Being Comfortable With Old Books

BEING COMFORTABLE WITH OLD BOOKS - RETURNING TO MY COLLECTING ROOTS - MY HAUNTED BOOKSHOP

THERE'S SO MUCH WE DON'T KNOW....IN THOSE LONG RETIRED BOOKS; BUT WHO CARES TO LOOK

     I remember one day, after school, my chum Ross Smith, a talented landscape artist today, strong-armed me into the Bracebridge Public Library. Our family had only just arrived in Muskoka a year earlier, from Burlington, Ontario, and I was still inching my way around our new hometown. I was probably in grade six by this point, and I had begun writing short war stories, based on comic books, for the english component of class time, at Bracebridge Public School. But I wasn't all that interested in reading books. My reading skills were pretty good but for some reason, I couldn't commit myself to read fiction. I would have read sports related stories, especially on the backs of the hockey cards, I had scrunched up in my pocket. As far as proficiency goes, I could consume every word off a cereal box, probably three times, before I had finished half my bowl of cereal. Even the fine print, disclaimers, prize information, and list of ingredients, made semi-entertaining consumption. I had to have that box in front of me every morning, because I found staring at the kitchen wall a tad boring.

     I had an early objection, in my young life, to reading fiction, and whenever we went to the school library, I would inevitably arrive back to class with biographies of sports heroes. Unless I was forced to read a work of fiction, I would never pick one up voluntarily. Well, this interest has lasted a lifetime, except the part about reading sports related biographies. I got tired of sports generally about ten years ago. I have some select fiction in our small book component at home, and in the antique shop; it is largely a non-fiction collection. I make no apology. I hate the thought a tree had to be cut down for a work of fiction. I hate myself a little bit for saying this, because it also contradicts my love for the works of Washington Irving and Charles Dickens. So I do bend a little for the legends of literature out of respect. I do also collect signed and inscribed novels, if it is a known author. It's too late in life to change my ways, said Scrooge to the first of his three visiting spirits. I've given up on such redemption. Non fiction is what I have always invested in, and profited from, and I'm not about to change direction as an elder bookman.

     On the day Ross led me into the downstairs of the Public Library, in the old Carnegie building, situated like a crown, on the top of the Queen's Hill, on Manitoba Street, a lot of things changed for me from that book-laden moment. The children's section was being renovated, and I knew one of the men working on the restoration. Dalt Moon was a neighbor of ours, from up on Alice Street, and I think on this day, he had been employed to finish-up some interior painting. For whatever reason, the workmen allowed Ross and I to look around the new room, and before we left, we were each handed a free book, from a pile set aside for disposal. Mine was on the Arctic, but I don't know what book Ross was given. Maybe an art book, because most people knew how talented he was with his sketches. His father Ted, owned the ESSO gas station beside, and Ross would tend the gas pumps on Saturdays. He'd sketch or paint between customers. He'd often just give you a sketch if you said you admired it. He did a nice piece for me, in our final years of university together, from a wish I had, to one day own a small fishing cabin on a small lake in the northland. I still have that painting in my office, and it gives me as much pleasure today, as it did in the late 1970's, when I proudly hung it in my first apartment. I was just talking to him the other day, and he figured I would have sold it, in the shop, long before now. "You haven't got that cabin yet, do you," he said. "No Ross, but as long as I've got this painting, I've got the same great feeling, a nice view of it in perspective, the sensation of owning it, having very low taxes and no maintenance costs." I've still got the book Dalt Moon gave me back then as well. Art and books. Other than women, my two great weaknesses.

