by Tom Congalton

Tom Congalton of Between the Covers replies to Jed Birmingham’s essay “The Great Mimeograph Revolution.”

This article is very interesting and perhaps ironically, very helpful to me, particularly as regards the methods of viewing and marketing mimeos. I think you do recognize that if we adopt your approach to appreciating mimeos, as art, rather than as literature, that in some ways you are “selling us the rope that we’ll use to hang you” (or at least raise the prices, making your collecting efforts more difficult — but also increasing the value of your collection — always the double-edged sword of collecting) and it is brave and honest that you make to understand the market and what drives it.

I realize that we (Between the Covers) start from a more static book collecting viewpoint, but as you note, this subject is just a small part of our business, and one that we haven’t had, and don’t have the luxury of studying in the same detail as you do. I appreciate the strides that you and others have made in developing this market, and can only characterize my own status in the market at this late date as an interloper.

You might have noted very few Fuck Yous and no C Journals in the catalogue, which I agree are among the most interesting publications of this genre. That’s because we pretty much sell all that we can get before they see the light of day. We are not completely uncognizant of the art elements of mimeos, and I think you may have interpreted Matt’s statement about “…covers both achingly beautiful and wonderfully wretched” as not acknowledging that, while I think it did rather the opposite.

Our mimeos mostly didn’t come in runs, so we sold them individually. If we had complete runs, we sold them as such, and frankly we don’t have time to patiently accumulate runs. I have a large staff and payroll, and I’m not going to live forever. Also, in effect the fact that Bill Reese “sell runs” argument contradicts the “art” argument. Selling runs, while helpful and more economical for the collector, doesn’t display much appreciation of the contents or focus attention on the artistic elements of the mimeos, which our individual issue approach does, albeit not as much as you indicate we should (and which, as I said, was necessitated by circumstances more than choice).

I understand the “full run as art” argument. And while it is a valid argument, it is an after-the-fact, and in some ways artificial, argument. It is not necessarily true that most mimeos were issued as a totality. In fact in most cases I imagine, rather the opposite was true. They may well represent a cohesive sensibility, but they seem to have been issued based on a white-hot impulse and compulsion to publish immediately, and indeed I find that immediacy to be the charm of many of these mags: the make-do nature of some of them. In some sense this was well expressed as the “wonderfully wretched” element of Matt’s comment.

That as a whole they may represent something greater than the sum of their parts is absolutely true. The argument that it isn’t ethical or intellectually valid to sell these things separately, which were originally and mostly sold separately, is not.

That they “should”, as opposes to “could” be sold as complete runs ignores that. And to harken back to the tired old bibliographical model, it’s like saying that you can’t sell Hemingway first editions individually, because it is ignoring the comprehensive sensibility of the author, even though they were issued separately.

You “could” sell a complete collection of Hemingway first editions if you knew a millionaire or two, but “should” you? Not necessarily. In fact I rather doubt it.

Assuming you are missing an issue of Floating Bear, wouldn’t you rather have the opportunity to buy that issue, as opposed to having to buy the whole run all over again, with the commensurately greater cost (especially taking into account what you consider the new BTC pricing paradigm)?

The “mags as art” is a cool and valid concept and may be good marketing, as well, but it is mostly very much a constructed argument, promulgated by collectors and scholars, not necessarily one that was envisioned or intended by the creators, or that has to be conformed to by the sellers. I accept the criticism that they “could” have been more creatively marketed by us, but not the argument that they “should” have been.

This leads to part two, which I am not in any way personally offended by, but which could be viewed as offensive if one were of a more sensitive nature or if one were to apply it to the general practices of the rare book trade. That is your statement in reference to selling individual mags: “I liken this to those booksellers who detach maps, prints and plates from a book and sell them piecemeal to maximize profit.”

As a rhetorical trope I accept it. But “breakers” are traditionally those who remove something from a whole, which has intended to be bound together by its creator. This is a highly controversial practice and generally considered unethical in the trade. The same cannot be said of these mags. 

They are seldom found in complete runs in the wild, at least in my experience, and say what you will, I’ve spent more than 40 years rummaging in bookstores, libraries, and houses. Rarely does one find a complete run, unless the mag only lasted for 1 or 2 or 3 issues.

Selling things that were issued as separate and discrete objects over an extended period of time, is not at all the same as selling something that was issued together in the same binding, at the same time, and with the expressed purpose of being considered as a whole. If all issues of Floating Bear were mailed and bound together, and then broken apart, I would agree with your analogy, otherwise I think it is a specious argument.

