Canadian Book Seller, Dora Hood Part 3

THE PROVENANCE OF FOUND BOOKS AND DOCUMENTS - THAT MAKE THE HUNT WORTHWHILE

DORA HOOD WAS A MASTER OF DISCOVERY IN THE FIELD OF CANADIANA

     I HAVE JUST THIS MOMENT, ARRIVED AT MY HUMBLE STATION, MY OFFICE OVERLOOKING THE BOG, HERE AT BIRCH HOLLOW, HAVING SHOVELED THE LANE AND THE TOPS OF OUR TWO OUT-BUILDINGS, WEIGHT DOWN HEAVILY WITH WET SNOW. WITH RAINFALL PREDICTED FOR LATER IN THE DAY, I WAS WORRIED THEY MIGHT COLLAPSE UNDER THE ADDED STRESS. DESPITE THE FACT I DETEST SNOW REMOVAL, AS EITHER WORK OR WINTER RECREATION, THERE WAS NO DENYING THAT THE SCENE IN WHICH I WAS IMMERSED THIS MORNING, WAS ABOUT AS PICTURESQUE AS A ROBERT FROST POEM, IS MINDFUL, OF NATURE'S PRECIOUS ENCHANTMENTS. I SPENT LONGER OUT THERE THAN USUAL, BECAUSE I KEPT PAUSING AT MY LABORS TO LOOK OUT OVER THE FOREST AND LOWLAND ACROSS THE ROAD, WATCHING TWO DEER MOVING FROM EAST TO WEST ON THE FAR RIDGE. WE MOVED TO THIS NEIGHBORHOOD, IN 1989, BECAUSE OF THIS SMALL ACREAGE OF HINTERLAND, STILL THRIVING AMIDST THE URBAN COMMUNITY THAT SURROUNDS IT. I CAN'T REALLY DESCRIBE HOW PLEASANT AND BRIGHT IT IS HERE NOW, WORKING AT THIS OLD KEYBOARD, IN THE NATURAL LIGHT OF A WINTER MORNING……THE MELT WATER OF SNOW ON MY COLLAR GIVING ME A LITTLE SHIVER FROM TIME TO TIME.

     SURROUNDING ME NOW, OUTSIDE OF THIS MAGNIFICENT VIEW, ARE MY PRIVATE COLLECTION OF REFERENCE BOOKS. EVEN AS A KID, I LOVED ANY OPPORTUNITY TO GO TO A PUBLIC LIBRARY, AND DRINK IN THE CULTURE AND HISTORY OF THE PLACE. EVEN BEFORE I KNEW WHAT HISTORY REPRESENTED, OTHER THAN THINGS THAT HAPPENED "YESTERDAY AND THE DAY BEFORE," I KNEW THESE PLACES, SO FRIENDLY TO BOOKS, WERE PORTALS TO OTHER TIMES AND DISTANT LANDS; ADVENTURES AND INTRIGUE. WHAT WAS PRINTED IN THESE NEATLY POSITIONED BOOKS, IN ROWS, ONE ABOVE THE OTHER, CARRIED THE KIND OF INFORMATION THAT COULD LIBERATE THE CHILD FROM THE DAY TO DAY DRUDGERY OF SCHOOL. I FEEL EXACTLY THE SAME TODAY, AND WITHIN MINUTES, I CAN TAKE A HIATUS FROM WRITING, AND PICK UP A BOOK, AND COMPANION WITH AN AUTHOR WHO WILL TAKE ME GENTLY BUT ENTHUSIASTICALLY, TO A HUDSON BAY POST IN THE EARLY 1800'S; AND ALLOW ME TO DINE, THOUGHTFULLY, WITH THE COMPANY FACTOR, IN THE DINING HALL, ON A MEAL OF MOOSE, BEAR OR DEER. OR I MIGHT PREFER TO TRAVEL ABOARD A STEAMSHIP ACROSS THE ATLANTIC IN THE 1870'S, IN THE COMPANY OF MUSKOKA ARTIST ADA FLORENCE KINTON, ON THE WAY TO HUNTSVILLE, FROM LONDON, ENGLAND. I WOULD NOT SURVIVE LONG AS A WRITER IF I DIDN'T HAVE THESE BOOKS WITHIN AN ARM'S REACH. THEY ARE MY COMFORT ZONE. IT WAS THE SAME FOR DORA HOOD, A TORONTO BOOKSELLER, WHO BECAME A LEGEND IN THE CONSERVATION OF CANADIANA…….RESCUING THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS OF IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS AND BOOKS, CRITICAL TO THE STUDY AND APPRECIATION OF CANADIAN HISTORY.

     WHEN DORA STARTED OUT AS A BOOKSELLER, IT WAS BY HAPPENSTANCE. A FRIEND OF HERS, PRIOR TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION, HAD DECIDED TO GIVE UP HER SMALL ANTIQUARIAN BOOK BUSINESS. AFTER THE RECENT DEATH OF HER DOCTOR HUSBAND, WITH TWO YOUNGSTERS TO SUPPORT, SHE DECIDED THAT A LOVE FOR BOOKS ALONE, SHOULD BE ENOUGH TO KNOW HOW TO PROFIT FROM THEM IN RETURN. ADMITTEDLY, AFTER TWENTY-SIX YEARS IN THE BUSINESS, NAVIGATING THROUGH THE LEAN YEARS OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION, AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR, AS WELL AS SUCCEEDING IN A MALE DOMINATED BOOK TRADE, SHE WOULD ADMIT THERE WAS A LOT MORE TO BEING A BOOKSELLER THAN THE TITLE SUGGESTS. AS I'VE NOTED EARLIER IN THIS BRIEF SERIES, ON DORA HOOD AND HER BUSINESS, KNOWN AS "MY BOOK ROOM," IN TORONTO, WHILE SHE NEVER CLAIMED TO BE A WRITER OF HISTORY, SHE DID BECOME AN ARCHIVIST / HISTORIAN BY IMMERSION. SHE DOESN'T TAKE THIS CREDIT ANYWHERE IN HER BOOK, "THE SIDE DOOR - TWENTY-SIX YEARS IN MY BOOK ROOM," (1958 RYERSON PRESS), BUT ANYONE WHO READS IT, WHO HAS AN INTEREST IN CANADIAN HISTORY IN PARTICULAR, WILL RECOGNIZE THAT HER CONTRIBUTION TO THE CONSERVATION OF NATIONAL HERITAGE WARRANTED MORE SERIOUS CREDIT TO HER NAME. MOST BOOK COLLECTORS TODAY HAVE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF DORA HOOD. MANY HISTORIANS MAY FALL INTO THE SAME SITUATION, AND HAVE NO CONCEPT OF HER WORK ON THEIR BEHALF MANY DECADES EARLIER. I WISH TO GIVE HER THIS BENEFIT NOW, AND OFFER A FEW MORE STORIES FROM HER BIOGRAPHY, BECAUSE I THINK IT IS A CRITICAL BOOK OF STUDY FOR ALL COLLECTORS……AND NOT JUST THOSE WITH AN INTEREST IN BOOKS. HER ADVICE ON COLLECTING IS WELL PRESENTED, AND BASED ON CONSIDERABLE EXPERIENCE……AS SOMEONE WHO DEALT WITH A REGIMENT OF SERIOUS, HARD TO PLEASE, AND DEMANDING COLLECTORS.

THE ADVENTURES OF A BOOK HUNTER / BUYER / SELLER IN CANADA

     "It is one thing to buy accumulations of books as I had been doing up to now, and quite another to be offered a collector's library," writes bookseller, Dora Hood. "In the former, as a rule, no one hand and mind have been at work to bring all the books together; they, therefore, yield many unexpected finds, and in truth are rather exciting to handle. But when one person has, perhaps over many years, devoted himself to collecting all he can find on one or more subjects, it is an education itself to sort and catalogue such a library.

     "One such collection came my way, with very little effort on my part. I was asked to look at a library which had been in storage for many years. It filled a good sized room from floor to ceiling and was not very easy to examine. The books were tied up very securely in bundles of about one and a half feet high. The cord with which they were tied was firm, though soft, and did not, fortunately, cut into the books. I took my small son along to help move the bundles so that I could get some idea of the material that was in it. This time it was summer and hot and we toiled at the work for about three hours, and had only managed to examine about a third of it. It looked extremely good. I asked what the owners wanted for it and agreed to their price and the collection was mine. It arrived in two truck loads, and taxed my storage room to the limits. Would that all other libraries were in such good condition, contained so rich a store, and were easily handled. For months I read nothing else than the books and pamphlets of this collection. Night after night I chose a bundle and took it upstairs for bedside reading. I learned more from it than from any other collection of books I ever bought, and I also learned something of the mind and character of him, who had brought together all these records of the past. Charles Canniff James, whose collection it was, died in 1916, in his early fifties due, it was said, to over-work in the organization of Ontario's agricultural contribution during the first Great War.

