Publications

By Anthony Rota, President of Honour, ILAB, Bertam Rota Ltd.

Introduction:

Before I begin let me emphasise that I plan to talk about the book trade in the last 50 years and not my 50 years in the book trade (they don't run out till 2002). I rather suspect that I was asked to cover this subject in the expectation that I would spray a little instant nostalgia around the place. Well I will do my best. Much of what follows will be anecdotal, but these are not my memoirs. They are already written and I hope to see them published next year.

To compress the history of 50 years into 25 minutes is a well-nigh impossible task, so I have thought it best that we try to look together at some of the major changes we have seen since 1950. It has been said of the history of printing that there were more changes in the last 50 years than in the first 500. I suspect the same is true of bookselling. Certainly there has been change throughout the last half century, and moreover change at an ever-accelerating pace. I am glad my remit stops at the year 2000 for it is clear to me that the changes over the next 50 to 100 years are going to be the greatest of all.

Demand in 1952:

My firm put out its first catalogue in 1923. When I joined in 1952 we had reached Number 90. At that time it was quite usual for us to sell within, say, six to eight weeks ninety percent of the material that we offered, whether measured by value or by number of items. I should be very surprised if any of us, certainly those of us in the modern first edition market, could claim that kind of success today. The big difference was the dash for growth by the libraries attached to American institutions of higher learning. Thus twenty American university libraries might order from each of our catalogues, each of them taking between ten and a hundred items from us. For example, the University of Cincinnati would regularly buy any volumes of English poetry that we saw fit to list and that were not already on their shelves. Similarly the private benefactor of a New York library would take from the English fiction which we offered for sale any volumes which his alma mater did not already hold. How I yearn for orders such as those today.

At that time also it was the case that all the best items, all the most expensive items, went virtually automatically to the United States. That is no longer true. The domestic market seems to have improved dramatically and thank goodness for it, not least because, if collectors in the United Kingdom buy from us, we have a chance to re-purchase the books should they come back on the market later. What goes abroad tends, alas, to stay abroad.

Loss of large, street level, city centre bookshops:

Throughout the 1950s it was possible to buy for stock large quantities of good books - at least in my field of English literature of the last hundred years - by making a short tour - say three days - round the provincial bookshops of South East England. My wife and I would rise at dawn and drive across London before the traffic became heavy, pausing to take our breakfast at Tunbridge Wells. In that town one could invariably find good things at Harry Pratley's bookshop near the foot of the Pantiles. Everyone in the town seemed to know Harry, with his penchant for good works, and his pleasant and cheerful disposition: his high profile and enviable reputation meant that he was able to buy particularly well. On then to Rye where Gilbert Fabes, one time manager of Foyle's rare book department, and author of Modern First Editions, their Points and Values, had his shop. When we had made our selection there we would go to Fabes' home, a converted bus, propped up on bricks,at the foot of the hill in the pretty village of Winchelsea. It was a bus jam packed with books, often, to my eye, more attractive than the regular stock to be found in the shop. Then along the coast to Hastings, to Bexhill and to Eastbourne, this last to visit the eccentrically named bookshop of Glover and Daughter, and the antique shop of Mr Bonfiglioli, who used to avoid unwelcome customers by hiding behind the larger pieces of furniture in his stock. He allowed me access, he used to say, because the accident of my Italian ancestry enabled me to pronounce his name correctly. He had no large quantity of books for sale, but those he did have were interesting, unusual and always affordable. Thence to Mary Ranger's little shop at Seaford, to Bow Windows at Lewes and so to Brighton where Holleyman and Treacher, and George Sexton's shop in Ship Street always held good things. Even so the port of call I liked best in Brighton was at George Sexton's second shop, in Dyke Road, where his partner Mr Morley lived a troglodyte's existence in cavern-like premises that were for the book-hunter a veritable Aladdin's cave. When I think of the three-volume novels in mint condition that I bought from those premises wish I could have my time over again.

On the next morning, through Shoreham to Worthing, where Mr Miller had a nasty tendency to mark his books just a little too much, and thus to Vivien Meynell's at Chichester, where it was easy to combine business with pleasure, buying a few useful volumes while chatting with this scion of the distinguished literary family. And finally perhaps to Horsham before heading home. In three days one could fill the car till the springs creaked. If one made the same trip today I doubt that one could buy enough good books to fill one, or at most two, cardboard cartons. As Mark Cohen used to say in his shop at 84 Charing Cross Road, `Rare books are getting scarce!'

