment is my complete lack of concern about my limitations as a bookseller. Right now I have orders that should have gone out yesterday, but didn’t. Normally that would be enough to launch me through the air like a torpedo and deposit me one short step from the men in the white coats. I also didn’t have a book that was ordered on ABE yesterday, but instead of emitting a cascade of anguished lamentations I clicked the previously sold button with less concern than I’d give a hangnail. Who IS this woman pretending to be me? She’s hanging out in my sweats and she looks like death warmed over, but other than that I think she’s a total fraud. If I had the energy I’d even look into it. But the thing is, I kinda like her. If Eric wasn't huddled in bed with a blanket over his head he’d like her too.

Maybe once she feels a little better I can ply her with pinot grigio and black licorice (probably not at the same time). Who knows? It might keep her around awhile.

More Musings on the Book Fair

Well, it looks like all that running around I did came with a price tag. Woke up Tuesday to a head cold, but by Thursday I was back to (sort of) normal. I wish I could tell you I accomplished a zillion things this week, but I’m afraid I did not. My activities since Monday are as follows: wrote the blog about the book fair; read Reading Jackie about Jackie Kennedy’s work as an editor; went to lunch with Cheryl; wrapped orders every day; cleaned my house, most especially the kitchen floor which after a weekend of rain and little people reappeared under layers of dirt, orange juice, and blackberry jelly; had my friend Mary Lynn from Dayton over for breakfast and a peak at the royal wedding this morning (did NOT love the dress, but the bride’s adorable); listed some books; read a backlog of newspapers; did all the New York Times crossword puzzles I missed; talked to Eric who is at a show in Maryland; and conducted a daily round or two of the Great Book Treasure Hunt.

The latter is a fun, if somewhat stressful, game that occurs when you fail to unpack in a prompt manner after a book fair. I believe I mentioned that books become exceedingly popular when they are in boxes. Well, the good/bad news is that they stay that way even after the sale is over if you don’t release them from captivity. This year we unboxed them because Eric needed the wooden boxes for the show he’s at now, but all we did was stack the books in a large block in his office. Last year I put them away immediately, but with the cold and the other stuff it never happened, hence all the frantic rummaging I've been doing all week.  \I did make a considerable dent in it this afternoon, so three quarters of the books are reshelved now, but some still await me as you can see from the above photo. On the bright side I did  sell a vintage Akron pottery catalog to someone from the book fair. He bought a catalog at the fair and I mentioned I had the pottery one and, sure enough, he inquired about it yesterday and we struck a deal this morning. How cool is THAT? Last year my after fair activity was confined to a large outlay of money when we bought a book collection from a fair-goer. This year only one person asked if we buy books and so far we haven't had a follow-up call from her.

The events of the week -- the cold especially --  gave me both time and perspective to think about the fair some more, so a few additional things occurred to me. Last year we benefited greatly from the ability to process credit cards. In several instances we made sales after the buyers had run out of cash and saw something they wanted. This year, however, we had exactly ONE credit card sale – the rest were cash and checks. I knew credit card usage was down, but Eric was the one checking people out so I had no idea that the number of cc transactions had fallen off that dramatically. Why this would be I don’t know – perhaps the economy and worries about incurring debt. The other thing that occurred to me is something Darwin told me a couple weeks ago about the Ann Arbor Antiques Show. He said that this year attendance soared, but the buyers were not really collectors. They knew nothing about antiques, asked astounding questions, paled at the prices, and ended up being more like museum goers. As mentioned previously, we saw that same phenomenon. Again, I’m not sure what this means in the big picture, but I hadn’t immediately made the correlation between antiques and books.

A third difference this year was dealer sales. Last year we sold only to consumers. This year we walked away from our booth before the sale started on the first day and returned to find a children’s book with a dealer’s business card in it on our check-out table. I also sold three journals to the guy set up next to us and a scientific ephemera item to a third dealer. There may have been more, but even if not, those three sales represented yet another surprising difference. What's interesting is that a long time dealer who was at the show, but not as an exhibitor,  remarked that he couldn't buy inventory at the fair anymore because there was no margin for profit. I agreed, as I used to try buying stock at this fair even before I was an exhibitor and succeeded only once in doing so. Clearly, my prices allowed dealers room for profit which struck me as interesting given how much price resistance we experienced this year.

