Exhibitors 1972

A safari to the remote corners of my own house this week – and from there to the attics of my mind.  In fact just having a clear-out to make way for all the fresh purchases (really must do a catalogue).  Then I came across a printed guide for the Antiquarian Book Fair to be held at the Europa Hotel, Grosvenor Square, on the 13th-15th June 1972 – “under the auspices” of the ABA.   

ABA Book Fair at the Europa 1972

“More than eighty exhibitors from the United States, Europe and Australia will display books and manuscripts, all of which will be for sale” is precisely as punchy as the copy gets – a little reticent, a little old-fashioned, perhaps – but a stylish little booklet, neatly designed and printed, gently understated, and a perfect fit for the pocket.  And it has a witty and not wholly respectful introduction by none other than Philip Larkin – “I should never call myself a book-lover, any more than a people-lover …” (it’s Bloomfield B11 if there are any Larkin completists out there – even memories have a price).  And there’s a modest statement at the back announcing that a certain Tom Stoppard will open the fair at 11.15 am on the first day – whatever happened to him I wonder?  (And yes that’s right, it wasn’t for shirkers – the fair was open from 11am until 8pm on all three days).   

There were eighty-nine exhibitors by my count (fourteen of them from overseas, twelve from Europe and in fact only one each from the USA and Australia).  And I remember the fair so very, very, well – it was the first bookfair I ever visited, probably the first I ever heard of (this was pre-PBFA remember).   I had been a second-hand bookseller for less than year, but already starting to buy the odd thing “in the rooms”, as we used to say – Hodgson’s, then of course, just a walk from my shop in the City, and at least a single visit to observe the ancient ritual and rigid hierarchy of the horseshoe table and the intimidating stares of the hardened veterans at Sotheby’s. 

A complete (and somewhat hirsute) stranger

I’d just returned from my first trip across the country looking for books – the precursor of so many since.  I remember the inordinate courtesy to a complete (and somewhat hirsute) stranger of Hylton Bayntun-Coward in Bath, allowing me a peek at a genuine first edition of Alice in Wonderland which had turned up somewhere in sheets and been sent to Bayntun’s for binding or boxing.  He offered me lunch too.  I suppose it helped that he had known my predecessors, Hugh Jones and Cyril Nash, and I had just helped him out with an enquiry in the shop about Denton Welch (not really I suppose a Hylton sort of author), but I can’t think that many of us have ever shown such grace, consideration and friendliness to a young tyro.

I remember too old Mr Day in Dorchester (if that indeed was his name – it was the name of the dark and ancient shop) showing me some wonderful Thomas Hardy firsts in cloth – and going on to say that actually he’d known Hardy, who was well-known in the shop back in Mr Day’s boyhood.  What is that they say about handshakes away? – but this is complete digression – the bookfair at the Europa.

Well, I knew a little bit and was learning fast, but that bookfair just blew me away – the variety and quality, the sheer spectacle and magnificence of what was on offer, the thrillingness of some of the books.  I was already in love with the second-hand book trade – but now I wanted more, much more.  My eyes had been fully opened.  And, at our best, we can still do this.  I met up with a contemporary at the Olympia fair last year – well-read, educated, thoughtful, intelligent, an artist and keen observer – but this, for some reason, was his first visit to a big bookfair.  He’s still talking about it, still bubbling with it, months later.  Let’s remember those days of innocence and marvel and keep that candle alight for our successors.

It was my first real experience of the vast majority of the exhibitors back then – daunting, impressive and forbidding figures who had somehow brought to the surface such magic things to display.  I imagine I spoke to some of them, but mainly I just gawped, hoping not to give my ignorance away.  Anthony Rota was president back then – or he may just have made way for Martin Hamlyn – but I imagine (complete guesswork, I don’t know), that it was Anthony who organised the appealing and impressive Larkin/Stoppard combo.  It was to be another twenty years before I knew Anthony well enough to think of him as a friend and colleague , but I do remember him telephoning me out of the blue to congratulate me on my first Modern Firsts catalogue (1975) – another gesture of grace and consideration to a novice which I am horribly afraid I have never quite matched.    