I expect I see most of the bookshops I have just named through nostalgia's rose-coloured spectacles. Most of them have gone and only a few have been replaced. What we have lost in particular are the large general second-hand bookshops that used to stand in the centre of virtually every market town in the country. They have been driven out by high town-centre rents and high local taxes, figures which seem only to be afforded by chains of shoe shops, car phone salesmen and travel agents. What is perhaps more important is that the former booksellers have lost to the auction rooms (principally the London auction rooms) the steady supply of good books from country libraries that used to be brought to their door.

Does this matter? Of course I am sad that this good buying territory is finished, but of greater significance is the fact that, with the loss of so many provincial bookshops, we have lost places for the training of aspiring booksellers and places for the new generation of collectors to cut their bibliographical teeth.

Auctions:

When I began in the trade auction houses were still wholesalers rather than the retailers they have since become, the book room at Sotheby's was not laid out like a theatre, with the seats in rows facing the auctioneer, even though the events were sometimes highly theatrical. Instead the auctioneer sat on the rostrum at the head of a pound, or inverted horseshoe. A porter would hold up each book, or a representative item from a Lot, as it came to be sold, and would then walk slowly round the pound, silently offering to show the book to any of the dealers seated at the tables that formed the boundary of the enclosure. Places at those tables were taken by regulars in strict accordance with custom and protocol. Indeed places could be said to pass from father to son, rather like the privileges that went with a porter's badge at Billingsgate fish market.

Under the auctioneer's left hand sat the head of Quaritch; like Maggs opposite him he was there to buy the rarest and most costly items; next to him somebody from Francis Edwards, perhaps Charlie Harris; then Thomas Thorp, perhaps Tom himself with his distinctive bottle-bottom spectacles, or perhaps his first assistant Wally Harris, his huge dome of a head crammed with book-lore; and after Thorp either Stanley Sawyer or his brother Raymond. At the end of the pound one would find Dawson's, Alan Thomas, Charles Traylen and Harry Mushlin. Going up the other side were Marks, Joseph, Dobell, Pickering, Maggs and lastly, just under the auctioneer's right hand, H M Fletcher. My father used to sit facing the auctioneer, somewhere between Sawyer and Alan Thomas.

Part of the fun of this arrangement was that it allowed for eleventh hour viewing. Dudley Massey of Pickering and Chatto (who must have grown very tired of hearing himself described as looking like Voltaire in profile) was a past master of this technique. Perhaps he had not viewed the sale at all during the posted viewing hours, or perhaps he had simply not looked at the Lot which was now on the auction block? In either case some instinct seemed to tell him that a bargain was about to be knocked down, so he would snap his fingers to attract the attention of the porter and, while bidding with his left hand, would use his right to collate the book in question and to weigh up its condition. A volume might rise in price by several hundred pounds during this performance.

Up the table from Dudley, Ernest Maggs's little white beard would wag like a demented semaphore flag when there was something rich enough to appeal to his firm's appetite, something that caused his head to nod to signal his bids. In between, Mark Cohen of Marks and Co, and Jack Joseph of the eponymous Charing Cross Road firm sat staunchly side by side through the whole of every sale, snapping up any unconsidered trifles that the other players let fall. Jack was the wag of the auction room. Between them Mark and Jack would buy every copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. If three copies followed one another as successive Lots and Jack bought the first for, say twenty pounds, when the auctioneer called the next Lot Jack would shout `Same as the last, sir' and would very probably have the Lot knocked down to him without another bid being offered. This was regarded as fair enough, and a useful time-saving tactic but Jack would also cry out "Same price, sir" if the next Lot were not the 13th edition of the Britannica, but, shall we say, a Nuremberg Chronicle, or even a Gutenberg Bible.

In those days we bought some of our greatest bargains at auction, when, for example, other bidders seemed not to have noticed some subtle hidden attraction of a particular Lot and we were able to buy it on or around the figure at which the auctioneer opened the bidding, a figure which we might not have had the effrontery to offer the owner by private treaty, lest we be thought to be robbers. Nowadays alas auctions do not offer bargains as frequently as they once did. Two Lots I especially remember were a large quantity of books and pamphlets from the S. Dominic's Press, and a portfolio of sketches and drawings from Max Beerbohm's studio at Rapallo. The S. Dominic's Press published books written or illustrated by Eric Gill and David Jones, among others. The press runs were comparatively short and editions were bound up in small batches, one batch often differing from the others in binding style. A lay brother who worked at the Press as the Order of S. Dominic's only true professional printer, once told me that every time the bell rang for another service, the amateur printers would troop out to the chapel only to return with new revisions in mind. Thus it is that the variants of S. Dominic's Press books are practically without limit. Certainly in our bargain

Certainly in our bargain Lot we found almost as many variants not described in Evan Gill's bibliography of his brother's work as we found actually listed.