But of course we’ve only exhibited twice, so it may be premature to make assumptions about any of it based on so little experience. Perhaps every year is its own year, each one arriving and departing with its own eccentricities. Perhaps the fact that I sold a lot of paper this year means no more or less than the fact that I sold a lot of paper this year. Maybe next year I will bring a bushel of it and haul a bushel home again. Last year my hot category was technical books. This year I didn’t sell a one.

Go figure.

Notes From the Book Fair

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Did you hear that? If not, it was an enormous sigh of relief that last week’s frenetic activity is finally over. By the end of the Akron antiquarian fair on Saturday night I was so tired I was practically comatose. Our daughter, her husband, and our two grandsons showed up about an hour after we got home, so I whirled and twirled with the kids for a couple hours and was in bed by nine. The next morning we were back at it by 6:30, cleaning, cooking, flying with the kids, and hosting Easter dinner for ten. Needless to say, by nightfall the Wreck of the John B. had nothing on us!

But enough about that. Let’s cut to the chase and talk about the fair. If I were confined to a single descriptive word I guess I’d choose quirky. From the moment it started ‘til the final bell it felt very different to me than last year. There were several reasons for this which I will enumerate, but the important thing is the take-away message, which is this -- the future of the physical book is more secure than previous indicators may have led you to believe. I don’t know how many people I talked to who have e-readers and love them, yet still love and buy traditional books, primarily collectibles, or books perceived as potential collectibles, but it was a LOT. The other bright spot was the crowd. Eight hundred-plus people passed through the doors over two days and kept traffic at the booths constantly flowing. AND my book guru and neighboring booth proprietor scored $4000 on just TWO sales the first day!

On the downside, the number of dealers had dropped by about ten, but the soaring price of gas, plus the cost of hotels and meals probably had a lot to do with that. The other negative, or at least surprising, difference was the appearance of a never before encountered kind of customer. I talked to several other dealers who noted the same phenomenon and, like me, were a bit flummoxed by it. This customer had no clue about the pricing of collectible books, as in, “Why would a book that only cost $2.95 when it was brand new be $50 now that it’s so old?” This was also the kind of customer who picks up a $200 book and asks if you’ll take ten dollars! And the kind of customer who writes down the pertinent facts about a book when he thinks you’re not looking, so he can buy it cheaper online. And the kind who tells you that a collectible catalog is only worth $10 because that’s how much his friend paid for it at a garage sale. As much as they rattled me, I'm actually delighted these customers were there because we need newcomers badly if books and paper are going to be preserved and appreciated. So I tried my best to educate them as well as I could, though I'm not reallty sure they quite believed any of it!

Sadly, however, this kind of customer also does not know how to handle antiquarian books. In a heartbeat a woman opened a folio-sized 19th century book, allowed the front cover to flop over in mid-air and popped the first page following the front free endpaper. I can tip it back in, but I must admit to a surge of well concealed “shock and awe” when it happened. Believe it or not, we also actually talked ourselves OUT of a three-fgure sale when a woman wanted to buy a complete 13 volume set of children’s books in their original slipcase, throw away the case, and divide the spoils between three grandchildren in three states! When we finally convinced her not to do it Beethoven rewarded us with a few bars of Ode To Joy from the netherworld.

And yet, all that being said, we still did okay. With less items than last year our bottom line was almost exactly the same, minus one first edition Twain. This time the big winner was ephemera, though we did of course sell some nice books, including my favorite, a first edition of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company. Of all the sales though my three favorites were to people who so totally loved what they got they couldn’t stop telling me. Who knew that a Varga pin-up girl calendar with its original envelope, a salesman’s pocket sample of Victorian die-cut calling cards, a 1930’s Hollywood magazine with Jeanette MacDonald on the cover, Don Freeman’s rare magazine Newstand; One Man’s Manhattan and a refrigerator catalog from the 1890’s could elicit such unabashed pleasure. None of these things were especially pricey – the highest were just $50 and $60 – but the joy they engendered was so expansive I felt like the luckiest seller at the show.