     "As I sorted and catalogued the books and papers I was saddened to think he did not live to old age, when he could have enjoyed the fruits of his years of collecting. The only consolation one can find on these occasions is the knowledge that they go mostly into the hand of others who value them," noted the Toronto bookseller. "By 1932 I had acquired a really good stock of books, and that spring had issued my seventh catalogue. Among my letters about this time I received a communication from the American Library Association, asking me if I would consider taking a booth at their annual meeting which was to be held that year in Montreal.

     "I had done practically no advertising so far but was quite well known to many of the librarians of the American universities and institutions, and this seemed a good opportunity to meet them as well as some of my clients in Montreal. I had at that time far more collectors in Montreal and Quebec than I had in Toronto. The rent of the booth did not seem high and I suppose I was ready for a new experience outside the Book Room," she noted of her business at the time. "The books were to be arranged all round the large banquet hall of the Windsor Hotel. Publishers from all over the United States and the leading ones in Canada, all from Toronto had taken booths. I was the only antiquarian bookseller in that great company and a very inexperienced one at that. I bought some pretty clothes, for it was to be in May, packed a big carton of my most outstanding books, and notified some of my bookish friends that I was coming to Montreal for a week, and asked them to look me up."

     Dora Hood reports of the book sale, "In spite of the undoubted fact that the depression was getting deeper, a great throng of librarians attended the meeting, chiefly I think from the United States. There were meetings all day in other parts of the hotel and at McGill University and, in between sessions, groups wandered into the banquet hall to examine the displays of the publishers. Each of us had his name on a placard over his booth and I had my share of inquiries. In the evening the book-loving public turned up, for it was a book fair such as Montreal has never before seen. Many of my collectors came to have a talk and I thoroughly enjoyed it, for I am convinced that by and large book collectors are among the most delightful people one can meet. The next booth to mine was occupied by a German firm from New York. I cannot now recall the name but their children's books they displayed were the most attractive I have ever seen. There were three young women in charge who told me they had been in New York a year, and adored it, but they would soon return to Germany as their visas had expired. I asked them if they would continue to work with their firm, but they said unfortunately, being married women, they would not be allowed to work. This was a year before Hitler seized power, so it could not be laid at his door, but Germany was in the throes of distress and only unmarried women were permitted to work. These young women interested me because I knew they had grown up during the decade after the war when the youth of Germany, was struggling to educate itself and teachers in schools and universities were handicapped for want of money to buy books.

     "I had received pathetic letters from a professor (in Germany) who had spent a year in Canada and was anxious, if possible, to build up a working collection of Canadian literature for his students. He was quite frank in telling me that he and his students hoped gradually to pay me for the books I sent. For two years small amounts came by special permits and then suddenly stopped. I wrote it off as a trifling bad debt, though I still felt it could not be the fault of the professor. Two or three years later came a letter from one of his students, telling me that he had died suddenly at the time the money had ceased to come. His former students were heartbroken at losing him and as a memorial were paying the money still owing, and ordering a further lot of books to complete the collection they called after him."

     She notes of the successful show and sale, "At the end of the week I had a note book full of addresses of institutes of learning in United States, all, it seemed, with plenty of funds for book buying. This was a most satisfactory outlook in spite of general forebodings. Before leaving for home I drove out of Montreal for a brief holiday in the lovely Laurentians. I remarked to my host that I hoped nothing would happen to the United States of America. His smile was rather wan. Well, nothing did happen just then and fortunately I was well established when the American banks, one after the other, closed their doors and the appropriations of many of their educational institutions were cut to a discouraging minimum."

     In the year 1579, Francis Bacon took a shot at describing the value of books…..in non monetary terms of course: "We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands…..(but) the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempt from wrong of time and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still and cast their seeds into the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding generations."

     A short while ago, I took a break to read the daily newspaper. I found an article about decorating with books. And the way colorful spines positioned together on a book shelf can enhance the ambience of any room. I had to read the article twice. Now folks, I don't want to be a hypocrite here, because my antique business does cater to home decorators every day of the business week; but when we start putting books together on a shelf because of the color of their spines, I can't help but be aghast at how far we've degenerated as a society…….when we care less about reading them, and more about their decorative value and if they can be stacked artistically and made into lamps. When I see and read this tripe, I know I'm far more a purist than I ever thought. But I do have one story about my book collector friend, David Brown, and of all things, "home enhancements."

     Dave came in to my store one day, and asked if I'd like to make a trade. He was always doing things like this, and I really didn't wish to participate…..but the books he wanted to trade for, had been on the shelves for about three years without a single copy being sold. In return I got some sports related books, our boys would enjoy, and a number of art books he didn't particularly care for. After he boxed up what books he wanted, and loaded them in his trademark Ford pickup with the yellow canoe lashed on top, he came down to chat for awhile, before heading back to Hamilton. "Thanks for the books Ted. They're for a friend of mine," he said. "His wife threw him out of the house, and now he's got this big apartment with empty bookshelves. He just wanted some books to fill the open spaces, and these will do just fine." I just stared at him, and honestly, I didn't know whether to throw him out of the store by his shirt collar (which would have been hard, as he was a substantial size), or strike it up to on-the-job training. I had just traded books away as the attractive good graces of home decor. Now it has reared its ugly head again. Well sir, I don't decorate with books. I have books, which I adore, and read daily. Sure they look good on a shelf, and in a cabinet, but if that was all they were worth…..just to look at from the outside, then I would have them all removed from our house……as I am morally against facades, unless they are items that are solely meant for decoration and functional furnishings….art of course for art's sake. The funny thing about Dave Brown, is that he was my book mentor, and here he was, the broker of fashionable design, to stave off the opinion of apartment visitors, that this gentleman friend was out of sorts with the world. God forbid there should be an empty book shelf.

     I will have another chapter on Dora Hood in tomorrow's blog. I hope you have time to visit again. I could write continually about old books, because they have served me well as both a collector and historian for my entire professional life. I would feel I had lost part of my soul, should someone decide I no longer needed them…..clearing my shelves to make room for china ornaments and glass vases. Thanks again for taking some time to visit my blog-site. Lots more on tap.

Canadian Book Seller, Dora Hood Part 2

ON BEING THE SELLER OF OLD BOOKS AND THE ENCHANTMENT IT CREATES

ONCE BITTEN…….WATCH OUT…..MAYBE YOU WILL BECOME A BOOK DEALER

     EVERY TIME I WALK INTO A SHOP THAT SELLS OLD BOOKS, I AM IMPRESSED IMMEDIATELY BY THE RICH, HISTORIC, WORLDLY AROMA OF SO MUCH BOUND AND PRINTED-UPON PAPER; POSSESSING THE AURA OF OLD WRITERS AND CENTURIES OF CONTENTED READERSHIP; SO MANY SHELVES OF HISTORY AND LITERATURE, FICTION AND NON-FICTION, NOVELS AND BIOGRAPHY, AND SO MUCH SOCIAL / CULTURAL FUEL FOR THE EAGER MIND TO FEED UPON. EVEN STANDING ALONE IN A BOOK SHOP, IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO FEEL ISOLATED OR LONELY. I ALWAYS THINK OF CHRISTOPHER MORELY'S "HAUNTED BOOK SHOP," WHEN I VISIT THESE HAVENS OF GOOD READING. I HAD A SIGNED COPY OF "THE HAUNTED BOOK SHOP," BUT ALAS, THIS DASTARDLY SITUATION, OF A BOOKSELLER ACTUALLY HAVING TO SELL SOMETHING, IN ORDER TO SURVIVE. AH, THE TEMPTATION OF MONEY OVER POSSESSION.