What strikes immediately about the list of exhibitors back in 1972 is how few of them are still around – only twenty of the UK exhibitors are still ABA members.  Of course death and retirement will take their necessary toll over a period of forty years: we have indeed lost three of them in recent months (Roger Baynton-Williams, Bill Duck and Paul Minet).  Some firms on the list certainly survive in the hands of younger generations or fresh owners – but it is rather sad that so very few of our enterprises are able continue down  the years in this way.  It is surely too high a rate of attrition – too high a rate of lost knowledge, knowledge not passed on – for any trade to be comfortable with.

Another striking feature is how many landmark shops have been lost, certainly in terms of ABA membership – Bain of Horsham, Beach of Salisbury, Brimmell of Hastings, The Castle Bookshop of Colchester, Chelsea Rare Books, the two Crowes – Stanley of Bloomsbury and Thomas of Norwich, Deighton Bell of Cambridge, Peter Eaton of Holland Park, David Ferrow of Great Yarmouth, Fisher & Sperr of Highgate, Galloway and Porter again of Cambridge, John Grant of Edinburgh, Heffer of Cambridge, Frank Hollings in Cloth Fair, Kegan Paul in Bloomsbury, Lloyd’s of Wimbledon, Rosenthal of Oxford, Harold Storey in Cecil Court, Traylen of Guildford, Trevers of Reigate, Ben Weinreb – the list goes on.

I believe the ABA had in all 376 members at that time.  It’s down to 237 now – a fall of 37% over the period.  Not something we can look at with complacency.  And the consequences, both cause and effect in a steady downward spiral, are clear: the annual subscription was then, I believe, £8.50, which equates to £87.50 now (Retail Price Index) or perhaps a better measure would be £148 now (Average Earnings).  Admittedly the ABA had no office and only one employee at that time, but the subscription only rose to £15 when an office and a part-time assistant secretary were acquired shortly afterwards.  That’s the equivalent of £141 (RPI) or £229 (AE) at today’s prices – while the actual ABA subscription now stands at £400. Again, not something to be viewed with complacency.  These are sobering figures – and will and must demand radical answers before too long.  Perhaps, as a start, we should all try to be as kind to young people  trying to make their way in the trade (however weird they look) as Hylton and Anthony were all those years ago.

Michael Holman

On the road again to hand out another of the ABA’s Fifty Years a Bookseller badges.  This time a trip to Lincolnshire with Vice-President Brian Lake (Jarndyce) to seek out our old friend Michael Holman now in retirement in Lincolnshire.  An early start as I rendezvous in North London with Brian, who has agreed to do the driving.

We reach Osbournby more or less without incident, barring a couple of minor mishaps with counter-intuitive and ill-signposted one-way systems in Stamford and Grantham (Jane, satnav queen, where were you?)  Discuss on the way some new ideas to spread the burden of ABA subscriptions more equally between the members at the head of the trade and those (most of us) nearer the foot.  Collect Michael and Dorothy H. – pausing to case the joint for any books which might have been overlooked and to admire his English watercolours.   Both Michael and Dorothy looking rather well – although both would perhaps admit to having reached the with all faults stage by now.  We meander through the distinctive Lincolnshire countryside to the rather splendid Bustard Inn at South Rauceby.  Michael  is greeted by a hug and a kiss from our hostess – the affection and popularity he has always inspired plainly undiminished with the passing years.

A fine lunch is produced and over it we talk through Michael’s fifty (rather more actually) years in the book trade – from selling new books in Sussex, moving to London, on the road for publishers, and in the sixties opening his first bookshop.  Trading as Anglebooks in Berkhamstead, he was a member of the PBFA from the outset (its first treasurer – although we know Dorothy did all the work) and elected to the ABA in 1974.  He later moved to Cecil Court in central London , where I first met him all those years ago.  Amiable, friendly, knowledgeable, keenly interested in both books and people (not necessarily the most common combination) – a natural raconteur, with all the timing and prodigious memory entailed in making that look easy. 

One of the many tales he told us – about the only one I’m ever going to repeat until the libel laws are repealed – was how he was elected to the ABA Committee in the early eighties on a ticket of healing the breach between the ABA and the PBFA (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose).  But even the most scurrilous tales (and there were one or two, maybe rather more) were told with affection and without a shred of malice.  Brian and I urge him to get it all written down for posterity – for posthumous publication if need be.   Michael recalls Adrian Harrington offering to bring a tape-recorder and just letting it run.  Get going, Adrian.  This is the real history of the rare book trade in the final third of the twentieth century.