Of course we went there to make money, which we did, but I think we can sometimes get so caught up in its pursuit that we fail to appreciate the less obvious pleasures of the trade. One guy who bought three of the items listed above said to me, “Man, you’re the one with the GOOD stuff! I spent all my money right here.”

Music to my ears. Bethoven not required.

P.S. It's been ten minutes since I posted and I've already been asked about the circle on my leg in the picture. I have no idea. I never even saw it until it was pointed out to me. It's not on my clothes, so it must be a beam from one of  tthe overhead cannister lights (see photo). You guys amaze me with your powers of perception!

Practically Perfect

Some people would argue that there’s no such thing as perfection here on earth. Both Amish quilters and Persian rug weavers believe that only God is perfect and so they will purposely make a tiny mistake in each of their creations to remind themselves of the need for humility. While the sentiment may be true, I think we just attended a library book sale that, if not perfect, is as close to it as humanity is apt to get. It was the first time we attended it though, so I’m not shouting “Eureka!” as if I'd tapped into a permanent gusher. I’ve had this experience before with antiques mall buying, so my optimism for the future of the sale dangles on a cotton thread for good reason. There used to be a mall in Toledo where we always stopped when we went to visit our daughter in Michigan. The first time we went it was so good I thought I’d just discovered the eighth wonder of the world. But never again did I feel so much as a twinge of exhilaration in all the years which followed, though we could always count on getting at least one or two decent books every time.

As to be expected, scanners abounded at this sale, including our local crazies, of which we have three who are extremely colorful. In fact, they are SO colorful that I never met their match at any sale outside of a fifty mile radius. I think if there were a national prize for the most vivid characters at a book sale northeastern Ohio would be dragging home a trophy the size of Mt. Rushmore. Anyway, they were there, the crowd was huge, a loud argument erupted at the front of the line seconds before the sale began, and I almost got mowed down because I didn’t realize that as soon as the doors opened everyone would run like a herd of wild horses. I’m not kidding when I say run either. We’re talking Boston Marathon here. Fortunately, Eric grabbed me by the arm and steered me into a little piece of book heaven before I was flattened like a cartoon character.

But forget that stuff. Imagine instead a tiny room -- Ernest Hemingway’s “a clean well-lighted place” which instead of café tables is lined with beautiful, expensive books. There’s a large window, a very nice attendant, and antiquarian titles blooming here and there like tiger lilies at the side of a winding sun-dappled road. Prices began at $400 and went down to around $10 with the average being $25. At first I scanned the titles quickly, but soon realized something absolutely without precedent. We were the only people in the room! And we remained the only people for an astonishing fifteen minutes! Needless to say, we did very well. In fact, we did so well that we didn’t even bother with the rest of the sale, so never encountered anyone wielding a scanner the entire time.

But here’s the interesting twist. When we got home I immediately unpacked everything and sorted it into three piles – antiquarian fair, antiques mall, online. That’s when I realized that several books did not make it home with us even though I’d paid for them. By the time we checked out another dealer had also bought a ton of stuff and was behind us in line. Eric packed as fast as he could, but her stuff tumbled all over the two square feet of available carpet space and we had no choice but to pile our bags in a heap by the door. The only thing we could conclude was that one of them must have migrated under the card table they used to check out.

Friday morning I phoned and, sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. Fortunately, I remembered two titles in the bag so we were able to claim it easily. I was rather annoyed though that we had to make another long trip even though we were already headed in that direction on Sunday due to yet ANOTHER aggravation. I’d bought Eric a new chair for his birthday and the furniture store had called to tell me that the fabric I chose was discontinued and I would have to come back and choose something else. With the book fair only five days away I felt absolutely crunched for time. The last thing I needed was another thing to do that I’d already done.

But I’m here to tell you that what appears to be a bad thing can actually be Mother Theresa in a Richard Nixon mask. We arrived at the library to find that almost everything in the little room was half price on Sunday! I wound up buying even more than I had the first day of the sale. It was so good it was almost surreal. All week I’d wrung my hands, gnashed my teeth, and rended my garments as people continued to buy the books I’d packed for the show. I knew that realistically my chances of acquiring a quantity of quality new items to replace them were about nil.