     I read and re-read that book on the arctic, and I suppose it was the spark of a bibliophile life, I lived ever since. While I was kept in check for a lot of years, because my family didn't have a lot of money to spend on new books, I did become a card carrying library member, shortly after I got the book from the kindly Mr. Moon. I loved the smell of old books, and for whatever reason, from the moment I walked into the building, I felt scholarly, even when I had little idea what that meant. I felt the same when I would wander into the library at York University, and start drooling out of the corner of my mouth. So many wonderful books! At the Bracebridge Library, I'd pick a non-fiction title, and saddle up to some of my chums, sitting at the huge library tables in the upstairs part, of the Carnegie building. I'd check out the art books, and pause for a tad, to casually check out the nudes, until that is, one of my female classmates would sit beside me....and ask what I was looking at.....so I'd quickly flip over to a landscape painting. Hey, a lot of my male chums were doing the same thing, sitting across from me, but they'd get caught. I had nimble fingers. I would have been swallowed by embarrassment if I'd been caught, and I know the stories would have been re-told in the classroom the next day, by the girl(s) who made the startling observation. I always had pity for those who did get caught, but you'd never have known it, by the way I added to the chiding, giving the appearance and opinion that I would never gaze upon such things; even if afforded the opportunity. The word hypocrite does come to mind, but as I did then, I dispatch it from my otherwise clear conscience.      The only time I ever got caught sneaking a peak, was when I was trying to pick up books I had dropped on the floor, (possibly on purpose) and while I was trying to scoop them up, a girl at the locker next to me, put her foot on one of them. When I tried to pull it out, while looking up to get her attention, oops, she was wearing a skirt. Well sir, truth be known, I didn't even get a chance to see the hem, on the inside of her skirt, before she had stepped off the book, onto my outstretched fingers, and was yelling at me in a crowded hall, to "stop looking up my dress." Once again, I was influenced by the books I was trying to protect, and in the process, I was branded the school pervert. Funny thing that, because ninety-eight percent of the wee lads in my grade, did the very same thing, at every occasion afforded them. So there were a lot of things hitting the floor in those years, because there was quite a thrill picking it all up. I'd never have been so shallow as to have dropped a pencil or eraser. It was always a book. Maybe two. Books have been both a "curse and a blessing," over my lifetime thus far. At times, I've darted into bibliomania, and become a hoarder, until Suzanne has offered yet another warning, of a pending divorce, and I straighten up for a few years. I've probably been this excessive three times in the past thirty years. I like to think I'm a recovering bibliomaniac, because I've actually been selling five times more books from our shop, than I've been buying recently. I have thousands of books to go through yet, before I'll feel seriously depleted as a book collector / dealer.

     My turning point, other than finding Suzanne's bags packed (because I couldn't possibly move out myself with all these books), was writing the biography of my collecting mate, Dave Brown of Hamilton, who had 100,000 books at the time of his death. Dave and I had a lot in common, and when he arrived to stay the weekend, here at Birch Hollow, it was all Suzanne could do, to stomach the latest stories of major acquisitions. "Dave's a bad influence on you," she'd say, while looking over the boxes of books, he'd just brought our boys, from a recent auction he had attended. Dave never showed up to our house, without paying for his visit with boxes of books he didn't want....and neither did Suzanne. Writing the book brought me face to face with the demon bibliomania. It clearly showed me the down side of loving books too much. Dave was a great guy and a superb mentor, but he had an obsessive side, that commanded him to hustle more and more of what he felt were "good books." And yes, always non-fiction. Of his 100,000 books, at the end of his life, only five percent, if that, were works of fiction. Some of these, were left over from his youth, like the Thornton Burgess animal stories, of which he had the complete set.

     Often times, as biblomaniacs frequently do, he would buy fifty or so boxes of books from auctions, and get stuck with some old fiction and sports histories, which he would eventually give to me for our Bracebridge shop. He even got stuck with boxes of pornography, which he didn't know about when he purchased a huge job-lot of boxes, at a Hamilton area auction. He told me about his unexpected and unwelcome find, and was fearful of how to dispose of them without getting caught doing so. Guess what? He did get caught, but by one of his friends, Hugh MacMillan, who included this in his own biography; because he was on-site during portions of the estate clean-out and sale. When Hugh was finishing up his book, "The Adventures of a Paper Sleuth," he told me he was going to reference the pornography, in a section he was including about the eccentricities of collectors he had known.