     I HAVE BEEN IN SOME WONDERFUL OLD BOOK SHOPS, SINCE I BEGAN SELLING BOOKS MYSELF, BACK IN THE LATE 1980'S. IT DIDN'T MATTER IF THE SHOP WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF A TIGHT URBAN DOWNTOWN, IN A RUSHING-EVERYWHERE CITY, OR IN A SMALL TOWN, OR HAMLET, MAYBE EVEN OUT IN THE RURAL CLIMES, BECAUSE ONE STEP INSIDE THE DOOR, AND THERE CAME ALL THOSE FAMILIAR SENSORY PERCEPTIONS. THE VERY PROFOUND AND HAUNTING, "I'VE BEEN HERE BEFORE," SENSATIONS. WHETHER IT WAS URBAN OR RURAL, IT NEVER SEEMED TO MATTER. THEY WERE ALWAYS RUN BY HOSPITABLE, WELCOMING FOLKS, WHO FELT THEIR BOOKS WERE AN EXTENSION OF THEIR SOULS. THEY DIDN'T OFFER THIS AS A WELCOMING EXPLANATION, BUT YOU KNEW IT, AFTER ONLY A SHORT CHAT. IT WAS A REFLECTION IN THIER EYES, THAT THEY LOVED WHAT THEY WERE DOING IN LIFE. WORKING IN THESE SHOPS WAS NO EFFORT AT ALL. IT WAS THE "LIFESTYLE" SITUATION, I HAVE TRIED TO PORTRAY THROUGH THESE PRELIMINARY BLOGS ABOUT COLLECTORS AND THE ART OF COLLECTING. YOU WILL MAKE A TERRIBLE ANTIQUARIAN BOOK COLLECTOR IF YOU DON'T CHERISH BOOKS…..AND NOT JUST THE ONES YOU LIKE. I CAN HONESTLY SAY I HAVE NEVER BEEN IN AN OLD BOOK SHOP THAT I DIDN'T LIKE…..OR SPOKEN WITH ITS PROPRIETOR, AND FELT THEIR DEMEANOR TO BE COLD OR STANDOFFISH. THE PREVAILING ATMOSPHERE IS SCHOLARLY AND IT WAS THE SAME FEELING I GOT, WHENEVER I WENT INTO THE COMMUNITY LIBRARIES IN MUSKOKA, AND THE MASSIVE FACILITY AT YORK UNIVERSITY IN TORONTO, WHERE I STUDIED ENGLISH AND HISTORY.  AS I HAVE BEEN SURROUNDED BY BOOKS, AND LOTS OF THEM, FOR MOST OF MY COLLECTING LIFE, I KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO FEEL AT HOME WITH "THE COLLECTION." I KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO HAVE TO SELL A BOOK, YOU'D RATHER NOT. SUZANNE HAS HAD TO PRY A LOT OF BOOKS OUT OF MY HANDS OVER THE YEARS, SUCH AS A PRISTINE FIRST EDITION, SIGNED COPY OF "BLUENOSE SKIPPER," SIGNED BY CAPTAIN ANGUS WALTERS. WE NEEDED MORTGAGE MONEY, AND THIS WAS A PRICEY BOOK. BUT IT'S BEEN THE SAME WITH ANTIQUES, FOR ME, AND I'VE HAD PANIC ATTACKS, SELLING OFF A FAVORITE BUFFET, OR FLAT-TO-THE-WALL, DESPITE THE FACT WE MADE A HANDSOME PROFIT. THERE ARE MANY READING THIS, WHO WON'T APPRECIATE FULLY, THAT ONE CAN ACTUALLY BECOME MORE ATTACHED TO A BOOK AFTER READING IT, THAN THE ANTICIPATION OF HAVING IT ON THE NIGHTSTAND…..AS A BOOK IN WAITING. I MUST HAVE READ "BLUENOSE SKIPPER," THREE TIMES BEFORE IT WAS SOLD, BUT THE BOOK HAD A LITTLE MAGIC ATTACHED, I CAN'T QUITE EXPLAIN. IT WAS LIKE HAVING CAPTAIN WALTERS READING ALONG WITH  ME, TO POINT OUT THINGS I MIGHT HAVE MISSED DURING A PREVIOUS RUN-THROUGH.

     I FEEL THE SAME ABOUT DORA HOOD'S FASCINATING BIOGRAPHY, "THE SIDE DOOR - TWENTY-SIX YEARS IN MY BOOK ROOM," PUBLISHED BY THE RYERSON PRESS, IN 1958. I WILL NOT SELL MY INSCRIBED AND SIGNED COPY. BUT I WILL SHARE SOME BOOK COLLECTING AND SELLING STORIES FROM WITHIN. IT IS A BOOK EVERY CANADIAN SHOULD BE FAMILIAR WITH, BECAUSE DORA HOOD WAS AS MUCH AN HISTORIAN AS BIBLIOPHILE. SHE CONSERVED A GREAT DEAL OF CANADIAN HISTORY, WITH HER ASTUTE HANDLING AND RESEARCH OF LARGE COLLECTIONS SHE HAD ACQUIRED. ITEMS OF NATIONAL IMPORTANCE WERE GIVEN GREAT AND PAINSTAKINGLY CAREFUL SCRUTINY, AND THE CONSERVATION ATTENTION, TO PRESERVE THEM FOR MANY GENERATIONS TO COME.

     "THE SECONDHAND BOOK BUSINESS HAS A VERY LONG HISTORY AND HAS HAD SOME ADHERENTS WHO HAVE BECOME FAMOUS IN OTHER WAYS," WRITES FORMER TORONTO BOOKSELLER, DORA HOOD. "IT IS RECORDED THAT ALEXANDER CRUDEN 'MAINTAINED HIMSELF BY KEEPING A SECONDHAND BOOKSHOP,' WHILE HE COMPILED HIS MONUMENTAL WORK, THE FAMOUS 'CONCORDANCE OF THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS.' AT TIMES HE HAD PERIODS OF LUNACY, THOUGH WHETHER THIS WAS THE RESULT OF HIS STUDIES OR FROM WORRY OVER THE CONDITION OF HIS BOOKSHOP, HIS DOES NOT RELATE. HE DIED IN 1770 AND EVER SINCE HIS NAME HAS BEEN A HOUSEHOLD WORD, AN ACHIEVEMENT THE REST OF US HAVE NEVER ATTAINED.

     "THERE HAVE BEEN MANY CHARMING ESSAYS AND BOOKS WRITTEN ABOUT BOOKSHOPS, REAL AND FICTIONAL, BUT THEY COME FOR THE MOST PART FROM ABLE PENS OF LITERARY BOOK BUYERS AND NOT FROM THE EVER GRUBBY AND HARDWORKING HANDS OF THE PROPRIETORS. 'HANDBOOKS,' THERE ARE WITHOUT NUMBER ON HOW TO CONDUCT MOST BUSINESS VENTURES, BUT I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF ONE ON HOW TO RUN A SECONDHAND BOOKSHOP. WE WHO DRIFT INTO THE TRADE DEVELOP OUR OWN HAPHAZARD WAYS AND WOULD, I THINK, FIND IT DIFFICULT TO FOLLOW RULES WE HAD NOT DEVELOPED OURSELVES. WHAT FOLLOWS, THEREFORE, MAY NOT APPLY TO OTHER BOOKSHOPS BUT IT IS THE INSIDE STORY OF HOW WE WORKED."

     DORA HOOD NOTES OF THE PROFESSION SHE MARRIED, "IT TOOK ME YEARS TO WORK OUT A SYSTEM IN THE MANAGEMENT OF ROUTINE OFFICE WORK, WHILE WAYS OF BUYING AND SELLING AND WRITING CATALOGUES CAME ALMOST BY INSTINCT. WE HAD OUR DAYS OF JOYS AND SORROWS, OF TRIUMPHS AND HUMILIATIONS, OF EASE AND DRUDGERY AND THOUGH THE NET RESULT IN DOLLARS AND CENTS WAS MODEST, THE LIFE WAS SUCH A SATISFYING ONE THAT I NEVER DREAMED OF GIVING IT UP. AUGUSTINE BIRRELL, IN HIS PITHY WAY WROTE, 'NEVER CONVERT A TASTE INTO TRADE,' BUT I THINK HE WAS WRONG. I WOULD SAY YOU MUST HAVE A TASTE FOR BOOKS, OR YOU WOULD LOATHE THE TRADE."