But I did. And all because of a forgotten bag. It may not be a coincidence that the first book we got (pictured above) was called The Book of Blessings.

Wonky World!

I know I’ve been MIA, but it’s been a whirlwind of book pricing for the antiquarian show. I did, however, take off an obscene amount of time yesterday to attend a book sale which can usually be counted on to offer at least one nice thing. In fact, I would have to say that this sale has produced over fourteen years the best books we’ve ever purchased in a library. This is NOT to say, however, that it’s as good as it used to be – NOTHING is as good as it used to be. But I am definitely a happy bookseller today. The sun is shining, it’s not even nine a.m., and I have already wrapped my orders, facebooked, twittered, accepted an offer, returned a phone call, taken photos of a magazine and sent them to a customer, and begun this blog. Amazing what a little positive energy can do!

I have to tell you though that the whole book sale experience was the equivalent of tumbling down the rabbit hole into Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory. Yes, I know I have mixed my literary allusions, but that’s the kind of day it was. This sale tends to be the equivalent of Filene’s basement during the annual wedding gown grab, so the staff is constantly looking for ways to make it run smoothly and keep tempers on an even keel. The new idea was to hand out numbers at two o’clock for a five o’clock opening. Of course this means the die-hards now turn up at noon instead of two. We got there around one-fifteen and were happy to find only about half a dozen people waiting, among them a couple favorite old-timers like us. We passed the time pleasantly enough, grabbed our numbers (seven and eight), and headed off to Applebee’s for lunch/dinner at two where we lingered over spicy Cajun shrimp pasta.

Before we went though another new wrinkle appeared at the sale. It seems that the library decommissioned so much stuff that they had no room to display it. So creative lot that they are, the volunteers decided to rent a POD, box the books by category, and sell the boxes sight unseen for $15 each which made the average book price around 60 cents each. The way it worked was you chose your category, they issued you a box number and you went outside to the parking lot to collect it. Ah, nothing like a little gambling to add some spice to the book sale! Plenty of people availed themselves of the opportunity but, alas, we were not among them. I buy ex-libs so infrequently that even when they are fabulous my aesthetic sensibilities cringe like a Victorian dowager at the appalling sight of a young lady’s ankle. I know, I know, I’m something of a book snob, but now that I just celebrated my ickiest year birthday to date I don’t have to apologize for it.

Anyway, after the repast at Applebee’s and some in-car reading in the library parking lot we returned to the sale with about an hour to spare. Again, good people to talk to and an atmosphere of such tranquility you would think it was peopled by a tribe of Tibetan monks. Finally the doors opened and we headed to the collectibles area. Now here’s where it gets interesting. God love them, these volunteers are so nice and so hard working and sincere, but their pricing system is on par with the eternal question “what is the meaning of life?” Believe it or not – and I don’t believe it yet -- in this wonky little world in which I found myself a nine volume leather-bound set of Ridpath’s History of the World could be had for fifteen dollars. By contrast, a battered copy of a cheap children’s series book printed on high acid paper was $12! Needless to say, I chose the $15 option (see photo above). I only snapped four volumes though because the rest are in another box and the box is in the garage and it’s freezing out there, so you’ll just have to use your imagination to picture the whole set in all its glory.

The other thing I got that made me dance a little jig was two of the eight Sara Ware Bassett invention series books. Oh, how I love these and in first edition too. I have never had them before, but my “bookdar” went off like a factory whistle at high noon at the very sight of them.

All told, we spent an astounding seven hours from the moment we left our driveway to the moment we returned and yet somehow it ended up being a fun, satisfying day. Yes, the scanner people were there, but it was as though they’d been issued valium at the door. The world may have been wonky at the library, but I’d be happy to fall down that rabbit hole again any time.

A Course Is a Course, Unless of Course ...

Leo the cat goes home today and I begin filling the wooden boxes for the antiquarian book fair. Once again, I sold a book I had planned to take, but it’s okay, as it got me to thinking about an area of collecting you may never have considered – antiquarian and vintage self-help books and courses. Ever since I was a kid I have loved independent learning. In fact, I still believe the word autodidact was coined just for me. When I was still in high school I somehow managed to cajole my extremely – um, thrifty -- father into spending an obscene amount of money for the Famous Writer’s Course, which of course later proved to be rather bogus, but thrilled me nonetheless and still does. The heady excitement when the big box arrived from Westport, Connecticut filled with books and assignments still almost makes me believe I could be the next Harper Lee.  From that day forward courses of all kinds have called my name.