     I tried for an hour, on the phone, to explain to Hugh that Dave had purchased them inadvertently at a sale, versus having purchased the material magazine by magazine. I thought I'd quelled the issue, until that is, I was reviewing his book for a column I was writing for The Wayback Times, and discovered the several paragraphs, that most certainly would have caused Dave Brown to spin a while in his grave. I was stunned by it, because I knew Hugh hadn't really listened to what I had told him previously. I couldn't do much to help Dave in retrospect, because my book on him, had been released in 2000, and I wasn't planning a reprint edition. What made this so unfortunate, is that Dave was a highly respected Outdoor Education teacher, well known in Hamilton, and at summer camps in Ontario, and had never once had an issue of misconduct over a long and storied career; not a thing that would suggest he had a need for pornography....or would have, in any way, acted unprofessionally toward his students. When you read that a former teacher, was found to possess boxes of pornography, you just expect the door to be wedged open that way, for the rest of time. I know Dave would have been destroyed to have this known, because he tried so hard to cover it up, while it was in his possession. He had even asked my opinion about what to do with the material, and it may have been my suggestion, that he just keep it under wraps for the time being; or at least until he could figure out how to recycle it all; possibly dispose of it at a landfill site. Then he got sick, and there were more important things to think about. His decline from leukemia was so fast, and severe, that there was no way to resolve the matter of this pornographic collection before he was hospitalized for the last weeks of his life. I forgot about it, until Hugh brought it up prior to publishing his book. I had no idea anyone handling the sell-off of the estate, would have revealed that Dave had these books in his house. They could have disposed of them, and blocked prying eyes. Whatever happened, it wound up in print, with an international circulation, and my only hope, is that my earlier book, would have highlighted his more important accomplishments in life and work.....of which there were hundreds of examples.

     I would find myself very unhappy, without the company of books at home and in the shop. Suzanne, in a huff, will remind me of my past excesses, whenever I arrive home with a few boxes of old books these days. It's okay if they're for the shop. Just not for the house. "Sometimes I think you like your books more than me," she comments, when I've completely blocked my view of her, in the seat beside, because of the pile of books I've just been looking through, on a research jag. "Don't worry dear, I know you're there, and I'm glad of it....but work is work." She knits, I read, the cats jump from one lap to the other, and the television is on with no one watching. Gosh, are we dull people or what? In our dullness, and predictability, we are perpetually calm about our tasks; and if this is really work, well, then we will never have to worry about being stressed as a result of working too much. "We're still together after all these years," I bark back. "Admit it, you find bibliophiles sexy beasts!" She has no response, unless you count the cadence of the knitting needles colliding, as morse code, for "Yea right!"

     I wrote a warm-up column back in November or early December, about heading back, once again, into the insane world of books, of which I was once so heavily involved. You see, for someone as obsessive as me, there is a precariously thin dividing line, between being a buyer and seller of books, a collector, a bibliophile and the slide back into bibliomania. As an example, I have now stashed away about fifteen books, yanked off the shelves of the book shop, for reference purposes. The books I've been using over the past few months, as reference, are now cluttering Robert's sound studio, and boy the looks I get are so reminiscent of the one his mother used to give me, when she'd find my latest stash of new "old" books, I'd snuck into Birch Hollow. It became my drug of choice, to have more books, and I started behaving like any drug addict, when it came to sneaking around, and to some degree, misrepresenting the truth to meet my objectives; and pacify my partner. The boys would rat-me-out constantly, because the room that was getting most of the overflow of books, was the family room in which they were playing. Gradually they lost their play space to my excesses. The "out" for me, was that I was also selling a lot of books at the same time, but we didn't have a storefront. So we sold our books at special public sales, and online, but I was acquiring way more than I was selling. And because I could prove to Suzanne that I required many of these books for my historical research, and column writing for the local press, she couldn't argue they weren't being used. Just not enough to justify the volume fanning out of my downstairs archives. It wasn't just the books either. I was a hoarder of old documents and paper, so that a third of my space occupation, was devoted to the storage of ephemera. Not a pretty picture.

