The Thrill of the Paper
DAVID MASON delves into the previously unknown-to-him trade in paper artifacts and begins collecting even more.Published in Amphora, Number 192.
THE FIRST TIME I attended a Paper Show I was astounded. I found that underneath the book trade where I operated, there was a whole world of which I was unaware, where all the ephemeral paper artifacts which we booksellers ignored, if they weren't letters, manuscripts, or broadsides, were sold. I had gone because a couple of booksellers I knew had taken booths, but I ended up entirely absorbed in all the paper artifacts these unknown people were offering, of which I was largely ignorant.
They had every paper form of communication extant: stamps, comic books, advertising examples in many forms back into the 19th century, often realised in glowing colour printing. There were many postcard seekers huddled over the ubiquitous shoeboxes dealers use to show them, magazines of every conceivable sort, even the beloved Big Little Books of my childhood and the Classic Comics which introduced me and many others to real literature. There were 19th- and early 20th-century dime adventure novels with fantastic, coloured covers, every possible form of presenting stories and advertisements. And all very cheap to my eye.
What most amused me and resulted in new purchases which became the beginning of one of my favourite collections, were children's games in cheap cardboard boxes with the lids brightly illustrated in coloured modes of the period. I now have a fairly large collection which I mainly built just by buying one or two every time I saw one in fine condition. Most of those I now know are found in shabby condition due to all those rainy afternoons where they were the grounded kid's entertainment. I didn't know this in the beginning; I was simply operating with the primary rule that if you buy things only in fine condition, you can't go too far wrong, no matter your ignorance.
Here we are presented with a good example of what can transpire with collecting. Almost by accident, one casually buys examples over a period without thinking much about it, then one day looking closely we realise a good basic collection has been formed. There is a point where an accumulation suddenly crosses an invisible line and becomes a collection. That, of course, is when it can become quite expensive, but the thrills far outweigh any regret.
One day, assembling them for a piece for Canadian Notes & Queries,l I found I had a pretty good collection. At that first show I barely looked at any books and I bought quite a lot, starting or expanding several collections.
I go now to every show and on top of the great pleasure I've had, I've expanded greatly my knowledge of popular culture which in turn has expanded my feel for how it fits together with what I already make my living from.
I have also bought many things which I've sold through normal channels at considerable profit. Naturally, I used this profit to justify my personal indulgences, thereby converting money into yet more piles of junk which Debra Dearlove will need to deal with when I'm gone.
And on top of everything else I've amassed another thousand or so stories.
One of the many minor collections I pursue at paper shows is ephemeral advertisements for bookstores and bookbinders. I started with the 19th century then progressed up into the 20th century, but lately I've expanded my focus up to the beginnings of my own time in the trade. With this latest expansion I began with dealers I've known who are now dead, but lately I've even begun to acquire early adverts, business cards, and bookmarks of living dealers when I see their different early ones. Last year a customer gave me a letter on my own stationary from my Gerrard Street store and just last week I encountered an old, browned card from my Church Street store. I even have a letterhead from my first address when I began dealing from my house on Ward's Island in the bay across from the city. So, collecting history has even caught up to me. The other day my colleague Dan Mozersky gave me a folder of quotes and letters when I was selling him things as a client in the '70s, and I was delighted to get it. Invoices, business cards, and even advertisements from the past give me great nostalgia when I see them. In a hundred years they will give vital, often quite important, information to scholars. The most emotional such acquisition came when my cousin Liz Warrener, a retired librarian, gave me a few years ago a printed paper bag from Young's Books, the small new paperback store where I began in the trade about 55 years ago. I framed it and it faces me on my desk, reminding me every day of my modest beginnings. Young's Books is long gone, and I expect few if any of its bags survived except this one. The collector serves history even when he is just having fun for himself.
My bookselling ephemera interests began with the usually elaborately coloured 19th-century trade cards or bookmarks with printed adverts on the back. These have varying levels of Significance. The most important ones to me are the Canadian ones, which will eventually be donated to the still-forming collection on the history of the book in Canada at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.
But in general, the ones which give me most pleasure when I find them are, in descending order: trade cards actually shaped like books; others where the picture is of someone sitting reading a book; and most rare, those containing views of actual bookshops.
One finds these ephemeral records ideally at paper shows where everything on paper is offered, but sometimes they are found in books, left there when the book wasn't finished. The 19th-century ones I began with are called trade cards, and they often have humorous scenes, multicoloured, with printed adverts on the rear. Straight bookmarks are sometimes equally elaborate but usually more simple. Bookmarks themselves are sometimes found in used bookshops, discovered, and removed while the dealer was pricing books.
Ten Editions Books on Spadina Avenue, now criminally defunct (evicted in 2018 by the very institution, the University of Toronto, which should have been nurturing and protecting it), had a huge box on the counter full of them, priced at one dollar each. I don't know if Susan Duff ever sold any of them. I do know that Susan, like me, and like her mother who founded that great shop, is the kind of bookseller who never throws anything away based on the idea that somewhere, someday, someone will want them. We both know we will die surrounded by clutter, but we don't care. We know our duty.