Over the years I have bought and sold many of these – it’s amazing how many types there are covering so many topics – The Roth Memory Course (LOVE that one and so do buyers), The Purinton Foundation Course in Personal Efficiency and How to Master the New Science of Personal Efficiency (just shipped that to Denmark last week), and The Course in Human Betterment. There are also radio courses, electronics courses, singing courses, art courses, courses on phrenology, and, my two other all-time favorites, The Home Study Course for Hawaiian Guitar published by the U.S. School of Music in 1938 and the rare Marshall Stillman Boxing Course. I’ve bought them all and sold them all, yet my love for them remains boundless.

So yesterday when I sold Annie Payson Call’s book The Heart of Good Health from 1907 (I’d previously sold her Nerves and Common Sense from 1910) it got me to wondering whether I’m the only one who swoons over vintage self-help. The field is huge – I consider early New Thought material to be part of it – and yet the stuff can be maddeningly elusive. Annie Payson Call, for example, was enormously popular in her day – she wrote regularly for Ladies Home Journal in addition to penning books on emotional and physical health, and yet today you say her name and most people stare back blankly. As for her writings, it would be easier to find a gold nugget in the backyard. I got both of her books at the same time and have never seen any since even though my “bookdar” is set so high for this stuff I swear it would go off if anything existed in a twenty mile radius even if were buried in a steel box underground. The last time I bought such a thing was last fall at an estate sale in Wooster where Orison Marsden’s The Secret of Achievement suddenly began flashing in neon red and nobody but me seemed to notice. Marsden started Success Magazine in 1897 and contributed regularly to Elizabeth Towne's magazine Nautilus – about which I will refrain from excessive gushing, as I think you already can guess I’m crazy about it.

Right now I have in stock a VERY cool course, but the thing is I’ve had it about three years, and haven’t listed it because I can’t find a comparable for it and am not sure what the market will bear. This one is Alois Swaboda’s course in Swabodism which is a blend of mind control and physical culture and is believed to have inspired Houdini. Swaboda signed mine, which includes the six lessons, a seventh called Confidential Instructions for the Application of Organic Stress to the Sexual System (yeah -- how about THAT in 1920’s?), plus How To Change From Worry to Happiness and How To Induce Others to Do For You What You Desire. I’d like to take the whole shebang to the fair, but can’t seem to settle on a fair (ha-ha) price. If any of you know anything about this my ears are wide open.

Admittedly, vintage self-help does sort of beg to be chuckled over, but it’s nonetheless a genuine collecting field even if you give it zero legitimacy. As for me, I am not a famous writer, I would be hard pressed to play even a few notes of Aloha Oe on the Hawaiian guitar, have a terrible memory for some things and a prodigious one for others, can’t divine character by the bumps on anyone’s head, can’t build a radio, can’t wire a lamp, worry incessantly, can’t carry a tune and can’t draw a stick figure. I do, however, have great boxing skills, which is good, since I have to haul sixteen boxes of books to Akron very soon.

The Book Fair Effect

Well, I think Leo the cat has decided he’s moving in. Not only does he hang out in places where you can see him, but he’s eating more (though more is relative) and is even engaging in unbecoming behavior. First I found him sitting on top of he kitchen island and then caught him just as he was about to exercise his claws on the slipcase of a Limited Editions title signed by THORNTON WILDER!! But to balance the scorecard, he has also made us laugh. Catnip to this guy is like a reefer dream in Technicolor. He squirms, he rolls, he flips in circles – can’t get enough of the weed. But the funniest thing is what we’ve taken to calling “wacko-wacko hour.” Around five or six p.m. an astonishing force takes him over. He stands at the corner of a wall and leaps wildly into the air, a mind-blowing three quarters of the way up, then lands back on the ground, only to repeat the performance. Catie says he does this many times in a row, but so far we’ve been treated to just two magnificent jumps and a mad lap around the kitchen before he collapsed in his (my) favorite chair for the rest of the evening.