KEEPING COMPANY WITH A BOOKSELLER

     "Contrary to the general belief, we are a fairly honest lot. For instance, as we become more expert in our business, we actually pay more for the books we buy than we did as novices. Luck it seems is often with the beginner for when I was timid about every outlay I made on books, some wonderful bargains came my way. I have no qualms of conscience on this account, however, for had there been any rival buyer in the field, the books would not have become mine. As time went on I gradually built up a first hand knowledge of the value of a great number of books, both rare and commonplace; I could not in all honesty offer less than I knew they were worth to me. Most of us buy more books than we can handle, and lay out much more capital than we should. None of us grows rich! There is a vast difference between buying a few volumes and estimating the value of a large library. I grew to enjoy the latter, for it required skill and experience with the added possibility of something unusual turning up. As time went on, and especially after the 1939-45 War, I did not have so many unorganized collections offered me, such as the Jones and Heyden libraries, for by that time most of the loose collections of papers had been tidied up and unfortunately consigned to the paper drives. The only one of this kind that remained was the Coyne Collection, and that took me years to acquire although I had known of its existence for some time."

     She writes, "More and more frequently I was called on to price and buy well selected libraries belonging to university professors, civil servants or wealthy businessmen. These books were usually arranged neatly on shelves in attractive libraries or in rather chilly basement playrooms, and the task was much simpler though not as exciting as ploughing through piles of miscellaneous books and papers. Gradually I devised a method of arriving at a price which developed into playing a little game with myself. I had in time become so familiar with the appearance of a vast number of Canadian books that without even reading their titles, I recognized them by the size, the color of their bindings and other features very much as we know the appearance of our friends without ticking off each feature. Therefore, when I came into a room full of books, I could take a general look at the collection and size up the trend of character of the library. After a few minutes' thought I would jot down on a piece of paper what I thought I should pay for it and put this away in my briefcase. Then I would go carefully over the whole collection, putting down in one column on my pad, the value of the highlights or really good books on each shelf and in another column, a covering price on what I called 'run of the mill,' books. These included those that turn up frequently and of which I had a good supply and the practically unsaleable others. Often this proved a thoroughly interesting operation, for when unfamiliar titles turned up, I had to spend some time going through them to decide on their value. Then came the final reckoning. The two columns would be added up, the good and the not so good, and putting them together I would arrive at the final price; and here is where the game came in. The original guess would be produced and the two prices compared. In nine cases I do not know how I did this and it amused and astonished me over and over again. Though the carefully detailed estimate was probably nearer the real value, I usually gave the seller whichever was higher."

     So if you've ever wanted to know how book dealers operate in the heat of the moment, Dora Hood provides some valuable insights. "There is one difficult problem which every book dealer has to face. The owners of libraries, almost invariably, will not put a price on their books. Most of them want the dealer to do this, and, having got his expert advice, proceed with this as a basis for further bargaining with others. I do not think it occurs to them that this is somewhat unethical. The only method we can employ to offset this is tactfully to explain that the offer must be accepted or rejected at the time it is made and will not be renewed. Sometimes it is very difficult to be so dogmatic. Most bookish people are disarmingly nice and it is distressing to disrupt the friendship atmosphere. The best way is to take the seller into your confidence by explaining that you have many offers of books and must have an answer there and then lest you have too many unsettled offers. Fortunately, I was able gradually to build up a certain confidence in my business ways and my estimates were accepted among those who knew me. My advice to those who have libraries to sell, is to try one of three three following ways of going about it. !. Try to arrive at a price before you offer your books, keeping in mind that the dealer must make a profit and that he will have to dispose of the books one by one, while you are to get cash for all without further effort on your part. 2. Make a careful list of your books giving author, title, date and place of publication, and exact condition, being sure to find out if all plates and maps are present. Have several copies made and sent them simultaneously to the dealers in the community, asking them to quote a price on the lot. Then accept the best. It is not playing the game to withdraw books from the list after sending it out. 3. Go to a dealer you know and trust him if he offers to buy the entire library. This is much less trouble and will probably give you the best return."

     She indicates, with considerable experience on her side, that "Booksellers are continually plagued by being asked to quote prices over the telephone. Often it is merely idle curiosity that prompts these calls and most bookmen refuse to give this information. Telephones, as we all know to our regret, are tremendous temptations to some people. I was frequently rung up after business hours by people who were comfortably at home and whose own offices were dark and silent. I remember once answering the telephone late at night to hear a cheery voice saying "We have just been having an argument about the value of the first edition of 'X'…..and someone said Dora Hood was sure to know, so we thought we would ring you up to see who was right.' My answer to this was 'That's very flattering, but what time is it at your house?' On several occasions I was asked to price books for probate, but did not particularly care for this work as the collections often contained quantities of miscellaneous books about which I could only guess. But once I was asked by the librarian of an important university as a business proposition, to put a price on a valuable collection of Canadiana. I was not told who had owned the books nor why a price was wanted. It was an interesting piece of work and required a good deal of research as many of the books were extremely rare. Again I applied my own technique of looking over the long list in a casual manner and jotting down an estimate. Then I went seriously to work on it, and as I did not know whether the books were to be sold or donated, I had to use my own judgement and decided to put on them the approximate current price. It took me several weeks to do the work in my spare time. Once again my estimated price and the final detailed amount were within hailing distance of each other, though a good many thousand dollars were involved. I learned later that the books had been left jointly to two heirs. The share of one was given as a gift to the library while the other heir demanded cash. What the final arrangement was I did not hear although I received a letter of appreciation from the librarian."

     As a final note, Dora Hood offers an explanation about book pricing for retail consumption: "To end this account of the inner workings of the Book Room, I must attempt to answer the question I am often asked. How did you know what price to put on your books? It was necessary, in the first place, to learn the universal principle of supply and demand. To do this I studied the catalogues of reputable and well-established bookmen. I went to the reference library to look up auction reports but them only occasionally helpful. I became familiar with the background of the books I had to catalogue from my bibliographies and histories. This took time but once learned stood me in good stead. The current values of the books, for instance, of Champlain, Charlevoix, Heriot and Weld were not difficult to establish, but these were not everyday occurrences in the Book Room. The task became much more of a problem as the flood of later books increased and I was confronted with good books which apparently I had never before been offered. It was necessary then, I found, to develop an acute sense of the value of the content of each books; this and the cultivation of a retentive memory for everything I had ever read or heard about a book was, I believe, the most useful faculty I acquired. There is, of course, another factor not generally, I fear, taken seriously by the trade, summed up in the modern term 'overhead.' There is only one solution to this and that is to keep it so low that you are continually bumping your head and by so doing most of the work yourself. Probably in the end, we fall back on the ancient rule of trial and error. but looking back as a bookseller of long standing, I believe the crucial factor in successful pricing is to possess a deep and absorbing interest in one's vocation."

     To my final breath in this mortal coil, I will be a bibliophile. I will buy books and then sell them. Not as much as I used to, when a little younger, but I could not have an antique shop assigned to my name, and have it void of some interesting books. At one time in my collecting life, I had about 40,000 books, and it has taken about twenty years, to whittle that number down to a manageable collection. I became obsessed with acquisition, but not so much, with selling proportionally, to what I was buying daily, weekly, monthly and annually. I was even resorting to sneaking boxes of books into our house, when Suzanne was at work, so she wouldn't yell at me for my excesses. I started changing my ways, when my old book hound friend, Dave Brown, commissioned me to do his biography. Dave didn't tell me at the time, he was seriously ill, and would likely never see the completed text. He was right. Dave passed away with 100,000 books stuffed into his small Hamilton bungalow. How bad was it? I'll bet you've never heard of load-bearing piles of books before. The handlers of the estate found this out, when they began taking the basement books out of the house, before lightening the load on the first floor. They nearly had a serious collapse. The piles of books, on shelves, were actually wedged at the top, against the floor joist of the upper level. Suzanne was my research assistant for the biography, which sold-out by the way, and it was after this, she put me on a reformation diet……no new books until the quantity was reduce by many thousands. Dave enlightened a lot of us, to the damnation of becoming a hoarder without knowing it. So now I buy only what I think I can sell quickly, and I have paid far more attention to the good advice from Dora Hood, than from what I found out about my old friend David Brown……a bibliomaniac by definition.

     I will have more information from Dora Hood's book in my next blog. Thanks for spending some time with me, in the recollection of one of Canada's well known antiquarian booksellers. Please drop by again soon, for some more wild and wooly collector tales from her in the snowy woodlands of South Muskoka.

The Making Of A Book Seller-Dora Hood, 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.