The Beerbohm portfolio came to us by an interesting route. My father had spotted it in the catalogue quite late in the day and hadn't had time to view it thoroughly. Our friend Harry Mushlin was bidding on it and seemed set to go a long way. Instead of opposing him, my father let him buy it. I think £650 was the price. After the sale my father drifted over and congratulated Harry on his advantageous purchase. Harry swelled with pride. My father asked him if he had a ready buyer for it or if he was going to split the collection. Harry said he had no one waiting for it. "How much would you take for the whole portfolio?" my father asked. "£850" said Harry, counting a £200 profit a good reward for holding the lot for only an hour. "Done!" said my father, who would have had to pay much more if he had chosen to try to outbid Harry in the saleroom. We lived off the contents of that portfolio for several months.

Were these the "good old days" as far as auctions were concerned? Along with the fun there were drawbacks. Bundles of books were tied up not with tape, but with unyielding string that almost immediately cut into the boards of the front and back books in the Lot - and the top book in the bundle suffered the further indignity of having a little adhesive label pasted to its front cover.

Then, too, the ring flourished. To abolish the ring is rather like trying to abolish original sin, but the ABA can at least claim that it has very largely put its own house in order long since, and the ring is only a shadow of the evil institution it used to be.

When I first attended auction sales it was possible, if one asked nicely, to learn the auctioneer's estimate of what a particular lot might bring. The answer one got depended on who happened to answer the telephone. The general circulation of carefully considered estimates and the wide publicity given to them are comparatively recent phenomena. The problem with estimates of course is that they tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. You and I, as experienced professionals might dismiss an estimate as far too high, but to the uninitiated collector, if the auctioneer expects a Lot to bring a certain price, then that is what the collector thinks he must bid.

Bibliographies and Catalogues:

Although I have no statistics to prove it, I am quite sure that more catalogues are published by more dealers today than at any time in the trade's history. Certainly that view is supported by the number of catalogues arriving on my desk day by day. I would, moreover, suggest that the increase in numbers has been pretty much a straight-line appreciation throughout the half-century we are considering. None of this is surprising if one sees it as a consequence of the retreat from the High Street: the new breed of one-man specialist dealer has need of the catalogue in order to reach out to potential purchasers.

Again I have undertaken no research to prove the point, but I am sure that the standard of scholarship in catalogues has also risen, and continues to rise. The new generation of dealers seems to make good use of the flood of bibliographies published in recent times.

I remember Charles Harris Senior, for many years head of Francis Edwards, saying to me thirty years ago "It's easy for you young fellows today: it is all written down. We had to carry it in our heads". Certainly in my time in the trade I have seen our reference library double and then re-double in size. I could, if I wished, reel off the subjects of at least fifty author bibliographies from this period without pausing for breath. Don't worry: I promise not to. If anything, some dealers make too much use of this reference material.

Giving bibliographical citations for commonplace and straightforward books which present no bibliographical problems either to buyer or seller, and which need no reference number to identify them is superfluous at best.

Anyone with half an eye for a well printed page would have to agree that standards of catalogue production have improved dramatically, a number of dealers going to the best professional typographers to commission house styles.

Right up to the mid-point of the century it was relatively easy for a collector to get his name added to a bookseller's mailing list and relatively rare for a name to be removed. How all that has changed. Today I know of no dealer who does not regularly prune his mailing list, removing from it automatically those who have not ordered for a specific period of time. Nowadays this weeding-out process is applied almost as rigorously to libraries as to private collectors.

Book Fairs:

It would not altogether surprise me if there were dealers attending this congress who are under the impression that book fairs have run in a regular uninterrupted sequence from medieval times right through to the Fair which is due to open here in Edinburgh on Thursday, but that is not the case at all. Book fairs, as we know them, really began in 1957 when a group of about half a dozen booksellers from the provinces banded together and rented one of Sotheby's auction galleries for a week in the summer holiday season, when no auction sales were to take place. What these booksellers were effectively doing was giving themselves a London shop window.

The first ABA-sponsored fair took place in June 1958; twenty-eight booksellers took part. It comes as something of a shock to recall that the 1958 fair ran for sixteen long days. Then, as now, most of the business was done in the first twenty-four or forty-eight hours. A big leap forward came in 1971 when London was the scene of a congress of the International League: some ninety dealers applied to take part. Since then it has generally been onward and upward.