But this post isn’t about Leo, cute though he is. It’s about another mysterious force known as the Book Fair Effect. I’m sure that somewhere along the line I mentioned that last year, our first to exhibit at the Akron Antiquarian Book Fair, I began to notice a strange phenomenon just as soon as I began to pack. Books that had languished all year long on their shelves suddenly developed an aura that made them irresistible. One by one they departed like jet-setters from the wooden boxes I’d placed them in, headed for parts all over the globe. While I haven’t as yet filled the wooden boxes Eric built for shows, I have been pulling out titles I know I want to take. Apparently that’s enough to fully activate the Book Fair Effect because this morning one antiquarian book and four not- small- enough-to-quality-as-miniature, but still pretty small books of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales were ordered within the same hour. The book is The Soldier's Story of His Captivity at Andersonville, Belle Isle, and Other Rebel Prisons published in 1871 (and later rebound oibviously) which I bought last fall at the fancy estate sale where they not only served food and hot drinks, but provided fires for warmth. It’s a great book and I expected it to disappear fast, but it did not until I decided it should go to the fair. As for the fairy tales, they’ve been hanging around over a year.

I love those little books though and this is the third time I’ve had them, but this particular set is less desirable than the sets I had prior. The first was best – all four books with dustjackets and their golden award winner seals attached to the ends of their red ribbon markers, nestled like babies in their very rare original box. The second time there was no box, but I had the jackets and the seals. This time I just had the books without any additional accoutrements. But STILL, they are very cute and need a home, so I figured off to the fair with them too and if they ddidn’t sell they could take up residence afterward at the antiques mall. Instead they are off to New York tomorrow morning.

If it sounds like I’m complaining, or maybe even gloating, I am -- both things. I love, love, love that the books found homes, but there is a problem here that scares me to death. I have had, as you know and are probably sick to death of hearing about, a year-long acquisition problem. I did just get in a lot of books from the dealer at the show Eric was at in Kalamazoo and from our long-lost picker, but, remember, all those books are about weapons. I am not a gun book specialist and if I was the fair would probably be a bust, so I cannot haul in boxes and boxes of gun books. I will have one box out of sixteen, but that’s it. So, I need the goodies to hang around awhile. Fortunately, a large pile of them has not ever been listed, and will not BE listed, until the fair ends, so that much at least is protected. I could also retrieve some stuff from the antiques mall if needed, but a lot of the good stuff has disappeared from there too. Last week alone I sold a record 19 books in one day, a good half of which were fair material. Of course I loved that too, but nibbling around the edges of my elation was anxiety – LOTS of anxiety which is building as we speak. In fact, last night I dreamed that my teeth fell out. For me this is classic. Push up the anxiety meter high enough and invariably my dreams focus on teeth. Don’t ask why because I don’t know. It just works that way.

Wait a minute – I just realized something! I’m always talking about book magic and how all you have to do is touch a book, think about a book, change something in its description and suddenly it will sell. The Book Fair Effect isn’t a mysterious force at all. Or no more so than plain old book magic is because it IS plain old book magic. By taking them to the fair I focus on these books, I touch them, I pencil in their prices, and I pack them up in boxes. Of COURSE they sell. But here’s the rub – how can I get ready for both the show and Easter unless I start pricing and packing? I could temporarily take my inventory offline of course, but there’s one small problem -- no sales, no money.

So I will keep packing and just try to have a little faith. There’s time – three weeks – and one book sale for sure coming up and maybe a second. Last year I did buy a first edition Twain a week before the sale, so anything is possible. There could also be an estate sale, an auction, a phone call, a – something.

And if not, I can always climb the walls. Seems to ease the tension for Leo.

Living with Leo

Before you jump to the conclusion that this is the successor to the Late Great Mickey, let me clear it up right away. It is NOT. This is Leo (who oddly also answers to the moniker Little Man), a cat of such bountiful hair that he appears three times his actual size. Leo is a Himalayan who nibbles daintily on the contents of tiny cans of cat food the size of silver dollars. My Mickey was a breed unto himself who devoured with gusto everything that wasn’t nailed down. Leo is sweet and laid-back. Mick was a thug known to nip even the hand that fed him. The only thing the two have in common is that they are/were both cats.

