The Story of Book Seller Dora Hood of Toronto

"THE SIDE DOOR" ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS IN MY COLLECTION

EVERY ANTIQUE DEALER HAS A FAVORITE BOOK THEY HAVE FOUND INSPIRATIONAL

     IT IS A BOOK I CONSULT REGULARLY. IT SHOWS THE INTENSITY OF MY STUDIES. RIPPED DUSTJACKET, AND THUMBPRINTS ON SOME OF THE PAGE-TOPS. I AM A READER WHO EATS WHILE ENJOYING A BOOK. BIG PROBLEM. IT'S A CANADIAN BOOK COLLECTING BIBLE. THERE HAVE BEEN A FEW TIMES WHEN I'VE BEEN TEMPTED TO SELL IT, BUT ONLY BECAUSE THE PRICE HAS BEEN RATHER SUBSTANTIAL. I HAVE RESISTED FOR QUITE SOME TIME NOW, AND BECAUSE IT'S IN SHORT SUPPLY, AND A GREAT STORY FOR THE BOOKSELLER-ME, I WANTED TO SHARE A CHAPTER OR TWO WITH YOU. IN MY PREVIOUS BLOG, I MENTIONED THE COMPROMISES OUR FAMILY HAS MADE SINCE THE MID 1980'S, WITH THE RE-DESIGNATION OF LIVING SPACE, IN THE THREE HOUSES WHERE WE'VE RESIDED. I SUGGESTED THAT THIS WAS A COMMON OCCURRENCE AMONGST ANTIQUE TYPES, AND I OFFERED TO HIGHLIGHT ANOTHER DEALER WHO HAD MADE SIMILAR COMPROMISES OF HER ABODE, TO ACCOMMODATE A NEW BUSINESS SHE HAD ACQUIRED. IT'S AN AMAZING STORY OF RESTRUCTURING AND SUPPORTING FAMILY, AFTER THE LOSS OF HER HUSBAND; AND DEMONSTRATION OF WHAT A STALWART WORK ETHIC CAN DO, EVEN UNDER THE MOST ADVERSE CONDITIONS. HAVING TO SURVIVE THE ECONOMIC CHAGRIN OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION. AND TAKING OVER A BUSINESS SHE HAD ONLY A CURSORY KNOWLEDGE, IN ONE OF THE MOST RUTHLESSLY COMPETITIVE PROFESSIONS ON EARTH…….TUCKED TIGHTLY IN THE DOMAIN OF RARE AND OUT OF PRINT BOOKS.

     "THE SIDE DOOR - TWENTY-SIX YEARS IN MY BOOK ROOM," BY DORA HOOD, WAS FIRST PUBLISHED, IN HARDCOVER, BY THE RYERSON PRESS, TORONTO, IN 1958. QUITE A FEW YEARS AGO, I WAS ABLE TO PURCHASE AN INSCRIBED AND AUTOGRAPHED COPY, DATED SEPTEMBER 1970. PRESUMABLY SHE HAD SOME BOOKS LEFT OVER FROM THE 1958 PRINTING, AND GAVE THIS PERSONAL COPY TO A FRIEND. IT IS INSCRIBED, 'TO MY FRIEND FLORENCE BOYT WITH AFFECTIONATE REMEMBRANCE……DORA HOOD." DORA HOOD OPENED ONE OF THE MOST RESPECTED OLD BOOKS SHOPS IN TORONTO, AND WAS KNOWN TO BOOK COLLECTORS AROUND THE WORLD. THAT'S RIGHT, AND SHE WORKED OUT OF HER MODEST HOME, IN A TIGHTLY KNIT, BUT QUICKLY DIVERSIFYING NEIGHBORHOOD. THIS PROVED TO HER GENERAL ADVANTAGE, AS A BOOK SELLER.