Bless you, Michael – you have adorned the trade for many a year.  Universal affection isn’t won that easily.  Do get those memoirs written.  As you (or was it Dorothy) said on parting, “Only the good die young – we should be good for a few more years yet”.

Book Collecting Seminars 2012 (1)

Out and about this week – distributing flyers for the new series of seminars on book-collecting, which kicks off at Senate House (London University) next Tuesday with a session from the well-known and formidably articulate Rick Gekoski.  In a trade full of good talkers, he is still the best.  

Not part of the safari proper – too many people away at the book fair in California – and flying visits to too many ABA members’ premises to write about properly.   A list rather than a blog for this week – began at Jarndyce – no-one there yet  – stuffed some flyers through the letterbox.   On to Senate House itself, where I exchanged a bundle of the flyers for an equivalent number of similar flyers for the London Rare Books School.  On to Stephen Foster in Bell Street – flyers left, quick chat about the ABA.  Tried to persuade him to stand in the forthcoming elections for the ABA Council – something I would ask you all to consider (we badly need some new blood). 

Down to Jonathan Potter’s new premises  in George Street, between Baker Street and Marylebone High Street.  Descended from his eyrie above Bond Street, Jonathan returns to ground-floor retail premises in an interesting part of the world too long neglected by the rare book and map trade – we all wish him well.  Southwards to Bond Street and more flyers dropped off at Marlborough Rare Books and Pickering & Chatto – the size of their lift makes me seriously consider a diet.  Onwards to Maggs Bros. in Berkeley Square – quick cup of coffee with Carl Williams in the Maggs tea-room (think downstairs rather than upstairs).  Going to Maggs is always a bit like visiting royalty (which in the book trade they are) – and not just because they hold the royal warrant as Purveyors of Rare Books and Manuscripts to the Queen.  But no time to stop.  A quick word with Rachel Heslop at the splendid Heywood Hill in Curzon Street.   Speedy stop in Sotheran’s – and pop upstairs to the ABA Office in passing.   Across Piccadilly to Thomas Heneage and Sims Reed in Duke Street.  Round the corner to Daniel Crouch Rare Books in Bury Street.  And then across the dug-up Leicester Square to see our nine ABA shops in Cecil Court.   More than enough for one day – a glass of wine (or two) with Tim Bryars, Ken Fuller (Marchpane) and Angus O’Neill (Omega Bookshop) en route for home.

Out again in earnest on Saturday.   Leave a hundred flyers for our friend Tim Pye at the British Library.  Down to Victoria.  Amble into Sangorski & Sutcliffe in Rochester Row –  Rob Shepherd’s away in California, but a quick chat with Kim Pooley.  Across to Classic Bindings in Cambridge Street.   Circle Line round to Adrian Harrington’s  in Kensington Church Street – slightly odd conversation with Pierre Lombardini about what we might call a tête-bêche binding in English.  Back to Robert Frew – Robert away in Pasadena, but his assistant greatly looking forward to Tuesday’s seminar.    Down to Peter Harrington – try to sell Ian a copy of British Map Engravers.   Across the road to Charles Russell (Russell Rare Books) – interesting conversation about how the rare book world has changed in our time – the demise of the runner – the loss of certainty as to what will sell and for how much.  Food for thought – a topic to return to.  Buy a book and bump into Barry McManmon down for a bookfair.  And – by now seriously footsore – one final stop at the World’s End Bookshop on the King’s Road.  Bus home in time for tea.  Feet up by the fire.

Do come along and enjoy the seminars – and if you would like some flyers, there are some left.  Just let me know.

Book Collecting Seminars 2012 (2)

Paul and Sheila Minet - Paul receives his Honorary Membership

The ABA occasionally awards someone with an honorary membership.   These are most often given to luminaries from outside the immediate world of rare book dealers, but who are deemed nonetheless, as the citation runs, to have rendered “signal service to the antiquarian book trade”.  Far more rarely is the honour given to one of the ABA’s own members – and the only grounds here are that they should have rendered truly “exceptional” service to the Association. 

The ABA Council voted unanimously to make this award to Paul Minet just a fortnight ago.  Undoubtedly long overdue.  A small party – myself, past-presidents Adrian Harrington and Raymond Kilgarriff (himself one of just a handful of booksellers to have received this honour), together with Adrian’s wife, Hermoine, and John Critchley from the ABA office – was despatched to Sussex to make the presentation and to give Paul the accompanying badge.  Paul was extremely ill and no longer able to speak, but plainly understood our mission and favoured us with the occasional truly radiant smile as we took it in turn to pay him tribute.  A week later, as most of you will know by now, he died.    