Leo’s a loaner cat, here for a few days while our younger daughter and her boyfriend explore housing options near Washington D.C. where they will be moving in June thanks to Joe’s new job. He works here in Ohio for the Department of Agriculture (something to do with grain and ships), but will soon be ensconced right in the heart of the government district. Long time readers may remember last fall when I dogsat Max the boxer. Leo is Max’s adopted brother. The reason I got Leo this time is because they can’t leave him alone since their house is for sale and I’m a cat person and Joe’s father is a dog person. Though Max and I got on famously, I’m still partial to cats, so in that regard the four-legged people got divvied up just right.

Leo arrived late last night, so this morning he was still a little skittish, particularly about the hardwood floor on the steps. He prefers soft carpet so he sort of picks his way up and down. I would be secretly calling him a wimp were it not for the fact that you can’t undermine a cat who instinctively recognizes quality when he sees it. This morning I looked all over for him and finally found him in the guest room lying regally on my divine purple office chair that will soon be in the office( it WILL!). Until it is, however, I'm happy to dub it the temporary designated throne of King Leo I.

Actually, it’s a good thing I have him for company today (though I’ve lost him in the house again), as I was decidedly cranky after leaving at 6:30 in the morning to wait three freaking hours at an estate sale that advertised “lots and lots of great books” and delivered about a hundred lousy books. We were in and out in ten minutes flat and that’s with looking through three stories and a basement. From there we repaired to Panera to drown our sorrows in dark roast coffee and cinnamon crunch bagels. The caffeine and sugar revived us somewhat, at least enough to head over to T.J. Maxx in hopes of replacing the appetizer plates for the Akron Antiqaurian Book Fair basket, one of which I ceremoniously destroyed by dropping it on the brick floor of Eric’s office. I had hoped for the same ones I’d had, but that was asking far too much, so I settled for a black and white set that looks faintly Asian. They’re smaller than the original, but it’s still better to present four smaller ones than a measly two bigger ones when anyone, including those with a recessive shopping gene, knows they come packaged in fours. Even Eric, who has no shopping gene at all, agreed with me on that one.

Anyway, the fact that I can now call the basket a wrap (ha-ha) cheered me up a bit, as did the fact that Leo came out of hiding a few minutes ago and headed for the guest room. I thought I’d snap a picture of him ensconced in the divine purple office chair for this post, but NO -- I CANNOT. He’s defected to the armchair in the corner next to the bed. Maybe he and the Late Great Mickey have something in common after all.

A Tisket, A Tasket, A Disaster With the Basket!

The countdown begins for the Akron Antiquarian Book Fair and I am busily scurrying around trying to get my books (as opposed to my ducks) in a row. Because the fair is always held the Friday and Saturday of Easter and I have the kids – both Moira and her family and Catie and Joe -- coming for Easter dinner the day after the fair closes I have to plan a menu that won’t make me crazy and also get the Easter baskets made for my little boys. Oh, and the eggs too – Easter wouldn’t be Easter without plastic eggs filled with treats scattered around the yard. I already have the gift basket for the drawing at the fair sort of done (more on that in a second), but the next big thing for the fair is selecting books and penciling in prices. The books aren’t too hard to do, but I also plan on bringing ephemera which creates FAR more busy-work. But it’s fun work and I’m jazzed to do it all.

Now then, about this basket which you see in the photo above. Disaster struck last night when I was assembling it for the final time and filling in the spaces with the curly decorative shredded paper. I have no idea how I managed to do this, but I dropped the four appetizer plates on the brick floor of Eric’s office. Oh! The sound! The fury! There are not words.

The good part, the amazing part, is that only one plate actually broke, as they landed face down. But here’s the dilemma. Nancy and I chose them because they match the black and white beaded-handled appetizer knives and I doubt they can be replicated, though I will go back to the store tonight and try. If they don’t have any more and I can’t get some that match the knives I’ll revert to my fall-back plan which is to cut the number of plates down to two, use the backing from the original manufacture’s packaging, and wrap them in cello. Does this make me happy? No! It most emphatically does NOT. In case you haven’t guessed, I am a perfectionistic, neurotic who would make you nuts in five minutes. I’m telling you – that Eric is a saint.