     "IT WAS BY CHANCE RATHER THAN BY DESIGN THAT I BECAME A BOOKSELLER," WRITES DORA HOOD, TO OPEN HER BIOGRAPHY. "IT CAME ABOUT IN THIS WAY. I DINED ONE EVENING WITH MY FRIEND, JEANETTE RATHBUN, AND THE CONVERSATION TURNED TO THE CONGENIAL SUBJECT OF BOOKS. I WAS SURPRISED TO HEAR HER SAY RATHER WEARILY, THAT SHE WAS TIRED OF BOOKS. SHE THEN CONFESSED THAT FOR MORE THAN TWO YEARS SHE HAD BEEN ATTEMPTING TO CARRY ON A MAIL-ORDER BOOK BUSINESS IN HER SPARE TIME, WHICH MEANT THE EVENINGS, FOR SHE HAD A FULL DAYTIME OCCUPATION. SHE HAD AT ONE TIME HOPED SHE MIGHT MAKE THE BOOKS HER BUSINESS, BUT NOW SHE KNEW SHE COULD NOT DROP HER SALARIED WORK IN FAVOR OF THE UNCERTAINTY OF SELLING BOOKS.

     "AFTER DINNER I ASKED TO SEE THE BOOKS AND FOUND THAT THEY WERE ALL OUT OF PRINT BOOKS ON CANADA. I THINK THIS WAS THE FIRST TIME I HAD ENCOUNTERED THE EUPHONIOUS WORD 'CANADIANA' AS APPLIED TO BOOKS, AND IT WAS MOST EMPHATICALLY THE FIRST TIME I HAD SEEN SUCH A MINUTE AND TIDY SECOND-HAND BOOKSHOP; FOR SUCH IT WAS. SHE HAD ISSUED A FEW CATALOGUES AND HAD COMPILED A SMALL MAILING LIST, AND HER FILES AND ACCOUNT BOOKS WERE MODELS OF NEATNESS. I BEGAN TO ASK QUESTIONS. WHERE DID SHE GET HER STOCK OF BOOKS? THAT WAS THE DIFFICULT, SHE CONFESSED. IN HER LIMITED TIME SHE COULD NOT LOOK FOR THEM AND KEEPING STRICTLY TO MAIL-ORDER IT WAS DIFFICULT TO EXPAND. IT HAD ALMOST CEASED TO BE A PAYING ENTERPRISE. I STAYED LATE BUT FINALLY TORE MYSELF AWAY AND STEPPED OUT INTO THE WINDY MARCH NIGHT. I LIKED WHAT I HAD SEEN OF THAT SMALL BOOK BUSINESS. IT HAD A POWERFUL APPEAL TO ME AND I THOUGHT OF NOTHING ELSE ALL THE WAY HOME. SUDDENLY, AS I NEARED MY HOUSE, I FOUND MYSELF SAYING OUT LOUD TO THE SWAYING ELM TREES, 'THAT IS WHAT I WANT TO DO! I'LL MAKE HER AN OFFER.' BY THE TIME I HAD TURNED THE KEY IN MY DOOR, I HAD TAKEN THE FIRST STEPS ON A JOURNEY WHICH WAS NOT TO END FOR TWENTY-SIX YEARS."

THE MAKING OF A BOOK SELLER - AND A CANADIAN LEGEND

     Now comes the compromises to family and home, in order to run an efficient, affordable business, to help raise her two children. Dora Hood writes in her biography, "In a short time satisfactory arrangements had been completed and I was in possession of a business about which I knew nothing. Looking back over this period, I do not remember having had the slightest misgivings about my ability to become a bookseller, although up to this time no experience in my life had included money making. But things were different now. I had six months before, become a widow and I knew I must add to my small income in order to keep myself and my two small children. If all went well, this was the answer. I had two assets. On the intangible side, I knew I had a certain awareness of books. On the tangible, a house that would lend itself to such an enterprise. It had four good sized rooms, one behind the other, on the ground floor, and it was on a street which was fast turning from a residential to a business one. I felt it might be possible, with the help of a housekeeper, to bring up my family, and at the same time conduct a business. I think on the whole, I found the latter job the less difficult. I remember vividly the first few weeks of my business career. Nothing could have been more unbusinesslike. I pushed the furniture to the back of my long old fashioned drawing room, and moved in a large utilitarian steel bookcase, a typewriter, and a massive steel letter file; and then the books arrived. As I unpacked them and spread them out on the Persian rug, I thought I had never seen a more uninteresting collection in my life. But I was wrong and, as time went on, I learned not to judge books by their outward appearance. This was the nucleus around which was to gather and disperse, as the years passed, and many thousands of Canadian books and pamphlets.