I suspect he was the most widely-known member of the trade of his generation.  I first met him when I sold him a store-room full of books for pence each perhaps forty years ago.  Stephen Foster,  whom I was chatting to yesterday, can remember meeting him as a boy on a book-buying trip with his father to Salisbury Market back in the sixties.  Paul was there exhibiting with Gerry Mosdell and the other pioneers at the first-ever PBFA monthly fair in London in 1972 – and a familiar presence at all sorts of bookfairs down the years.  At various times he sold books in all sorts of ways in all sorts of places right across the south of England.  Everyone knew Paul – no-one had a bad word to say – and of course we knew him, if not in person, then through his monthly Book Chat column in the Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, which he founded in 1974.  He ran the magazine for years, was its star columnist – and no-one has ever come near to replacing it as a truly popular, occasionally outspoken, and thoroughly read (rather than simply admired) book trade journal.

In truth, this whole President on Safari thing was originally his idea.  When he became president in 1998, he mentioned something to me about trying to get round the country to see as many members as possible during his presidency.  I’m not sure quite how far he got – but a number of people I have visited in the last few months have said that he was certainly the last acting president they had seen in their immediate vicinity.  And it was as president, as John Critchley reminded us last week, that he took John on and revitalised the ABA Office.

We owe him so much.  We recall his quiet and discreet generosity.  His sense of fittingness and probity.  We enjoyed his Late Booking : My First Twenty-Five Years in the Secondhand Book Trade  (1989) – an engaging memoir of bookselling in all manner of forms – and his lifelong pursuit of the ideal browsing bookshop.  His Bookdealing for Profit (2000) was already then grasping the nettle of where the internet was taking us and prophetic of its probable impact on the trade.  He was ABA treasurer as well as president.  I doubt that the ABA centenary history, Out of Print & Into Profit (2006), would have appeared without his silent work behind the scenes.  He also contributed three of the most readable essays in it – he could write enviably well, as natural a journalist as he was a bookseller.  

And there was so much else to his busy and bustling life – trustee of the Huguenot Society and the French Hospital at Rochester, feoffee of Chetham’s Library, publisher of reprints, editor and publisher of The British Diarist, and who knows what else.  A man burning with energy and ideas.

Thank you Paul – you were our conscience and our mirror.  Our thoughts are with Sheila and his family.   Paul Piers Brissault Minet FSA (1937-2012) – Requiescat in Pace.

Among Booksellers

“Booksellers are often rather odd.  This is not surprising since we have all managed to escape or avoid more regular forms of work.

It is also a trade for which there are no rules.  It can be conducted from a shop in Bond Street, from a barrow or from a car-boot.  Some booksellers get most of their books from sales, some by clearing houses;  others, like myself, simply by buying books from other booksellers’ shops”.

So begins David Batterham’s book, Among Booksellers : Tales Told in Letters to Howard Hodgkin (Stone Trough Books, 2011) – because David has essentially been on a safari to bookshops all his working life.  And writing about it too – with style and panache.  

Dealing in books which, as he says, “one can enjoy without having to read” – the illustrated and the picturesque – “trade catalogues, fashion magazines and other illustrated journals, typography, political caricatures, architectural pattern books”, etc. – he is not particularly constrained by considerations of locality or language.  The wider world is his canvas.  Here we have a selection from his  apparently one-sided correspondence with the artist Howard Hodgkin – letters written between 1970 and 2006 from places as varied as San Antonio (Texas), Tunisia, frequently Paris (and elsewhere in France), Venice, Barcelona, Copenhagen, New York, Lisbon, Porto, Brussels, Madrid, Istanbul – oh, and Morecambe.

David has the enviable ability to sum up the style and character of a bookseller or a bookshop to a nicety in a few short phrases – “a flamboyant fellow dressed in English milord-style tweeds. He speaks perfect but somehow archaic English, ‘chums’ and so on.  I think he must have been to an English public school in Estoril or even Brasil” – he notes of one ABA member.  And as he was writing privately to a friend, he evidently felt no particular need to hold back – at least two past presidents of the ABA are shown in a less than flattering light (you won’t find either of them in the index provided of “People in the Text”, any more than you will any of the other booksellers mentioned – no cheating, you have to read it all).