The Personalities and The Bookseller-You Just Never Know Who Might Pop In Next

THE PERSONALITIES AND THE BOOKSELLER - YOU JUST NEVER KNOW WHO MIGHT POP-UP NEXT

GOOD BOOKS, GOOD CONVERSATION, GOOD TIMES - GOOD REASON TO RUN A BOOK SHOP

     "IT WAS ON DECEMBER 7, 1921, THAT VALERY LARBAUD PRESENTED THE IRISH WRITER JAMES JOYCE TO THE AMIS DES LIVRES. (THE BOOKSHOP OWNED BY ADRIENNE MONNIER, IN PARIS, FRANCE.)

     "THAT WAS ONE OF THE MEMORABLE MEETINGS AT OUR HOUSE. THE FIRST FRAGMENTS OF THE TRANSLATION OF 'ULYSSES,' WERE GIVEN A READING THERE AFTER THE WARNING, 'CERTAIN PAGES HAVE AN UNCOMMON BOLDNESS OF EXPRESSION THAT MIGHT QUITE LEGITIMATELY BE SHOCKING' (I QUOTE FROM THE PROSPECTUS). AS AUGUSTINE MOREL HAD NOT YET UNDERTAKEN HIS TRANSLATION, IT WAS JACQUES BENOIST-MECHIN WHO HAD COURAGEOUSLY ATTACKED THESE FIRST FRAGMENTS; AND LEON-PAUL FARGUE HAD BEEN ESPECIALLY CONSULTED FOR THE ADAPTATION OF THE MOST DARING PASSAGES," WROTE ADRIENNE MONNIER, AS TRANSLATED, IN THE BOOK, "THE VERY RICH HOURS OF ADRIENNE MONNIER," PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS OF NEW YORK.

     "JOYCE WAS THEN UNKNOWN TO THE FRENCH PUBLIC. IT WAS NOT HERE, HOWEVER, AT LA MAISON DES AMIS DES LIVRES, NOR WITH VALERY LARBAUD, THAT HE FOUND HIS FIRST WELCOME. A LITTLE WHILE AFTER HIS ARRIVAL FROM TRIESTE, HIS FRIEND THE AMERICAN POET, EZRA POUND HAD TAKEN HIM TO THE HOUSE OF ANDRE SPIRE, WHO HAD RECEIVED HIM WITH HIS CUSTOMARY KINDNESS. IT WAS AT ANDRE SPIRE'S HOUSE THAT SYLVIA AND I MET HIM, IN THE COURSE OF A RECEPTION AT WHICH MANY LITERARY PEOPLE WERE PRESENT," SHE WRITES OF MEETING THE AUTHOR. "I HAD A LITTLE DISCUSSION WITH JUSTIN BENDA; HE MAINTAINED THAT THERE DID NOT EXIST IN FRANCE, FOR THE MOMENT, ANY WRITER CAPABLE OF GREAT FLIGHTS. WHILE WE WERE DELIBERATING, MR. JOYCE, WHO WAS SITTING IN A CORNER, REMAINED SILENT, HIS WINGS FOLDED. SYLVIA BEACH, WHO HAD READ HIS BOOKS AND EVEN THE CHAPTERS OF 'ULYSSES,' THAT APPEARED IN NEW YORK, IN THE 'LITTLE REVIEW, 'AND WHO ADMIRED HIM PASSIONATELY, HAD IN THE COURSE OF THE EVENING SUMMONED UP HER COURAGE TO APPROACH HIM. FOR IT WAS AN EXTREMELY CONGENIAL RECEPTION; SPIRE OFFERED US TEA AND SUPPER AT THE SAME TIME. THERE WAS NO LACK OF TIME TO TALK AND EVEN TO THINK A BIT ABOUT ONE MEANT TO SAY. THIS IS THE WAY THEN, THAT OUR RELATIONS WITH JOYCE BEGAN.

     "WHEN ONE RECOGNIZES THE IMPORTANCE OF THE SYMBOL IN JOYCE'S WORK AND THE CONSTANT CARE THAT HE TAKES TO ESTABLISH MYSTICAL CORRESPONDENCES, ONE IS STRUCT BY THE FACT THAT THE FIRST PERSON WHO RECEIVED HIM IN FRANCE, AND PUT HIM IN CONTACT WITH HIS FUTURE PUBLISHERS, IS A JEWISH POET - FOR JOYCE HAD CREATED IN ULYSSES A GREAT TYPE OF JEWISH HUMANITY, AND HE WAS TO FIND WITH US A PLACE FAVORABLE TO THE APPEARANCE OF HIS WORK AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF HIS REPUTATION." MONNIER WRITES, "SO, IN 1921, VALERY LARBAUD (WRITER) SPOKE IN MY BOOKSHOP ABOUT JAMES JOYCE, AND ABOVE ALL ABOUT HIS 'ULYSSES,' WHICH HAD NOT YET APPEARED IN BOOK FORM. THIS LECTURE, WHICH WAS PUBLISHED AFTERWARD IN THE 'NOUVELLE REVUE FRANCOISE,' AND WHICH PRESENTLY SERVES AS THE PREFACE TO THE TRANSLATION OF 'DUBLINERS,' IS A UNIQUE ACHIEVEMENT IN THE HISTORY CRITICISM. IT IS CERTAINLY THE FIRST TIME, I BELIEVE, THAT A WORK IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE HAS BEEN STUDIED IN FRANCE, BY A FRENCH WRITER, BEFORE BEING STUDIED IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA. CERTAINLY THE PRESENCE OF JOYCE AMONG US HAD PROVOKED THIS PHENOMENON, BUT IF ONE THINKS ABOUT THE DIFFICULTIES OF A TEXT LIKE ULYSSES, ONE IS ASTOUNDED BY THE TOUR DE FORCE THAT LARBAUD BROUGHT OFF. ALL THE MORE SO BECAUSE HIS STUDY IS AND WILL NO DOUBT REMAIN THE MOST PERFECT, THE MOST UNDERSTANDING ANALYSIS THAT COULD BE MADE OF JOYCE'S WORK. HOW LARBAUD WAS ABLE TO EXTRACT FROM IT A SUBSTANCE SO CLEAR, SO COMPACT, SO PLEASING, IN SO LITTLE TIME AND WITHOUT THE HELP OF AN EARLIER WORK - THIS IS WHAT WILL NEVER CEASE TO AMAZE US."

THE PERKS OF OWNING A FAMOUS BOOK SHOP IN PARIS

     ADRIENNE MONNIER, WRITES OF ANOTHER EXCITING MEETING, THAT WAS CONNECTED TO HER PARIS BOOKSHOP.

     The bookstore proprietor records that, "Upon our arrival in London, Sylvia (Beach, owner of the bookshop, Shakespeare and Co., also in Paris) had telephone T.S. Eliot to ask if it would be possible to pay him a visit. He at once proposed that we come dine with him, which charmed and flattered us very much. In english letters, Eliot enjoys an almost royal prestige - not without giving rise to a certain amount of grumbling. Here, in spite of his Nobel Prize, he is only a poor, translated poet. I do not say this to belittle him: Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton are also poor, translated poets. It is a terrible trial for a poet (spared the musician and the painter) that he must undergo translation if he wants to be read outside of this country. In no case can he emerge from this trial to his advantage; the fruit of his labor is spoiled, he is stripped of his most precious possessions, he becomes like an emigrant, who must start his life over again upon hostile soil, with means that are often uncertain. (Eliott has such a liking for penitence that it is possible that these hardships give him a kind of pleasure.) And that is so whatever talent of the translator may be. A Baudelaire, a Mallarme crown with a halo the foreign poet, whom they strive to transplant among us, but they do not communicate their genius to him - if they wish to remain translators. As Baudelaire says in the notice that precedes his translation of 'The Raven,': In the mold of prose when it is applied to poetry, there is necessarily a frightful imperfection; but the harm would be still greater in rhymed mimicry."

     She writes of the poet that, "On a visit to Paris in 1936, T.S. Eliott gave a poetry reading at Shakespeare and Company. On this occasion we had the pleasure of having him to dinner at our place in the company of (French authors) Gide, Jean Schlumberger, and Francois Valery. In the course of this dinner Gide tried to tear apart the spirit of the Orient completely, and in particular certain works that Eliott, Schlumberger, and I myself said that we liked. The 'Bhagavad-gita,' for example, or Milarepa (I have a very amusing letter from him on the subject of Milarepa). Schlumberger let him speak, then he said to him gently, 'All the same there is one Orient work that you have loved very much,' - and as Gide looked at him with a questioning air, he added, "the Gospels.' Following that I tried rather wickedly to prove that Buddha had had a particular attachment to his disciple Ananda, and that it was after a disappointment in love caused by him, that he had decided to leave the earth."

