New ABAA member (and our friend) Marc Kuritz of Churchill Book Collector smiles at the opening of the fair!<\/span><\/p><\/div>\nHeld in the Pasadena Convention Center this year, the largest antiquarian book fair in the country had all of these things going for it, and more. Well-lit and suitably grand, with plush grey carpeting covering the floor and dark, tasteful drapery dividing the booths down eight long aisles, the convention center housed over 200 dealers and some of their most magnificent stock, and did so with nary a hitch. The combined might of White Rain Productions and the dauntless ABAA volunteer committee, headed by Michael Thompson, ensured that everything from the easy load-in, to the well-stocked exhibitor snack room, to the requisite permits for the ABAA charity poker tournament were all taken care of before anyone could raise much of a fuss (okay, some disgruntled muttering was heard from time to time regarding the snack room, but that\u2019s inevitable). Security was tight, snappily dressed, and both professional and friendly with the bookish crowd; the temperature inside, once the fair officially started, was neither too cool nor too hot. Attendance was predictably good, if not the clamoring hordes of collectors everyone would have preferred. In terms of operational efficiency, the general consensus seemed to be that the fair ran with exquisite smoothness.<\/p>\n
Even I, still a relative newbie to the fair circuit, and a first-timer on this side of the counter at an ABAA fair, knew enough to be impressed by the well-oiled machinery underlying the event. The same sense of smoothness seemed to carry over into the Tavistock booth, as load-in \u2013 really nothing more strenuous than a quick drive down the ramp at the convention center parking garage, and then a stroll around the neighborhood while our books were brought up by the loading crews \u2013 turned into a luxuriously long setup, followed by a quick change of clothes before the crowd started spilling in on Friday afternoon. After that, it just came down to selling books \u2014 arguably, the most important part, but I\u2019ll get to that in a minute.<\/span><\/p>\nNone of this is to say that we didn\u2019t have our usual share of book fair mishaps. For starters, our booth was missing a glass case, and we had to track it down before we could do much in the way of unpacking. Then the corner of the table supporting our two folding bookcases cracked and began to buckle overnight, which meant we had to get a new table in on Friday morning and redo everything on the cases (as you may have already guessed, by \u201cwe\u201d here I mean \u201cI\u201d). My \u201cfancy day\u201d outfit demanded to be rectified at the last minute, and rightly so, and though I remembered to scrape the blue price stickers off the soles of my black heels before too many fair-goers had wandered in, the shoes I\u2019d thought were a solid thrift store find turned out to be duds: part of the right heel broke off not long into that opening day, giving my already less than graceful heel-wearing gait an added surreptitious limp, and leading to the sad discovery that I\u2019d left our Sharpie marker back at the shop.<\/span><\/p>\nYet, this time around, it all felt, well, par for the course. Simply working the fair, my biggest one so far, my first\u00a0ABAA<\/i>\u00a0fair even, seemed . . . normal. Which, quite frankly, was weird.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd which is why I now have a confession to make: I have been an antiquarian bookselling spy.<\/span><\/p>\nNot a spy\u00a0for\u00a0<\/i>anyone, mind you \u2014 don\u2019t sic ABAA security on me just yet. No, instead I have been a spy, of sorts, from the used and rare book world from whence I came, and where I spent the preceding eight years of my life in the book trade before moving to Tavistock.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe used and rare market isn\u2019t, of course, actually separate from the antiquarian trade. In fact, for some dealers, the two are very nearly one and the same: within the many permutations of the book business, there are plenty of antiquarian booksellers with open shops and a large quantity of general stock, just as there are plenty of used and rare booksellers with significant antiquarian stock. The distinction is in large measure a matter of how a bookseller defines herself, I suspect, and in which community she chooses to invest the majority of her energies, funds, and knowledge. (I also suspect that many of you have other, or better, definitions for these terms. Bear with me.)<\/p>\n
In my case, the two bookstores I worked for had a far greater preponderance of used than rare material, a significant investment in and reliance on their local communities, and the kind of more limited dealings with collectors and institutions that makes me feel comfortable distinguishing them from the purely antiquarian trade. The demands and joys of running an open shop took precedence; material valued at more than a few thousand dollars was unlikely to pass through the doors. Yet, while I may not have learned the ins and outs of collating or the rigors of bibliographic description, I did learn what I still take to be the one of the most basic tenets of the trade: that the job of a bookseller is, simply, to put the right book in the right hands.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThat\u2019s a tenet that\u2019s easier to follow, however, when one is dealing primarily with the public, and can point to sales of $1.50 and $1500 on the same day as proof that a book\u2019s value exists irrespective of the price tag on it. It strains credulity to make the same claim when the books you sell exclude all but the wealthiest pairs of hands.<\/span><\/p>\nOr so it has seemed sometimes, as, over the course of the past seven months, I have on the one hand been utterly delighted with some of the material that has crossed my desk and grown frankly callous about the prices attached to it, and yet, on the other hand, have found myself stalled at book fair booths or dinners with colleagues, making knee-jerk comparisons of the prices of things to my average annual income or the cost of the house it took my parents 30 years to pay off, and wondering what the hell I was doing there. Such comparisons do a rank disservice to everyone and everything involved, of course, and it seems likely that the authors of at least a few of the books in question, who surely knew some bookseller\u2019s assistants in their time, would have been mortally offended at having their life\u2019s lasting work held up to my meager income. But knowing that didn\u2019t keep me from wondering. Was the antiquarian trade just about selling expensive books to rich people? Had I sold my bookselling soul for a living wage and the chance to actually research the material I cataloged?<\/span><\/p>\nIf this sounds a bit like a form of snobbery, well, it is. Because the truth is, I was wrong. But being, as usual, a stubborn idiot, it took the largest antiquarian book fair in the country to convince me of that.<\/span><\/p>\n
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