     I was the same with booze as with books. I stopped drinking the day a friend of mine suggested in jest, that I was an alcoholic. I took it seriously, and quit for years, which by the way, saved my life and my marriage. My excesses in book buying and collecting was nearly as bad, so I quit and reduced my inventory. But like having a social drink, which I can now enjoy without excess, I have also been working my way slowly back with old books, checking myself weekly, as to whether I have acquired them for all the right reasons; and now, that is ninety-five percent for the benefit of our customers. I do confess to keeping a few Muskoka books for myself, because, as you know, I do use them frequently to support this blog. Like drinking too much, buying too many books brings on the need for justification, and I was really good at convincing people I knew my limits. The morning after a heavy night of drinking, and having just been told I ate the bride's bouquet at the wedding, I would spend the next two weeks of sobriety, making amends to everyone who attended. Suzanne watches me carefully around booze, and even more closely, at auctions and markets, just in case I start losing my footing on the slippery slope of excesses.

     I have been an old book buyer and seller for a long time now, and I've apprenticed with some real interesting characters in the field. Brilliant folks, who were all part time archivists, and part time historians, who could sniff out a five hundred dollar book five minutes inside a flea market. When it came to hunting these books, they went from the nicest chaps, to sharks, within a matter of seconds; and at this point, all the apprentice could do, was get out of the way. I've seen this intensity up close, and when the hunt is on, you have to respect the will of the bibliophile, to follow his or her instinct. I've watched Dave Brown load up his arms with twenty "money" books, before I could notch my second. "Money" books aren't just valuable ones on the open market, but books most sought after for assorted reasons, that will aid an ongoing project, fill a void in the collection, or be used as trade bait for another collector. Suzanne and I both apprenticed with Dave Brown, and a few others close to our family, so over the years, we've become hard core players in book acquisition; and secretive about what we are looking for, and how much we would be willing to pay for it, when found. It's why we often throw dealers off our scent, by buying items other than books from their shops; because if they knew full well what we know about them, we'd have contaminated any possibility of buying them there in the future as well. We are also guarded about offering advice or evaluations because, in our experience, it is used against us; friends in the profession becoming our main competitors at sales around the region. It takes a lifetime of experience to get good at buying and selling old and rare books, and although I've exposed myself, so to speak, in this blog.....following us on our book hunt, is risky business. I've known quite a few dealers who thought they could learn by association, only to find out we aren't all that easy to copy or predict. So it means that someone trying to copy us, could wind up spending a lot of money on something that is worth ninety-nine percent less than they paid. Mr. Brown taught us this very early-on in our apprenticeship. When it got to the point that Suzanne and I started to pull away, and make more finds that he was securing, he'd turn on us like a rabid wolf. Until that is, we learned that it wasn't wise at all, to pee on the leg of our mentor. So we withdrew to our own little world, and that's the way it has been ever since. I might write about it, and even expose a few tricks of the trade, but believe me, I will never offer it all.....just in case, you and I are both at the same estate book sale, and you can beat me to the best books of the lot. It doesn't mean you won't pick this up somewhere else, and still become a highly skilled competitor. It's why we never stop upgrading ourselves. Suzanne's hanging onto me pretty tightly these days, so I don't fall back into my bibliomania days, when I might have gone as far as biting my competitor, to get to the prize on the shelf and arm's length ahead. I've heard first person accounts of old book buyers, carrying side-arms, at estate sales, (in the United States), to safeguard their finds. Keep in mind, those finds could represent many thousands of dollars.