     In 1928, the author of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald met with Adrienne Monnier, and there is a picture of the bookshop owner and the writer, in the text of, "The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier," sitting on the doorstep of Sylvia Beach's "Shakespeare and Company." There are several photographs of T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, with Adrienne's mother and father. There is a terrific image of Joyce sitting with Beach and Monnier inside Shakespeare and Company, and another wonderful streetscape, where Joyce and Monnier are walking down the Rue de L' Odeon, where the two famous book shops were situated.

     Richard McDougall, translator and author of the book's introduction, offers this insight at the end of Monnier's life. "In the final weeks of her life, Adrienne Monnier had secretly and with great difficulty arranged her personal papers. Her final note which she wrote in May, was found at the head of these after her death. In Monnier's words, "I am penning an end to my days, no longer able to support the noises that have been martyrizing me for eight months, with continuing fatigue and the suffering that I have endured these recent years. I am going to death without fear, knowing that I found a mother on being born here, and that I shall likewise find a mother in the other life."

     "The news of her passing, in France, and abroad, was greeted with reverence, sorrow and love," writes McDougall in his overview of her life. "Alone, Sylvia Beach in her own last years received the honors that go to survivors, the official consecrations that must always seem in spirit to be somewhat at odds with the spirit of obscure beginnings. From March 11 to April 25, 1959, the cultural section of the United States Embassy in Paris, sponsored an exhibition, 'Les Annees Vingt: Les Ecrivains Americains a Paris et leers amis,' (The Twenties; American Writers in Paris and Their Friends') at the headquarters of the American Cultural Center in the Rue du Dragon, near the Pace St. Germain-des-Pres. Because most of the items on display - some six hundred photographs, letters, page proofs, first editions, and the like, belonged to Sylvia Beach and collectively signified her central position in the life of the decade, the show was as much a tribute to her as it was a retrospective survey. In the same year, Harcourt, Brace published her memoirs, 'Shakespeare and Company,' and in June, during the course of a visit to the United States, she received an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Buffalo, to which she donated material from her Joyce Collection. On June 16, 1962, Bloomsday, the anniversary of the day of which the action of Ulysses takes place, she was in Dublin to participate in the dedication of the Martello Tower, at Sandycove, the setting for the opening of the novel, as a memorial to James Joyce.

     He notes that, "In Paris, Sylvia Beach continued to live in her apartment at 12 Rue de L'Odeon above the premises that Shakespeare and Company had once occupied. Here, On October 6, 1962, she was found dead, apparently of a heart attack, 'kneeling but not brought down,' as the friend who found her said; she had died a day or two before. Her body was cremated at Pere Lachaise cemetery and her ashes were sent to Princeton, where they now rest. Her funeral service, which took place in the chapel of the Columbarium in the cemetery, was attended by crowds of mourners, many of them neighbors in her quarter who knew her not as a literary personality but simply as a friend whose kindness was unfailing. And of Adrienne Monnier herself, what more is there that need or can be said here. Her own life, simple and profound, simple in its purpose, profound in its motives - has the configuration of a heroic legend and even a legend of saintliness. Her simplicity was that of an undivided mind and a whole heart that followed from girlhood on, in the direction of a calling that she seems never to have doubted. We can trace this direction but the act, simple in itself, of describing the outward achievements of her vocation. As for the motives of her 'whose life was so mysteriously moving,' as Katherine Anne Porter has said, those motives that came 'from such depths of feeling and intelligence they were hardly fathomable…..but always to be believed in and loved,' to these her work alone will bear witness. For the rest, all one has attempted has been to give back to Adrienne Monnier, in the words of another language the gift that she gave so fully in the words of her own."

THE FASCINATING FOLKS WE MEET IN RETAIL EVERY DAY

     Ever since I began writing professionally, and retailing antiques and old books, at virtually the same time in my life, (late 1970's), I have needed my sources of inspiration. I have found both occupations profoundly difficult at times, demanding a vigor I sometimes can't muster. I have called upon books, like I have just reviewed, so many times, that my fingerprints and folded-over page tops, indicated all the best locations for seeking out inspirational passages, and chapters, that will help me on either a difficult writing project (that I may not be looking forward to); or having to spend a month or so manning the retail component of our antique business, which for me, is hugely limiting, seeing as I'm usually the official "on the road everyday picker," where I am the happiest to roam freely. I look up at my shelf of poor condition reference books, and other texts I keep for special occasions, of low ambition, and thank all the authors, including Richard McDougall, for his fine work on Adrienne Monnier, which has been my source of joy for many years…….as well as all the other researchers and writers, who without knowing it, have kicked me into place, with a few well chosen words, and insightful revelations, about the milestone achievements of others.

     There is a lot of interesting stuff that happens in an antique shop (that also sells old books), and while I will never have the rich stories, as told by Ms. Monnier, from her Paris bookshop, there are some tidbits of information, and actuality I've experienced, that seem entirely worthy of a little exploration. Connections that I've made with historians, writers, and oh so many fascinating collectors, just because they happened to wander in, to a little shop known as Birch Hollow Antiques. This was my own beginning, and it was fabulous.

     As far as literature goes, and for those reading this blog, who don't know our area of Ontario, Canada very well,……. our Town of Gravenhurst, where we are situated as a main street business, was named in the year 1862, by a Canadian Postal Authority, who moonlighted as a literary critic for publications throughout North America. To name our new post office, he borrowed a name from a book written by British poet / philosopher, William Henry Smith, entitled "Gravenhurst; or Thoughts on Good and Evil." You can archive this, if interested, back to the first of August 2012, where I have written five special feature blogs on our literary provenance, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of its naming. Our previous antique shop, was located in Bracebridge, ten miles north of Gravenhurst, and that town was named, in 1864, by the same Postal Authority, William Dawson LeSueur, after a book written by American author, Washington Irving, entitled "Bracebridge Hall." Irving was of course famous for his stories, 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and "Rip Van Winkle." So, while we can't say we entertained James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ezra Pound, we were named after two very astute authors from abroad. Thanks so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule, to sit down with me, for this visit to old Paris, and the shops made famous by Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach. Please visit again soon, as we continue our antique and collecting series of stories to educate, titillate, and always….to entertain.

The Literary Allure of Book Shops; Back to Paris

THE LITERARY ALLURE OF BOOK SHOPS ……A HAVEN FOR BUYERS AND READERS…..A PORTAL FOR CREATORS

MEETING PLACES FOR THE PASSIONATE - A RESPITE FOR THE UNINSPIRED TO REJUVENATE

     I MET ONE OF ONTARIO'S WELL KNOWN OUTDOOR EDUCATORS, AND BOOK COLLECTORS, IN OUR FORMER ANTIQUE SHOP IN BRACEBRIDGE. ACTUALLY, OUR FIRST MEETING, WAS IN THE SHOP PARKING LOT, AND ALL I SAW, AT FIRST GLACE, WERE HIS LEGS AND RATHER LARGE BEHIND, PROTRUDING FROM THE OPEN TRUNK OF OUR CAR. SUZANNE HAD GIVEN MR. BROWN PERMISSION, TO LOOK INTO THE BOXES I HAD JUST DELIVERED TO OUR MANITOBA STREET SHOP. BIBLIOMANIACS AREN'T REALLY WORRIED ABOUT OUTWARD APPEARANCES, AND I SUPPOSE ON THAT DAY, IT WAS JUST FATE AND KARMA ROLLING TOGETHER, TO FORM A DOUGHY, CRAZY KIND OF FRIENDSHIP THAT LASTED FOR QUITE A FEW YEARS…..AND DOZENS UPON DOZENS OF PROFESSIONAL DISAGREEMENTS. IT WAS THE MOMENT WHEN DAVE WOULD DECIDE THE CURRIES WERE THE KIND OF PEOPLE A COLLECTOR SHOULD GET TO KNOW…..ASSOCIATE BOOK LOVERS…..AND I HAD ALREADY ANTICIPATED THAT THIS GUY, BULGING WITH RIPPED SHORTS, FROM THE TRUNK, WASN'T THE KIND OF CHARACTER YOU'D WANT TO DISMISS CASUALLY. SO WHAT ELSE WAS I GOING TO DO BUT BECOME HIS BIOGRAPHER; ALL FOR GOSH SAKES, BECAUSE OF HIS FRIENDLY INTRUSION THAT SUMMER DAY, THE DIRECT RESULT OF OUR MUTUAL INTERESTS IN OLD BOOKS. NON-FICTION OF COURSE. DAVE WOULD GO ON QUITE A TIRADE IF THE DISCUSSION ROLLED AROUND TO LITERATURE. HE ALSO HATED WITH A PASSION, ANY RELIGIOUS BOOKS, AND WARNED ME AGAINST BUYING THEM FOR THEIR ANTIQUARIAN VALUE. THEY APPARENTLY OVER-PRINTED MOST OF THEM, SO RARITY NEVER BECOMES AN ISSUE. HE BELIEVED THE "NOVEL," AND "NOVELISTS" IN GENERAL, WERE ALL THAT WAS WRONG WITH THE WORLD. YET YOU WOULDN'T HAVE DARED TO QUESTION THE WORK OF CHILDRENS' AUTHOR, THORNTON BURGESS, BECAUSE THESE WERE THE KIND OF BOOKS THAT GOT DAVE THROUGH THE DRUDGERY OF CHILDHOOD. DAVE HAD ONE WISH AS A CHILD…….AND IT WAS TO BE AN ADULT.