 At any rate, very interesting and thank you for your attention to the catalogue. We’ll continue to assault the bastions, and be aware, we are very adaptable!

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Recently, I received an email attaching an article on megalisters from the Sunday New York Times. For those who do not know, megalisters are database managers masquerading as booksellers. They post thousands of books on internet sites like Amazon and Abebooks selling books for as low as one cent hoping to recoup their money on the margins in the shipping. They deal in volume and efficiency. To my book-scout and bookselling friends megalisters are, like book scanners (those who go through used or rare bookstores with an ISBN scanner to find errors in pricing), the scourge of the industry. If the New York Times is reporting on the phenomenon, it must be an epidemic.

The Times article bears a close read since this crisis in the rare / used book industry has an impact not just on Burroughs collectors but on all those interested in digging a little deeper into the Burroughsian. On the surface, megalisters would appear to be a boon to Burroughs fans. How else are you going to get a used copy of the Grove reprints of Naked Lunch for around $2? Way cheaper than half cover price. You always tend to forget the shipping. In this online world, the megalister makes a little profit; the Burroughs fan gets a cheap book. Everybody is happy.

Not so. The used bookstore in your neighborhood is not excited about this phenomenon for one. The basic brick-and-mortar store does not have the sales volume, sales staff, or distribution to make the one cent sale feasible. Nor do they desire such a sale. As the Time article describes, megalisters can be viewed as merely shippers of widgets. The best of the independent bookstores (new or used) are like the diner, coffee shop, corner barbershop, or general store. They are all gathering spots. Bookstores are indispensible parts of the community in which they serve. Being a citizen of the community takes time and effort. It takes a personality and a point of view. This requires an investment, and the customer pays that price. With a megalister you just pay shipping. They are nameless, faceless, and placeless. I do not want to belabor this point here as I have discussed it numerous times elsewhere. (See especially Burroughs and Bookstores.)

Besides — I know, I know. You do not care. You just want the book at the cheapest price and fast. Well, not so fast. The Grove Naked Lunch may be dirt cheap but the economic affect of the megalister is driving up prices for all those wonderful items that you are going to want after Naked Lunch blows your mind. The price of out-of-print non-fiction is going through the roof. As the Times article states, this market is one area in which the used bookstore can compete. For example the article notes that a hard-to-find, out-of-print book on the rock group Badfinger commands high prices in this market. Back when I worked at a used bookstore Pamela Des Barres’ memoir, I’m With the Band, was a quick $50 in paperback since the book went out of print and demand was high. Books like this were the exception not the rule since most of the non-fiction stock in the store (out of print or not) were affordable and priced to move. Increasingly, the astronomical non-fiction title is becoming the norm.

Let’s take Oliver Harris’ William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. It is not unusual to see this book listed for $100. Blame the megalisters. In many cases, they list a book they do not even have. They mark up the price (say, to $100) and then, if they find a sucker willing to pay it, buy the book elsewhere for a lower price. They operate like middlemen.

Again, so what, you say. I just will not buy that book from that seller. Fine but these unfortunately priced titles have a trickle-down effect. megalisters drive up prices. When I worked at the rare book store, I was dependent in many cases on Abebooks or Addall to set prices. As more booksellers become merely shippers of product and less bookmen and bibliophiles, the dependence on the databases is becoming more pronounced. You can see the vicious circle that develops. Prices get artificially inflated by the megalisters re-listing. Then the unknowledgeable bookseller (be it in a brick and mortar store or with an individual on eBay) sets his price based on these faulty prices. The next thing you know The Secret of Fascination, a key book for any Burroughs fans looking to dig deeper than the text of Naked Lunch itself, becomes impractical to purchase. A basic academic text becomes as high priced as a collectible.

I am a hypocrite, I guess, since I can accept literary magazines as collectibles, but I hesitate to accept academic texts on that level. One reason for that is the fact that literary magazines have a value as an object. Semina makes this clear, but I find the simplicity of mimeograph in C, Fuck You, or Floating Bear as fascinating and an example of print as art. There are exceptions, but academic titles have value as information not as object. They should be disseminated as such.

This is a pet peeve of mine, so let me digress. Academic texts, from the textbook to the scholarly journal article, should be available electronically. I would like to see the academic journal go the way of the phonebook. Get online. Non-academics cannot get easy access to scholarly texts. Try getting an article from JSTOR or MUSE if you are not a professor or a student. Historically, academics do not want to address laymen. This is a big loss to scholarship, particularly for topics thought to be outside the canon. Take the Beats. For years, the foundations of Beat scholarship were laid in zines, like the Moody Street Irregulars, Beat Scene, The Kerouac Connection, Dharma Beat and several others. I would suspect that ground-breaking critical work on the graphic novel was done outside academic publications. Same for cyberpunk or poetry slams.