My favourite bookselling ephemera is the hardest for someone like me to deal with, for it involves considerable work. These were the small labels pasted in by the original bookseller usually found on the front or rear pastedown, a simple tiny label which gave the shop's name and address. This custom was practised all over the world. A collector must remove them from the book, which it is an arduous task. There is a chemical which loosens the paste which affixed them (we use a concoction called Bob's Wetter Water) but depending on the material used it can take several applications and often much time to remove one and sometimes the operation results in a bad stain left on the endpaper.
So, I found myself with huge piles of books waiting for free time, or worse, I would remove one, re-paste it on a piece of card, only to mislay these pieces leaving my collection mostly scattered around my storage area. Not a sensible way to deal with what was always my most sought-after part of the collection.
There were two forms of these labels I most coveted: bookseller tickets (that's what they're called), and bookbinder's tickets, far scarcer and most sought-after by me.
The booksellers' part was ruined by two occasions where people appeared who I felt had a greater right to them than I did. The first was my late friend Gayle Garlock, a librarian at the University of Toronto who collected Canadian booksellers' labels in Canada for years. The larger his collection became, the more he attempted to buy mine, until I finally succumbed (to the more passionate collector should go the spoils) and gave him what was left of my collection. After Gayle's retirement he finally assembled them in a book, Canadian Binders' Tickets and Booksellers' Labels (New Castle, D.E.: Oak Knoll, 2015), which was happily published before Gayle died prematurely.
But a previous incident had already ruined my collection. The story is quite amusing and has become one of my favourite collector anecdotes.
One day some years ago, a young couple entered the store and a most friendly and interesting conversation ensued. As the conversation progressed, we learned that they were part of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, here on tour. He was one of the musicians and she was travelling with him for a holiday. They were obviously a married couple, and she exhibited the best form of the "collector's wife" syndrome, perching good-naturedly on a stool while he conducted a search for his collecting interests. He collected, we first learned, the then-ubiquitous, and much-collected Baedeker travel guides. The Baedeker guides, issued for most countries of the world, I had been taught about by the great Toronto collector Sybille Pantazzi, who had formed a great collection of them for her beloved library at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). Baedekers weren't dated garbage fodder, as almost all travel guides become within a few years of issue, because while the information of hotels, routes, and restaurants might quickly become outdated as those places became outdated or disappeared, what remained current and relevant were the detailed entries on museums and art galleries. These were as relevant as they'd been on publication, so a traveller visiting any country in the world could still obtain information on the great collections of art and antiquities in each country.
In teaching that (as she did her successor as librarian at the AGO, Larry Pfaff, who also formed a great collection of these, including all Baedeker's imitators like Cook's and Murray's guides), Sybille also confirmed and emphasised the great collecting axiom: "Look at everything and think before you dismiss it as irrelevant." That's one reason Sherlock Holmes is a hero to so many readers of mysteries.
Anyway, this man had a very good collection of Baedekers and as he described it with mounting passion, he removed his wallet and showed me and Debra the two facing plastic-covered compartments for photographs where there were two photos of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves full of those neat red backs of the uniform bindings of the Baedeker series. It was indeed an extensive collection and very impressive. But perhaps not so much to his wife who began to laugh good humoredly and commented, "You know, any normal man would be taking out his wallet to show you pictures of his children, but I'm married to a book collector, so this is what you get." They had children, as we learned, but she was demonstrating affectionate amusement, not the dull impatience so often seen in collector's wives. Later, he informed me that he also had a huge collection of booksellers' labels, and when he learned I did too, he pressed me to sell him mine.
I naturally declined, but later, the memory of their pleasant visit made me feel he deserved them, so I sent him as a gift the ones I could locate. That's why Gayle Garlock got only some Canadian ones, which was all he had wanted anyway. Neither gesture cost me more than the work I had put into taking the labels out of the books, and besides everything else, I knew that our mutual purpose was well served because two good books resulted and both collections, their formation rendering them of obvious importance, now are, or will be, secured perpetually in institutions.
These days, every time I see either Reinhard Ohlberger's Wenn am Buch der Handler klebt. Buchhiindler Vignetten und ihr weltweiter Gebrauch (in English, When the Dealer Sticks to the Book. Bookseller Brands and Their Worldwide Use), or Gayle Garlock's book, Canadian Binders' Tickets and Booksellers' Labels offered somewhere, I am reminded not of the eventual profit I gave away, but that I contributed to the assembly of two important records of our mutual past. And the labels are where they should be, and the three of us had quite a bit of pleasure in our contributions to that history.
And every time I recall the phrase "A normal man would carry pictures of his children ... ," I again laugh with great pleasure that I am part of that very same un normal group.
1. David Mason, "Collecting Games," Canadian Notes & Queries 9S (Spring 2.016),41-43. See also https://www.davidmasonbooks.com/cnq95.php .
David Mason is a Toronto bookseller.
-David Mason