Of course the trick to making this basket was to zero in on stuff that would appeal to the widest audience. So here’s what Nancy and I came up with:

4 (or two) appetizer plates

4 pretty beaded appetizer knives

2 goblets with cloth napkins inside

Basbane’s book about books “Patience and Fortitude”

A bottle of Da Vinci pinot grigio

A box of rosemary crackers

A package of cheese

Garlic stuffed olives

Chocolate

A scented pillar candle

The idea is that you go home, settle in with your new book and have a lovely snack by candlelight. Life is good and you are ever-so-happy that you went to the Akron Antiquarian Book Fair!

Of course before I take the basket to the fair the whole thing has to be wrapped in cellophane with the bow attached at the top, not on the basket handle, and the card I made earlier dangling fetchingly from the bow. But if there’s one thing I know from experience it’s that I couldn’t show you a picture of THAT if I spent the whole day trying. Cellophane creates a glare so blinding it would risk your eyesight.

Anyway, there’s the story of the basket. Mostly I’m happy with it, but I’ll be happier still if Marshall’s department store has four more small white square plates the rims of which are decorated with charming black depictions of New York City cultural destinations. It doesn't seem like too much to ask, but I can't even send up burnt offerings to the book gods.  I have it on good authority that they don't consider plates and baskets their department.

P.S. Yes, I already filled in the few spots I missed with the curly stuff.

Picking Up A Couple More ...

Could it be that when it rains books it pours? I don’t know, but after just getting all those gun books last weekend I was stunned almost to speechlessness (and I am rarely lacking for words) by what happened Saturday. As I mentioned some time ago, we lost our picker last year because he decided to quit the book scouting game in favor of agriculture. I don’t think he’s changed his mind, so the sight of him bearing eight banker’s boxes filled with books was akin to Scrooge being jolted by the vision of Marley. But stunning as this surprise appearance was, the whole thing only gets even more astounding. We took the lids off the boxes to reveal – ta-da! --GUN BOOKS! Lots and lots of gun books – in fact, so many gun books that they account for three-quarters of the lot. And get this – the rest of the books are about swords. It would appear that at this moment weapons R me.

You know I love gun books, but really, this is too crazy a coincidence. He’s brought gun books before from time to time, but never in such great quantity. His bailiwick has always been Civil War history, art, unusual cookbooks, and theater which is why I’m so fixated on this. In the good old days he came only once a year, but when he did the air swelled with the sound of carols – “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas ….”

Not only were the books GREAT, but there were at least three times as many as he brought this time. We always referred to them as “the 28 boxes” though the figure varied a few boxes either way every year. Sometimes he would even show up a second time in the same year, but you could always count on him in the fall like apples, pumpkins and trick or treat. As much as I would like to think he’s back I doubt very much that he really is. He hadn’t even  been scouting for these – he’d just chanced on them and decided to give it a go for old time’s sake. The best I can hope for is that he’ll chance on some more somewhere down the line. I know he knows how much we appreciate him, so that alone might spur him on during the off-season in agriculture.

Anyway, I spent Saturday evening sorting through the offerings and spotted many titles I’d had in the past and could easily reactivate. The difference between this bunch of gun books and those from last week is that these are much newer. Last week’s were the golden oldies – these are as slick and shiny as an oil spill which means they must either be sold in the store or online. To my amazement, the prices had not only held on most, but in a few cases had even escalated, so it looks like most of them will go online. Though it’s all good, I find myself wishing again for a seasoned picker. Someone else tried to do it for us awhile back, but didn’t have the knack no matter how many times I explained it all. Yes, I could have gotten him a scanner, but I am not going to surreptitiously do the very thing I rail about even if I’m not the one wielding it. What I want is a seasoned scout like the newly minted farmer. He takes one look at a book, sizes it up, and there are very few duds. In fact, he even segregates what he considers acceptable, but not faint worthy, in a separate box and charges less for those.

The sad fact is the seasoned picker may well be a thing of the past, an iconic image of bookselling in the Golden Age. At this juncture I’m grateful to have even known the joy of having had a picker -- which of course doesn't mean I've given up on revitalizing him!

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.