     THROUGH DAVE BROWN, I BECAME FAMILIAR WITH MANY BIBLIOPHILES, BOOK DEALERS, ANTIQUE COLLECTORS, AND HISTORIANS, LIKE ARCHIVIST AND WRITER, ED PHELPS, AND HUGH MACMILLAN, ONE OF THIS COUNTRY'S REVERED FREE LANCE (FREE RANGE) ARCHIVISTS, WHO HAD SO MANY INCREDIBLE STORIES,…..THAT WELL, HE SIMPLY HAD TO WRITE A BOOK TO CATALOGUE AND VARIFY THEY WERE ALL TRUE ACCOUNTS OF HERITAGE ACQUISITIONS. IT'S ENTITLED "ADVENTURES OF A PAPER SLEUTH," AND MY AUTOGRAPHED COPY SITS ABOVE MY DESK, WHERE HIS PORTRAIT LOOKS DOWN UPON ME EACH AND EVERY BLOG SESSION. OF ALL THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE HAD AN INFLUENCE ON ME, AS BOTH A WRITER, HISTORIAN, AND BOOK SELLER, IT IS CURIOUS THAT EACH, WITHOUT MY KNOWING IT, KNEW AND RESPECTED EACH OTHER. DAVE BROWN KNEW WAYLAND "BUSTER" DREW AND ADMIRED HIS WORK ON THE AUTHORSHIP OF "SUPERIOR; THE HAUNTED SHORE," AND HUGH MACMILLAN WAS GOOD FRIENDS WITH BOTH GENTS, GOING WAY BACK I BELIEVE, TO THE HERITAGE OF BIRCH BARK CANOES; COMPANIONING WITH CANOE AUTHORITY, KIRK WIPPER, AND HIS FORMER CAMP CANDALORE, NEAR DORSET. THESE WERE JUST SOME OF THE MANY CONNECTIONS MADE THROUGH OUR LITTLE ANTIQUE SHOP AND BOOK STORE, FORMERLY ON UPPER MANITOBA STREET, IN BRACEBRIDGE. BY THE WAY, THE NEXT BOOK I WANT TO HIGHLIGHT, WILL BE HUGH'S OUTSTANDING BIOGRAPHY, WHICH WILL GIVE YOU AN ENHANCED OVERVIEW OF "HISTORIC PAPER," IN CANADA…..AND WHY YOU SHOULD HANG ONTO THOSE WAR-TIME LETTERS FROM YOUR RELATIVES.

     AS I HAVE STRESSED, IN THIS SERIES OF BLOGS ABOUT THE ANTIQUE AND COLLECTIBLE BUSINESS, FROM MANY YEARS OF IMMERSION, I BEGAN THE BUSINESS, ORIGINALLY WITH MY FAMILY, AS A MEANS OF PUTTING MY DEGREE IN CANADIAN HISTORY TO WORK. I HAD NO EXPECTATIONS OF MAKING LOTS OF MONEY, AND IN FACT, I KNEW IT WAS GOING TO BE A STRUGGLE TO MAKE A YEAR ROUND BUSINESS WORK IN A SEASONAL ECONOMY. MANY SIMILAR VENTURES HAD, AND CONTINUE TO FAIL, BECAUSE THEY DON'T PREPARE PROPERLY FOR THE DOWNTURN OF BUSINESS, AFTER THE BUSY SUMMER SEASON HERE IN THE ONTARIO HINTERLAND. WHAT I DID KNOW, EARLY ON, WAS THAT I LIKED THE ASSOCIATION WITH OLD THINGS……AND THE OLD THINGS OF CHOICE, WERE ANTIQUES, COLLECTIBLES, AND OF COURSE, OLD AND OUT OF PRINT BOOKS. I LIKED THE LIFESTYLE. I ENJOYED THE SENTIMENTALITY, NOSTALGIA, AND HISTORY OF EACH OUTING, TO VISIT ESTATES AND ANTIQUE SHOPS, AND EVEN AFTER JUST A FEW YEARS HUNTING AND GATHERING, I HAD MET MANY FASCINATING FOLKS CONNECTED TO THE PROFESSION. IN REALITY, IT WAS THE PEOPLE-CONNECTION MOST OF ALL, THAT WAS THE ALLURE OF SPENDING ONE'S LIFE SELLING WHAT OTHER PEOPLE HAD CAST-OFF AS SURPLUS. EVEN TODAY, THE SAME HOLDS, AND IF I WAS DOING THIS ANTIQUE THING, JUST FOR THE MONEY, THERE WOULDN'T BE ANY POINT OPENING LATER THIS MORNING, OR TOMORROW, OR ALL THE DAYS AFTER THAT…..BECAUSE TRUTH IS, VERY FEW ANTIQUE DEALERS BECOME WEALTHY, UNTIL THEY CLOSE UP SHOP, AND HAVE TO INSURE THE LEFTOVERS. THEN ON PAPER, AT LEAST, THEY BECOME WORTH A CONSIDERABLE AMOUNT OF MONEY.

     EVEN NOW, ALTHOUGH I DON'T ADVERTISE THIS AS THE REASON YOU SHOULD VISIT OUR FAMILY SHOP, IT'S THE COLLECTION OF FOLKS, OUR EVER-GROWING CUSTOMER BASE, THAT MAKES OUR DAYS, WEEKS AND MONTHS ENJOYABLE AND INTERESTING. WHILE IT'S CERTAINLY IMPERATIVE TO MAKE RENT, AND A LITTLE PROFIT IN ORDER TO CONTINUE THE SHOP AS A GOING-CONCERN, AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING, SO IS IT THE SAME TODAY. EVEN IN THE FIRST YEAR IN THIS NEW LOCATION, IN THE FORMER MUSKOKA THEATRE BUILDING, ON THE MAIN STREET OF GRAVENHURST, WE HAVE BEEN MAKING GREAT PERSONAL CONTACTS, AND ALREADY WE HAVE RECONNECTED TO MANY OF OUR FORMER CUSTOMERS, WHO MADE BIRCH HOLLOW A SORT OF HANG-OUT, SOMEWHAT IN THE SPIRIT OF ADRIENNE MONNIER'S PARIS BOOKSHOP, THAT WE DISCUSSED IN YESTERDAY'S COLUMN. WHILE IT IS NOT THE CASE, THAT WE HAVE WORLD RENOWNED ARTISTS AND AUTHORS DROPPING IN DAILY, TO SIP TEA, AND CONVERSE, WE DO HAVE SOME VERY FASCINATING FOLKS WALKING THROUGH THAT FRONT DOOR, AND OFFERING SUZANNE AND I SOME VERY INTERESTING BIOGRAPHIES AND HISTORIES……BUT THEN THAT'S WHAT OUR BUSINESS IS FAMOUS FOR……AND IT IS ALL HAPPENING HERE IN THIS PLEASANT BURG IN SOUTH MUSKOKA. BUT IT'S NOT SOMETHING YOU ADVERTISE……AS A PLACE TO COME AND SHARE YOUR STORIES……BECAUSE IT ISN'T NECESSARY. IT'S IMPLIED BY THE FACT WE ALSO SELL OLD BOOKS. THERE'S THE STARTER FOR MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE. SO LET'S GO BACK TO WHERE WE LEFT OFF, IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR YEARS, OF PARIS, FRANCE, AND THE BOOKSELLERS AND AUTHORS WHO DEFIED THE TERROR OF CONFLICT, TO INSPIRE THE LIFE AND GROWTH OF LITERATURE……AND THE ONGOING INSPIRATION OF THE AUTHORS WHO HALF-RESIDED THERE, WITH THEIR PROPRIETOR FRIENDS.