The culture of academic publishing seems to be changing. In the past decade or so, leading academics like Stephen Greenblatt and Jerome McGann are speaking out with passion and intelligence about the necessity of academic publishing to adapt to the times. A new generation of hipster librarians is bringing McGann’s ideas into the archives. This is a dynamic time for academic scholarship. But there is resistance and fear. The need for peer review does not preclude online, openly available publication of scholarly texts. Academics conservatism clothed in the guise of diligence and thoroughness is stunting the growth of scholarship. Quite simply many in the ivory tower hope to remain sequestered and do not want to address the larger public.

Anyway that is how I see it, particularly when I have to pay $100 for an academic title I want. You can begin to see how the megalisters tie into and feed off of the artificial scarcity generated by the culture of academic publishing. The used book market contributes to making academic texts unavailable and unaffordable for non-academics.

A similar dynamic works in the rare book market. I have explained how listings of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch are deceptive and that buyers should beware when assuming that Burroughs’ masterpiece is really the $5000 book some dealers list it as. Recently I have seen the same phenomenon occurring with Big Table, arguably the key magazine appearance for Burroughs. Collectors: beware of buying Big Table at inflated prices.

Years ago I paid $200 for a complete set and I really overpaid even in today’s market. I was just starting out. The bookseller took pity on my inexperience and threw in a couple parting gifts. For years, $200 was the ceiling for a complete set of the five Big Table issues. A complete set of Big Table is not that hard to come across. Ten thousand copies of the first issue were printed. That is nowhere near the 100,000 copies of some issues of Evergreen Review, but it is a huge print run in the world of the literary magazine. As Royal Books points out, the later issues are tougher to find. Interest in the magazine slipped after the hoopla over Burroughs and lack of funds probably resulted in smaller print runs. In any case, the print runs for the later issues were still relatively large. The internet has made book collectors lazy. Big Table is the perfect example of a run of a magazine that can be pieced together through trades, connections and networking, and digging in bookstores. Big Tables, like Evergreen Reviews, turn up in the weirdest places. I pieced together a complete set for under $50. This is unusual but you should be able to beat $200 by buying individually. Brian Cassidy has a complete set for $150 which is a good price and does all the work for you even though the work is all the fun.

Yet in the last year, it seems the complete Big Table is increasing in price. I have only begun watching it closely in the last few months but I would suspect its increase in value to continue based on listings by Maggs Bros. and Royal Books. Maggs lists the set at over $600. Maggs is not a megalister, but their price has a similar effect to a re-listing. Other booksellers see this listing and set their prices accordingly. Sorry, but other booksellers and ebayers are not in Maggs’ or Royal Books’ league and cannot command those prices. They simply do not serve their clientele. In addition other sellers do not have these stores’ expertise or quality of service. High-end booksellers provide more than just the book. Your purchase comes with provenance, a guarantee of quality and authenticity, expertise as well as what amounts to brand name recognition in the book world. For some collectors, buying with dealers like Royal Books or Maggs is a priceless experience. Great book dealers provide even more. Royal Books’ incredible catalogs or The Dark Page are valuable resources. megalisters do not pass on any of these benefits.

megalisters and the dynamic of internet pricing may in the present market have an effect like the recent mortgage crisis. In the coming years, millions of baby boomers are going to begin to get rid of their possessions, like rare books. In addition in tough times, people turn to their attics, basements, and garages for a little extra cash. Both groups may make use of rare books in order to pay for college tuition or to supplement retirement. In many cases, these books were handed down through families or bought for peanuts before the boom on modern firsts in the last 15 years or so. So these books have sat awaiting the time to sell. In other cases, the books were purchased as investments with an eye to sell. Most people depend on the internet for pricing their collections instead of relying on more reliable and conservative pricing indices like auction results. Few have the time, inclination, or resources to track catalog prices over time. As we have seen, many books online are grossly overvalued by megalisters and the inexperienced. This can lead to people falsely believing they have a small jackpot on their hands.

Other books, like those at Maggs, need to be interpreted correctly. Anybody involved in the rare book business has had the experience of a customer entering your store with a beat-up, unjacketed copy of a book (or even a book-of-the-month-club edition) wondering why it is not worth the highest listed price on Abebooks. Ebayers and megalisters fall into the same trap. The website Bookride has been exposing numerous over-valuations of this nature on ebay and on-line for quite some time. When someone tries to sell his copy of the Olympia Naked Lunch for $5000 or his set of Big Table for $600, he is going to get a rude awakening. Your copy of Big Table probably lacks the condition of Maggs’ copy, the subscription cards or the inserts for example. And most importantly access to the market. Any way you look at it, many internet prices, like the real estate appraisals of the last few years, are leading to inflated values. For the most part, books like Naked Lunch or Big Table would never achieve their highest online value at auction.