     She writes, "I had no intention of keeping my trade to mail order only and hopefully expected a steady stream of customers once it became known that such a shop existed. Little did I know that collectors of Canadiana were few and widely scattererd across our great country, and that most men's thoughts were otherwise engaged in 1928 - that year of wild speculation and easy money. Nevertheless, a few letters began to arrive via the old address, and it was necessary to decide on a distinctive name. As books are a commodity of individual taste, I reasoned that perhaps buyers would like to know that they were dealing with a person rather than a company, and since men use their own names in business, why should I not use mine? The prefix "Mrs." sounded old-fashioned, even Victorian, so I decided to leave it out and as, in its present form, the business could hardly be called a shop, it became and remained Dora Hood's Book Room. I do not think any other name was considered. The public, uncertain as to how to address such an establishment, in general, solved the problem by the usual 'Dear Sir.' But curiosity got the better of some of them. A customer in Quebec begged to be forgiven, but he felt he must know whether the lady he was addressing was a Mrs. or a Miss. Later we became great friends but I failed to find out whether I would have been more acceptable as a single woman. Was I handicapped by being a woman proprietor of a second-hand bookshop? I do not think this occurred to me in the busy early years of my enterprise. But later, when I was well established, I knew I had to prove myself in a field where men almost exclusively had held sway."

     As for how it affected her young family, she writes, "The Book Room was a new experience in the lives of my two children, aged seven and ten. It needed a rapid change in my behavior sometimes, to turn from three ingratiating bookseller to the stern parent when occasion arose. Once I arrived in the office to find my seven year old daughter already there and in the act of displaying an illustrated book to an amused customer, with the remark, 'Now here is a very nice book!' Fifteen years later, she became my chief cataloguer and we worked together until the time of her marriage. It was a family occasion for us to sit around the dining room table, and to roll and tie up the catalogues ready for posting, until increasing homework put an end to my children's part in it. It was six months before that I realized I had a full-time occupation on my hands. Gradually my hours at work lengthened, and often I worked far into the night, when the house was quiet, with my cat for company curled up on one of the wire baskets on my desk."

     In a relatively short period of time, as a bookseller, Dora Hood was prospering enough, that she needed more books. More books meant the requirement of much additional storage space. "The time came more quickly than I had anticipated when more space was essential in the Book Room. The family retreated to a smaller room and the erstwhile drawing-room became wholly an office. More bookcases were fitted in, the fireplace was taken away, and the table on which we wrapped our parcels was moved to the hall. Still the room could hardly be called businesslike. There remained chintz curtains, the Chippendale bookcase and the Persian rug. I had qualms about the wear on the latter, until assured by a rug man who cleaned it, that that kind of rug was intended for use in mosques and would wear a hundred years." She notes, "By 1938, in spite of the Depression, the Book Room had developed growing pains. The room and hall that seemed so spacious at first, had grown uncomfortably crowded and each new purchase added to our problems. My children, too, were demanding more space for themselves and their friends, as they grew into adolescence. There were still two large rooms on the ground floor, an old-fashioned ample kitchen, and next to it an unnecessarily large dining-room. I decided on drastic measures to deal with a desperate need. i would make these two back rooms into offices and leave the front two for our living quarters with amidships, so to speak, a small modern kitchen. My architect, the late Hebert Horner, proved a man of deep understanding. He said it could be done by the simple means of taking down one wall here and putting another up there, by turning a window into a door, and thereby giving my customers direct access to the books. This returned the front door to exclusive use by the family and avoided inevitable collisions with important clients.