For those of you who have been enjoying any or all of these recent posts, this is undoubtedly a book for you – a safari  writ large and writ honestly – the author is as unsparing of himself as he is of others.  And (as a bonus) I don’t believe there is a single reference in it anywhere to the internet.  Margaret Drabble summed it up in a review as “An extraordinary portrait of the strange, eccentric world of dealing and collecting, with its chance encounters, its crazed characters, its obsessions and its loneliness”.  This perhaps tells us more about her than about the book – the good fellowship seemed to me to come through more clearly than the odd lonely night in an eccentric hotel (which David appeared to relish in any case – the more eccentric the better).

The First Lady greatly enjoyed it – “What a lovely life”, she said somewhat wistfully, plainly seeing me as having failed abysmally in making a similar life anywhere near as interesting or exciting – and going on to wonder and rather loudly and rather publicly why she hadn’t been taken on buying trips to any of these exotic places.

 Thank you for that, David.  Morecambe it is for the holidays.

Ken Spelman

Gentle start to the day as the train whisks me south along the glorious north-eastern coastline – all the old familiar sights.  I alight at York at mid-day and hasten through the rain to Ken Spelman’s on Micklegate.  Sorry to miss past-president, Peter Miller, who has just left for the weekend book-fair in Oxford, but chat happily away to Tony Fothergill, his partner and soon to be successor.  Tony is, of course, one of the driving forces behind the outstanding success of the York fair (see Going to the Races below) and I am very happy to have recruited him to inject the same kind of flair into the big ABA summer fair at Olympia.  He’s working hard with the rest of the Olympia team on that.

Tony Fothergill

Pick out a few books – another Tennyson in a sweet contemporary binding – you can just see it in front of Tony in the picture.  Tony is awaiting, with perhaps just a touch of nerves, the arrival of a TV crew intent on filming a forthcoming instalment of the BBC’s Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.  

Paul Hayes

BBC and Sun antiques expert Paul Hayes is to present Tony with a book bought in France – and try to sell it to him at a vast profit.  From what Tony knows in advance this is rather likely to be an uphill battle, but let’s not rush to judgement.   The crew arrive just as I am settling up, and I have a quick chat to Paul.  Only too ready to agree with him that the survival of proper bookshops like this on into the twenty-first century is a boon and a blessing to us all.  Acres of books, rewardingly priced.  Treasure it, people of York.

Lucius Books

Across to Fossgate – for once managing not to get lost in the meandering York streets – and to Lucius Books.   James Hallgate, young (certainly by book trade standards), energetic and ambitious, has put together a truly outstanding stock of mainly modern material.  He has a wide reputation for getting out and about to hunt down the material (he’s just off to Holland in search of more).  

James Hallgate

The smallish shop abounds with high-spots – and his new catalogue is mightily impressive.  No difficulty here in putting together a little collection of books I am very pleased to have – a nice first of Braine’s Room at the Top in the Minton dust-jacket (one of those 1950s novels which really has stood the test of time – try reading it again), a couple of Graham Greenes and some crime fiction, including a super scarce Gladys Mitchell.  Having a fine time.

Janette Ray

Next to Janette Ray and her shop in a mediaeval building leaning up against the walls of St. Mary’s Abbey.   Janette’s another of the potent forces driving the York Fair – and one of the sharpest and most clear-sighted members of the current ABA Council.  Architecture, design and photography are her fields – and the design element shows in the look and feel of the shop, the look and feel  of her website, and hopefully the rebranding exercise she is currently undertaking for the look and feel of the ABA.  She apologises for the shop being in disarray – a major reorganisation is taking place with piles of books moving from floor to floor – but it all looks perfectly orderly and under control to me.

Janette Ray

She introduces me to her Fridays-only assistant, Amy.  Always fascinated in the other lives of these almost invariably interesting characters who help out in bookshops part-time, I ask Amy what she does in real life.  Turns out that she is an artist – but not just that, hers are the sketches gracing the current BBC serialisation of Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong .  Whenever the hero produces his sketchbook and we see a drawing of Clemence Poesy, Joseph Mawle or dead soldiers – that’s Amy McKay’s work (link to the right in the blogroll).  Do try and watch tonight.  She also tells me that she may be working on something similar with the great Stephen Poliakoff in the near future – how exciting is that?