Is all well in the world of the book fair? Will fairs go on expanding in number? Will they be with us forever? The answers to those three questions are, I suggest, no, no, and probably. There was a period, notably in the 1980's, when the ABA fairs in London could not accommodate all would-be exhibitors, but waiting lists, such as those that used to be kept by the ABA, have disappeared: the difficulty now, not just for the ABA, is in finding occupants for all the stands that are available. I hear that the German association has just cancelled the Cologne Fair. Would-be exhibitors complain about the cost, although, seen as a percentage of average sales, stand rentals have remained surprisingly constant over the years. Regular visitors to fairs, particularly to those lower down the scale, remark on seeing the same books on the same stands at different venues month after month. Are these developments straws in the wind?

What are the good things about fairs? Certainly they present dealers with an opportunity to meet a number of customers in a short space of time. Equally, book-buyers have a chance to visit and talk to more dealers at a fair than they could otherwise manage in the proverbial month of Sundays. All those taking part can get an impression of the way the market is moving, of trends in collecting interest and of shifts in prices.

Fairs also present an opportunity for the book trade to win publicity for rare books and for collecting. They enable the dealers to demonstrate that it is not only at auction that books and manuscripts can command high prices. Taken overall it is probably the new dealer rather than the established one who has most to gain from the exposure that a fair can give. Moreover, I suspect that it is the generalist rather than the specialist dealer who benefits most in terms of sales.

The real problem that book fairs pose is to the future of bookshops. Despite the disadvantage of fairs and just the hint of the beginning of a diminution in their popularity, they still represent an easy way (some would say a dangerously easy way) of entry into the antiquarian book trade. The sad thing would be if that way became the only way.

Introducing the Computer

There was a time when Bertram Rota Limited was looked on as an innovative firm: I suspect that it is now regarded as ultra conservative. Be that as it may, we bought our first computer some eighteen or twenty years ago. We wanted it to do just two jobs: first to take care of the mailing list and to keep the accounts. We vowed we would never let a "mere machine" anywhere near the stock.

Rightly or wrongly we suspected that our customers liked their booksellers to do the accounts standing at a high desk wearing a green eyeshade and writing with a quill pen. We therefore tried to keep our acquisition of a computer secret. All went well for some time, until in fact there was a public holiday in the United Kingdom which the man who installed our systems thought would be perfect for doing a little maintenance work. Alas, he answered the telephone to an American librarian who wanted to know what it would be likely to cost to form a complete collection of the first editions of a certain late nineteenth century author. The systems man chose to explain his ignorance by saying he was "only the computer engineer" and, of course, the secret was out of the bag. His words seemed to spread across America quickly and inside seven days we had three more calls to ask if it was true. We lived that down but hastened to assure our callers that we would never turn the computer loose on such tasks as cataloguing, keeping stock records, and recording customers' wants. Within two or three years we had to eat our words - and how glad I am that we did so.

The Role and Status of Women

Growing up in the 1930s and 40s, visiting my father's bookshop at weekends and in the school holidays, I gained the very strong impression that his was a male-oriented world. In my early days in the firm I was only aware of one female customer who was a really serious book-collector. Women working in the book trade nearly all held secretarial positions. The few who ran their own businesses, perhaps inherited from their husbands, were always spoken of as `plucky little Mrs So-and-so', or brave `Mrs Such-and-such'.

How different the scene is today when women collectors are to be found on every hand, when many of the best booksellers running their own businesses are women, and where even such a traditional firm as Quaritch has women directors on its board. In the first seventy-seven years of its existence the Antiquarian Booksellers Association had just two women presidents. In the eighteen years from then until now there have been ten presidents, four of them women, each of whom has added lustre to the office.

Meanwhile in the fifty or so years of ILAB's existence distinguished women booksellers have played various important roles in its councils, but it is only now that the League has taken the long overdue step of electing a woman to its presidency. I am sure that by her example Kay Craddock will encourage other women to follow her until we reach the point where a candidate's sex pales into insignificance when compared to his or her ability to do the job.

Conclusion

Does the Web spell the end of conventional bookshops? Will dealers still publish catalogues of books for sale? The answer to the first question is an emphatic "no" and to the second a loud "yes". For anyone seeking a specific scarce text the Web offers a speedy solution but it is my belief that it is only appropriate up to a certain price level: above that the customer needs to be wooed, even seduced, by looking at the book itself and not an electronic description of it. Feeling the book firmly in the hand and perhaps sniffing its special aroma have no substitutes.