     "But it wasn't quite as simple as that. To alter a house and still live in it, to say nothing of conducting a business at the same time, proved too much for me. I stood for it for a few weeks, then covering up the books as best I could, I fled to Muskoka and tried not to think of what was happening at home. When I returned, despite dust and general confusion, I knew I had made the right decision. It only remained to move the bookcases and then the books into the rear offices, no small task. The bookcases fitted into the new wall space as though they had been measured for it, which they were not. I had merely trusted to luck and the results were better than I deserved. All hands were needed to transfer the books. Dust flew, chaos reigned, books mysteriously lost turned up and in the midst of it all, the household cat was vainly looking for her favorite wire basket. With the posting of the 'Book Room' sign on the side door, a new era had begun."

      "Part of the charm of keeping a second-hand book shop, I soon learned, is the uncertainty of where your next supply of books is coming from. I do not remember having worried about this, even in the early days of my venture. Very few weeks passed when no books were offered to me. To be sure, they were not always the ones I most needed, but that too added to the spice of life. It was comparatively simple to buy a dozen books, but quite another proposition to be offered a large library, when one was as inexperienced as I was. I was fortunate, I know now, in being offered good libraries for at that time I had few competitors who were willing to put their capital into books."

     There isn't a rare or out of print book dealer in the world, who wouldn't be fascinated by the biography of Canadian book legend Dora Hood. Her life story gets much more interesting, as we continue to look at her accomplishments, and her ability to uncover great collections of rare Canadiana, was nothing shy of monumental. Her customers included Stephen Leacock, Sir Frederick Banting, and author Blodwen Davies, well known for her biography of Canadian artist, Tom Thomson. She was as much a Canadian historian as a book seller, and I'd like to share a few more passages, from her book, documenting how she went about this hunt and gather, which benefitted not only private collections, but museum, art gallery, and university archives throughout North America and Australia, India, and Germany. She was an intrepid archivist even though she didn't have the credentials to do so, and she could have easily taught Canadian history, because it is known, she read much of what she collected and then offered for sale. The story of Dora Hood and her famous Book Room, is obscure today, and hard to find, but its relevance, to everyone who either runs, or is considering opening a book shop, or for that matter antique shop, is beyond parallel as far as I'm concerned. Her dynamic as a buyer was well known and revered by her colleagues; her capability to navigate the intense competition, to secure the best collections, made her not only a female role model in the profession, but left many of her male competitors in disbelief, as she always seemed several steps ahead of them. She had amazing contacts within the book community. She was trusted and her clients could have easily added chapters of commendation to the small biography she penned so modestly at the end of her career.

     As for the compromises of home and family. I've done the same to my family and they'll never let me forget it! Fortunately for our old bungalow here at Birch Hollow, we have emptied the collection into a safer and more secure town business site, and oh the joy of stretching out, without knocking over a spinning wheel, and a hundred books that we piled beside. Yup, and that would have been the result of a short arm stretch, or slight kick of the foot, right or left. "We used to have antique trails, and cross roads, in our living room," adds Suzanne, who has been reading some of today's blog over my shoulder. I will share some more intimate Birch Hollow "clutter" stories later, when she's not lurking behind me, here in my "private" office. And I will reveal some more collecting stories, as told by Dora Hood.

     It's been nice to have you drop by for a visit. Hope all is well with you. Looks like we're getting some rainy days coming up this week. Hope we are going to have snow left for the upcoming Gravenhurst Winter Carnival in late February. Suzanne has been making Skokie Winter Carnival scarves, toques and crocheted hats for sale in the shop, and there are bags and bags of orange and green wool all over the place. And then there's the ticky-tacky sound of knitting needle heads colliding, for hours on end. It's why I hide out in here, away from the din of creation. See you again soon.