All so interesting, I’ve almost forgotten to look at the books – but that’s soon remedied.  Another little group bought.  The cheque-book has now literally coughed and died.  The one I gave to James Hallgate was the last in the book.  Have to give Janette a personal cheque – but by this time there is almost certainly more in that account than in the business account.  Train home to recuperate and await the parcels.

Nairn & Watson - John Updike Rare Books

A fine Edinburgh morning – utterly clear and cloudless sky – sea bright and blue (you can just about see it from Elizabeth Strong’skitchen window if you crane enough and stand on one leg).  Healthy breakfast with Elizabeth and her niece – muesli, nuts and some seedlike things I can’t quite identify (and about half a pot of the wonderful home-made marmalade). 

I stroll up to see the boys at John Updike Rare Books.  Far too long since I’ve visited – over coffee we try to work out exactly how long.  Not entirely sure – but very good to see them again.  Really no idea how long Edward Nairn and Ian Watson have graced the book trade – but both bright as buttons still and no sign of retirement.  Indeed, to judge from the pile of fresh books which has just been passed to Nick Sherington to catalogue, the pace isn’t even letting up.  I’m torn between trying to get at the books before Nick does and utter fascination at what he’s typing away it – can it be, yes it is, it’s what we used to call a typewriter.  Not a computer in sight around here.  

Yes, That is a Typewriter

Slightly reluctant to blog about this as the premises feature prominently on the book trade’s  highly classified map of secret places to find books which haven’t been, aren’t being, and won’t be listed on the internet.  You have to go there (by appointment) – or at least ask for one of their excellent printed catalogues and make your order (the books arrive in proper parcels of string and brown paper, individually wrapped and layered in delicate and origami-like folds of corrugated).  And when you get there, you sometimes have to be prepared to move furniture around, crawl behind armchairs, squeeze into improbable spaces, and generally do some more of the craning and standing on one leg to see everything.   Some of the best books are on the stairs, says Edward – I touch mischievously I thought as I ascended the stairs on hands and knees without finding anything to add to my pile.  

But don’t for a moment think that anyone here is in any way out of touch.  The place is full of delightful books – always some you have never seen before, a caseful of choice books from the eighteen-nineties, a caseful of the rare and not quite forgotten first books of a whole range of authors, a caseful of signed modern firsts – including contemporary authors who can only have been born long after the boys started dealing.  I end up with a nice little stack of purchases – about enough to fill two boxes – but I seem to have lost track of time for a while.  When I emerge, it’s a completely different day – leaden, overcast and freezing.

Grant & Shaw

Down the road and across the street to visit Alan Grant (Grant & Shaw Ltd).  Alan’s somewhat unusual in the book trade in actually having some sort of formal qualification (an MA in Bibliography and Textual Criticism from Leeds).  Originally intending to become a rare book librarian, he escaped into the headier world of dealing via stints with R. & J. Balding and Blackwell’s.  The stock is, as you might expect, genuinely and solidly antiquarian – scholarly, sober and serious.  A first edition of Tennyson’s Maud (1855), which I presently buy,  is about the most modern book there.  The books are carefully chosen and excellent examples – taste and discernment, quality not quantity.  I pick out a few more books – two from the Fasque House library of the Gladstone family – one at least that the Grand Old Man of British politics would have grown up with.  It warms in the hand in that knowledge.

Alan Grant

By the time Alan and I pop out to have some lunch it is pouring with rain – what happened to that fine and sunny morning?  And by the time we sit down to eat in a quiet Italian restaurant it is actually snowing.  A pleasant lunch – thank you, Alan.  Soup and sardines for me.  I resist his invitation to adjourn to the Oxford (the First Lady has given particular and very precise instructions on this point – she has never fully recovered from a night out with Alan and Cooper Hay at the Chelsea Arts Club), but wish him well, agree to see him again at the Edinburgh Book Fair in March, and take advantage of a break in the weather to wend my way across to McNaughtan’s Bookshop.

McNaughtan's Bookshop

Watery sunlight as I walk across town.  I compliment Audrey, Elizabeth’s assistant, on the place looking tidier than I have ever seen it.  