THE VERY RICH HOURS OF ADRIENNE MONNIER IN PARIS

     Adrienne Monnier the owner of the bookshop, "La Maison des Amis des Livres, and Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the legendary book store, "Shakespeare and Company," across the road from one another in Paris, France, were champions of literature, in their own country, and abroad. They were considered kindred spirits to well accomplished authors, and their shops were havens to escape the burdens of two wars and the Great Depression. They housed, encouraged, supported, financed, and promoted the writers they came to know, and they provided sustenance, to those who were rich in accomplishment but low on funds, and shared the meagre provisions they had, with those who would help them build their respective businesses; by offering their newly published books for the collection. There is an overview that was written by Adrienne Monnier, about the nature and intent of her business enterprise, and it is so eloquently and effectively written, that it summarizes what most of us, who sell old and new books every day, feel about the shop atmosphere, and the importance of offering books to "the eager and the passionate amongst us." Now in her words:

     "We founded La Maison des Amis des Livres with faith; each one of its details seems to us to correspond to a feeling, to a thought. Business, for us, has a moving and profound meaning," Monnier writes. The description of the business, translated from French, is included in the text produced by Richard McDougall, entitled "The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier," published by Charles Scribner's Sons, of New York, in 1976.

     "A shop seems to us to be a true magic chamber; at that instant when the passer-by crosses the threshold of the door that everyone can open, when he penetrates into that apparently impersonal place, nothing disguises the look of his face, the tone of his words; he accomplishes with a feeling of complete freedom an act that he believes to be without unforeseen consequences; there is a perfect correspondence between his external attitude and his profound self, and if we know how to observe him at that instant when he is only a stranger, we are able not and forever, to know him in his truth; he reveals all the good will with which he is endowed, that is to say, the degree to which he is accessible to the world, what he can give and receive, the exact rapport that exists between himself and other men." Mennier notes that, "This immediate and intuitive understanding, this private fixing of the soul, how easy they are in a shop, a place of transition between street and house! And what discoveries are possible in a bookshop, through which inevitably pass, amid the innumerable passers-by, the Pleiades, those among us who already seem a bit to be 'great blue persons,' and who, with a smile, give the justification for what we call our best hopes. Selling books, that seems to some people as banal as selling any sort of object or commodity, and based upon the same routine tradition that demands of the seller and the buyer only the gesture of exchanging money against the merchandise, a gesture that is accompanied generally, by a few phrases of politeness.

     "We think, first of all, that the faith we put into selling books can be put into all daily acts, one can carry on no matter what business, no matter what profession, with a satisfaction that at certain moments has a real lyricism. The human being who is perfectly adapted to his function, and who works in harmony with others, experiences a fullness of feeling that easily becomes exaltation when his is in rapport with people situated upon the same level of life as himself; once he can communicate and cause what he experiences to be felt, he is multiplied, he rises above himself and strives to be as much of a poet as he can; that elevation, that tenderness, is it not the state of grace in which everything is illuminated by an eternal meaning? But if every conscious person can be exalted upon his every thought of gain and work that is based upon books, have loved them with rapture and have believed in the infinite power of the most beautiful."

     The bookshop owner reports that, "Some mornings alone in our bookshop, surrounded only be books arranged in their cases, we have remained contemplating them for moments on end. After a moment our eyes, fixed upon them, saw only the vertical and oblique lines marking the edges of their backs, discreet lines set against the gray wall like the straight strokes drawn by the hand of a child. Before this elementary appearance that is charged with a should made up of all ideas and all images, we were pierced through by an emotion so powerful that it sometimes seemed to us that to write, to express our thoughts, would solace us; but at the moment when our hand sought for pen and paper - somebody entered, other people came afterward, and the faces of the day absorbed the great ardor of the morning. We have often felt that 'all grace of labor, and all honor, and genius,' as Claudel says in 'La Ville (The City),' were granted to us; in that work there are many other words besides that seem written for us, and we can say with Lala….'As gold is the sign of merchandise, merchandise is also a sign…..Of the need that summons it, of the effort that creates it,……And what you call exchange I call communion'."

     "When we found our house (shop) in November 1915, we had no business experience whatsoever, we did not even know bookkeeping, and along with that we were so afraid of passing for paltry tradespeople, that we pretended without end, to neglect our own interests, which was childishness besides," records Monnier. "It is ordinarily believed that life extinguishes enthusiasm, disappoints dreams, distorts first conceptions, and realizes a bit at random what has been offered to it. Neveretheless, we can declare that at the beginning of our undertaking, our faith and our enthusiasm were much less great than they are today. Our first idea was very modest; we sought only to start off a bookshop and a reading room devoted above all to modern works. We had very little money, and it was that detail that drove us to specialize in modern literature; if we had had a lot of money, it is certain that we would have wanted to buy everything that existed in respect to printed works and to realize a kind of National Library; we were convinced that the public demands a great quantity of books above all, and we thought that we had much audacity in daring to establish ourselves with hardly three thousand volumes, when some reading-room catalogs announced twenty-thousand volumes, fifty thousand, and even a hundred thousand of them! Truth is that only one of our walls was furnished with books; the others were decorated with pictures, with a large old desk; and with a chest of drawers in which we kept wrapping paper, string, and everything we did not know where to put; our chairs were old chairs from the country that we still have. This bookshop hardly had the look of a shop, and that was not on purpose; we were far from suspecting that people would congratulate us so much in the future for what seemed to us an unfortunate makeshift. We counted upon our first profits to increase our stock without end. These first profits were above all based upon the sale of new and secondhand books, for we did not dare to hope to find subscribers to our reading room until after several months."

     She suggests, "One of the great problems of our commercial beginnings was the construction of an outside display stand for the secondhand sale. This operation required our presence for more than five minutes, during which we were exposed to the looks of the passers-by; we had to carry outside the trestles, the case, then the books and the reviews, which were old things that had come for the most part from family libraries. The first time that we made that display we were aroused to the point of anxiety, and when the last pile had been arranged, we escaped hurriedly into the back room of the shop, just as if we had played a bad trick on the passers-by; we looked through a gap in the curtain at what was for us an extraordinary spectacle, the formation of a little group in front of the books; the faces that appeared behind the shop window sometimes made us burst out laughing, sometimes shiver with apprehensions; if those people were to come in, address words to us! And here was an old lady who took a volume from the display and prepared herself to accomplish that grave act of becoming our first purchaser; one of us decided to emerge from the back room and stammered a ceremonious good day to the lady, who, with a very natural manner, showed what she had chosen - it was Henry Greville's 'L'Avenir d' Aline (The Future of Aline)' marked at seventy-five centimes; she had the kindness not to haggle; if she had haggled the situation would have become painful; we would have been torn between the temptation to give her the volume so that the deal might be more quickly settled and the duty of maintaining our really very modest price to show her that we were serious booksellers who did not charge too much. It was necessary all the same to wrap the book, tie it up with string, take the money, give the change out of a franc; thank effusively. That old lady, at last perceived the extraordinary emotion that she was provoking; she went away more troubled than she wished to let it appear and did not come back."

     I will make another return visit to see Adrienne Monnier, in tomorrow's blog, and I would like to highlight some of the meetings she and Sylvia Beach had with famous writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliott, and James Joyce. It's enough to make you want to open your own bookshop.

     There are times these days, when it seems the printed hard copy book is on the way out, so to speak. I am a loyalist, who while embracing the advances of technology, will never, ever, abandon a real book for an electronic device that claims to be its equal. Like a real Christmas tree…..there's a beautiful aroma of print, paper and binding, that just doesn't emit from an electronic device. My favorite book related movie, of course, was "84 Charing Cross," and to be in the book shop that was depicted in that movie……the dream of dreams. To be the proprietor of a shop of that calibre……well, a fellow can ponder the possibility…..can't he? Hope you can find some time to visit again tomorrow, as we make another visit to La Maison des Amis des Livres, in Paris, via the words of shop owner, Adrienne Monnier.

     Thanks for showing your support for book sellers, antique dealers, collectors and all the others, who love history and all the wonderful relics it leaves behind to cheerfully hunt and gather. Books? Just the tip of the proverbial iceberg? There's just so darn much to collect.