A mixed bag of memories
Nicolas Barker
OUT OF PRINT AND INTO PROFIT: A HISTORY OF THE RARE AND SECOND-HAND BOOK TRADE IN BRITAIN IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY edited by Giles Mandelbrote British Library/Oak Knoll Press, £30, pp. 414, ISBN 0712349200 In 1958, half way through the century here recorded, the late and much lamented National Book League put on the first ever antiquarian book fair, with 24 members of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association exhibiting. ‘We hope,’ wrote The Book Collector, ‘that the ABA will be encouraged to make this an annual event.’ It did, and in the process transformed the way old books were bought and sold (a fact unnoticed here). It became the custom for some celebrity (or what passed for one) formally to open the fair. One year it fell to my turn. I had noticed that all previous openers had always said, sententiously, how much they owed to the booksellers they knew. I thought I would go one better; I too, I said, owed much to the booksellers I knew, and I read out the names and the sums outstanding. This went down like a lead balloon on the few listening booksellers (the rest were too busy trading). But it was an important point. In the 19th century, Joseph Lilly wrote to Lord Lindsay, who had complained that he had had no statement of account for two years, ‘It is more valuable to me to own your Lordship’s debts than to have your Lordship’s money.’ He meant it; not only were they negotiable when it came to buying more stock, they were a moral bond that linked book-buyer to bookseller. Blackwell’s used to price their books ‘8/6 (7/cash)’, clearly preferring the former — indigent undergraduates could become rich later and buy more books.
There is not much of this in the ABA’s new conspectus (the title is silly — when did a bookseller ever admit to making a profit?). It is not a conventional history at all. There are very few dates, and chronology is abandoned in favour of essays on different subjects, 22 in all. Rather too many are anecdotal, though there are some good one-liners, and there is too much repetition. The writers seem more interested in the booksellers than in the kind of books that they sold (more booksellers than books in the index), though the ups and downs of subjects, theology, topography and literature, the irregular growth of the sciences, deserve consideration. They skirt round the infamous ‘ring’. The economic pressures that drove the second-hand bookseller away from the shop-window on the high street to the surplus country vicarage, and thence to the now ubiquitous book-fairs, do not come into it at all.
That said, the anecdotes are good value. Bob Pirie’s transatlantic memoirs (asked to leave Francis Edwards, so that the partners could enjoy their tea undisturbed by customers) rival Dave Magee’s. Anthony Hobson magisterially recalls the Phillipps sales. Michael Harris preserves the memory of the London street barrows, now almost extinct. There are essays on bookshops in the West Country, Scotland and Northern Ireland (but not the South), and London. Others deal with the rise and fall of institutional buying, the vogue for ‘made collections’ (a Kohler speciality), and ‘patterns of collecting and trading’ (Pearson and O'Neill). Most deal with the last 50 years or so, but Henry Woudhuysen’s long and valuable account of catalogues — who catalogued what, how, and for whom covers the whole period.
The biographical vignettes are lively, especially A. S. G. Edwards’s on scholarly booksellers and Arnold Hunt’s on three great exotics, Maurice Ettinghausen, E. P. Goldschmidt and W. M. Voynich. Voynich is the only bookseller to have his name as a shelf-mark in the British Museum (now British Library), and channelled the proceeds of selling it unique Italian books to support the Russian Revolution through his friend Stepniak; his wife, Ethel Boole, was the author of the best-selling novel The Gadfly. Marc Vaulbert’s ‘Bookseller’s Memoirs’ comes nearest to ‘the truth about the trade’, in particular about ‘84 Charing Cross Road’; he is the only writer, too, to recall Gustave David, hero to so many Cambridge bibliophiles that the University offered him the choice of a dinner in his honour or an MA. Unhesitatingly he chose the former, cried during the speeches and then went to sleep; they gave him the degree, too. But where is John Carter’s brilliant ‘Epilogue’, where Stanley Smith and the Marchmont Bookshop, the Davis-Jepson ménage à trois, and Norman Colbeck of 100 Ophir Road, Bournemouth, who issued but one catalogue in an edition of one copy only for John Hayward?
The temptation to ask, Twist-like, for more is not fair; better be grateful for what there is — lots of pictures, for one thing, all evocative. But what about the smell of old bookshops? It has subtly changed over the century. It used to be more various, from the forbidding damp old newspapercum-mouse of the most basic to the elevated sherry-and-British Museum mixture of the Robinson brothers’ immaculate shelves. Albi Rosenthal could tell a Goldschmidt book by his individual Turkish cigarette smoke, as John Carter the sinister trace of washed leaves. G. V. M. Heap’s apples floated down from the attic above, and James Stevens Cox’s toucans flavoured his stock rather differently. Nowadays it is more antiseptic, although the hot, acid, charcoaly smell can give away a photocopied jacket. Out of Print and into Profit smells reassuringly of printer’s ink. And the book itself? Potpourri, plum pudding or curate’s egg? Bit of all three, perhaps.
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