McNaughtan's

Half of it now turned into a gallery – with some of Elizabeth’s own paintings on view in the latest exhibition.  Proper old-fashioned second-hand bookshop – books on all subjects – modestly priced.  More expensive (but still modestly priced) books under lock and key.  Just looking at those when Sophie Schneideman breezes in – just in Edinburgh for the day, about to head off for the airport and acting slightly mysteriously. But evidently pleased with the outcome of her mission, whatever it may have been – a spectacular purchase? a magnificent sale?  Really don’t know.  I buy a book I wouldn’t have noticed had she not been looking at it.  (You will perhaps have noticed how another bookseller showing even a flicker of interest in a book always makes it that much more enticing). 

Making Elizabeth Laugh

Elizabeth returns from visiting her father and I present her with a large cheque (a little too large as it later turned out) and a small pile of books for posting on to me.  I can’t quite remember what I said to make her laugh so much – but obviously it wouldn’t have been an indiscreet comment about the ABA Council.  A good day’s work among some of the most pleasant people you could ever wish to meet.

One of Elizabeth's Tanera paintings - Note the Oystercatcher

Cooper Hay Rare Books

My Glasgow hotel had a sort of Rennie Mackintosh theme – at least, that is, until you got to my room, which seemed to have disappeared down a wholly different avenue of Scottish art – think  Landseer in Monarch of the Glen mode given a makeover by Walt Disney.  The bedside light also had the darkest and most opaque lampshade I’ve ever encountered – I swear the room got darker when you switched it on.  Certainly couldn’t read by it.  The hotel also stood at the top of the steepest hill I’ve ever seen – a mountain goat would have baulked at it – far too forbidding for a portly president – I walked round the (very) long way.   So steep in fact that I couldn’t even bring myself to walk down it the next day.  But, hey – it was by far the cheapest British hotel (courtesy of Late Rooms) I’ve stayed in for over twenty years:  clean, comfortable and the breakfast wasn’t at all bad for a Scottish breakfast as interpreted by mittel-Europeans.   And the coffee (which admittedly didn’t arrive until about twenty minutes after the breakfast) was really rather good.  Not complaining.  Not complaining at all.

Inside Cooper Hay Rare Books

Just the thing to set me up for an early morning visit to Cooper Hay Rare Books in Bath Street.  I find Cooper grappling with Janette Ray’s adamantine rules about the only possible correct usage of the new ABA logo in relation to the posters for the forthcoming Edinburgh Book Fair (link to the right) in March.  Problem seems to readily solved.

Cooper Hay

Meanwhile I’m looking at the books.  The thing about Cooper’s stock  is that all the books are in such lovely condition – no matter what it is – an expensive book or a cheap one, it can be relied on to be just the perfect example of whatever it happens to be.  Purring with delight as I unpack his parcel just now – four charming and unusual nineteenth-century books for children, a beautifully bound copy of a Pickering edition of Bacon’s Essays, a John Buchan and a Lytton Strachey.  Very pleased to have them – and very happy with the prices paid. 

Cooper's Dipping Powder

Cooper is another graduate of Smith’s of Glasgow – not sure whether he took over the antiquarian department from George Newlands, or George took over from him – but the official history of the firm apparently gets it wrong in any case.  And now we set off together to the station to meet up with Marianne (Mrs Cooper H.) and catch a train to Edinburgh for the main event of the day – lunch with the Scottish branch of the ABA.   Pick up our way through the Edinburgh tram excavations (how long has that been going on?) to Rutland Square and the Scottish Arts Club.

The Scottish Arts Club

Open fires and a warm welcome – and what a good turn out – booksellers, spouses, partners, a few friends and even a couple of auctioneers.  Alex Fotheringham full of praise at the outcome of our ABA meeting with the British Library recently.  Puts in a good word about a young bookseller in the north.  Alan Grant (Grant & Shaw) is there.   My very dear friend Elizabeth Strong (McNaughtan’s Bookshop), one of our past presidents, is there.  And another past president – Senga Grant, now retired as a bookseller, but still likes to be kept in touch on ABA matters (although, she promises me, she wouldn’t dream of trying to tell the current elected Council how to go about its business).  Collector and scholar Dr Bill Zachs is there.  The Ian Watson half of the John Updike Rare Books partnership is there (Edward Nairn not quite up to it today, but then he has turned ninety) – I swiftly make an arrangement to go and see them the following morning.  David Brayford (Jay Books) is there.  Larry Hutchison, another stalwart of the Scottish trade is there.  And there – yet again – is that man George Newlands – the third time I’ve sat down with him in as many days.

And Domhnall MacCormaig is there – I chat with him about Scottish independence, a good young bookseller on the Isle of Skye, and Domhnall’s own impending move to North Uist in the Outer Hebrides.  He suggests we should have an ABA Book fair there.  Challenging, I say – but we could call it the Book Fair at the Ends of the Earth.  I think I’ll get the ABA Office to carry out a feasibility study (just out of badness).

Bookshops in the West Port

Pringle Booksellers

An excellent and convivial lunch, thank you all so much for a delightful time.  We all agree to see each other again in a few weeks’ time at the Edinburgh Fair – a joint enterprise which we put on in collaboration with the PBFA – and always the jolliest fair of the year.  Just enough daylight left for me to saunter down to the bookshops of the West Port in the Old Town.  Andrew Pringle’s away on holiday – shame to miss him (I’ll be back in March) – but I find Peter Bell still there after so many years.  He entertains me agreeably and pithily on the woes and pitfalls of the modern trade – but is clearly still enjoying himself very much.  Buy a few more books (another parcel just arrived and ready to open) – and then wander off to meet up with Elizabeth Strong, with whom I am staying.  The only things I know steeper than the hotel hill in Glasgow are the endless flights of stairs up to Elizabeth’s flat in the New Town.

The PBFA National Executive Committee

A very interesting day last week as I sat in (as a guest) on a meeting of the National Executive Committee of the British rare and secondhand book trade’s other association – the PBFA (Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association).   A decided contrast in styles – the PBFA meeting decidedly less abrasive than some we have known recently in the ABA (although someone later dropped a probably indiscreet hint that my presence had meant best behaviour all round – let’s hope and see if the same is true when I invite my PBFA counterpart, George Newlands (McLaren Books) to sit on in the ABA’s March Council meeting).   George is of course also a member of the ABA – just as I am a member of the PBFA – in the slightly muddled world of book trade organisation we have somehow managed to bring about.

The PBFA National Executive Committee

Other contrasts too – the Committee members are decidedly regional representatives in a way that the ABA likes its elected Council to turn out, but does not always quite succeed in so doing.  And the PBFA, although a much larger organisation, putting on vastly more fairs, seems to manage with a slightly smaller Council.  It also seems to manage without the ABA’s plethora of sub-committees, most of the work being devolved to its permanent staff (and of course the local fair managers on the ground).

But there the differences more or less end – the discussion round the table was remarkably similar in most respects and any number of common themes and identical problems emerged.  Both associations rely heavily on the goodwill of members giving up their time to organise and get things done – and the pool of volunteers both competent and willing is always smaller than one might wish.  And both associations are proving ill-adept at recruiting the younger booksellers who work more or less exclusively via the internet and see no need to exhibit at book fairs or to belong to a trade association.  I hate it when people talk about becoming more “relevant” – a screechy blackboard word if ever there was one – but I don’t know quite how else to put it.

Late Afternoon in Helensburgh

It was actually a complete coincidence dictated by train timetables and expense that I started my Scottish tour with a visit to the self-same George Newlands in his lair at McLaren Books

McLaren Books

in Helensburgh, where the Clyde broadens out into the Firth.  Stunning views across to Greenock and Port Glasgow as I strolled along the front in late afternoon the very next day – ducks and swans on the foreshore.  All about the sea hereabouts, and George is of course a specialist in books naval and maritime – ships, yachts, boats and everything about them.  A dense stock of books in his chosen area, a man happy in his work – and a man who gives a great deal back to the trade.  

George Newlands

We fall to discussing how we started off in the book trade – and realise with a start that at one point in our now distant youth we must both have applied for the very same job with a small chain of new bookshops in and around the City of London.  George got it – I didn’t (let’s leave it there).  From that, George migrated north to work for the celebrated Smith’s of Glasgow – first in new books, then in their antiquarian department – and later on to an independent career.

We adjourn to have a cup of tea and a cake in George’s new house on the seafront at occasionally stormswept Craigendoran – views clear across to Dunoon from here – and cellarage large enough to absorb all his stock when the shop finally closes.  A very pleasant afternoon – and I jump on a train to my next stop, Glasgow.

In the meantime, check out some of the links over to the right – the new video on the Bibliodeviant’s blog is, as he says, just glorious;  ABA website editor Beatie Wolfe’s fabulous singing;  all the details of the new seminars on book-collecting;  the ABA’s own blog, Shelf Fulfillment.  And even the Uggs Song.  Plenty to entertain there.