Like all collectors, I track the prices listed on Abebooks. For a few years, I kept charts of every copy of certain Burroughs books that came on the market. I admit that I would get all Mr. Burns and rub my hands when a saw a copy of a book listed online at a high price. And my copy was in better condition! Then I worked in a bookstore and saw what books bought and sold for. And I saw on a daily basis people like me drawn to books like moths to a flame. We were and are a sorry lot. It was that experience that ended for good any thoughts that book collecting revolves around anything but a love of books. Money is not the paper than matters.

Despite what I see printed elsewhere, you cannot convince me that book collecting, or at least my collection, is an investment. megalisters and scanners are making book collecting as an investment even more difficult and dicey. My bookshelf is a money pit, like a 40 foot yacht or a sports car. Book collecting is a passion that in most cases goes contrary to sound money management. There is a reason book collecting has for centuries been categorized as bibliomania, a sickness and a form of madness. For Burroughs’ fans, it fits well into the old man’s junk paradigm and is best considered an addiction. Addictions take and do not give. Yet there are exceptions. Congratulations to Eric Shoaf. It is a major accomplishment to have your book collection bought by a University, especially one as immersed in the culture of the book as the University of Virginia. I suspect Nelson Lyon made a nice profit on his collection in 1999. Burroughs made a living off of his addiction to drugs and books. But these are exceptions. Book collecting requires a price. In the words of Nancy Reagan, “Just say no.” Or at least know what you are getting into.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Fourteen days, 2500 miles, 7 states, and a slew of bookstores. Vacation is over. The car is shot; the budget was blown; and the bookshelves cannot handle all the new books. In the last few years, it seems that everywhere I turn I see an article about the death of print, the decline of the newspaper (The New York Times reported an 82% decline in profits last quarter), or the closing of an independent bookstore. By the way, the chains are struggling too. Take a look at Borders. It was refreshing to travel the Middle Atlantic and New England and see plenty of books and bookstores. Don’t get me wrong, all was not rosy. Rue Cottage Books in Bass Harbor, which I featured last year, seems to have closed, but Nicol Fox’s interests range far beyond her store. Hopefully, she moved on because she is pursuing those interests, rather than any lack of customer support for the shop. (Any information on the status of Rue Cottage Books would be appreciated.)

Yet there were reasons for optimism. The Book Barn in Niantic seems to be thriving, if sheer number of books (around 350,000) is any indication of financial health. I have been going to this store since it opened in 1988, and the size of the operation has exploded. The store is now part farm, part commune, part oasis. I do not mean to suggest that the Book Barn is a little piece of calm in a stormy world because the activity around the store is intense. People reading books, buying books, selling books, talking books, living and breathing books. There is energy here. The store’s stock is meat and potatoes but, like that corner diner you just cannot live without, they heap your plate with loads of quality books and do not charge a fortune. I bought about 10 books. Nothing earth-shattering but solid books for my research library. Major biographies on Marcel Duchamp, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams; all under $10 dollars apiece. I tracked down a copy of Aquarius Revisited, a book on the major players who shaped the 1960s. Burroughs is featured as are Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, and Allen Ginsberg. The Book Barn usually has reading copies of the mainstream press Burroughs titles, like the late trilogy. Dig around and you might find something special behind that ubiquitous copy of the Erica Jong’s The Fear of Flying. For example, a friend got me two early issues of the Evergreen Review from the Book Barn days before I got there.

From Connecticut I headed back up to Gloucester. Dogtown Books was just as I left it. Last year featured a first of Ginsberg’s Howl. This year there was a copy of the Viking first of On the Road. Next year will be the Olympia Naked Lunch no doubt. I loaded up on non-fiction books on Bohemianism, particularly pre-WWII. I found a jacketless copy of A Return to Pagany for $6. This is a history / anthology of that crucial little mag from the early 1930s. Pagany was edited by Richard Johns, and William Carlos Williams played a major role in its formation and direction. In fact the title for the magazine came from Williams’ novel A Voyage to Pagany from 1928.

Dogtown had lots of small-press poetry in the store of a contemporary nature as well. I stopped down at Mystery Train and looked through a ton of spoken word LPs. Lots of readings of The Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare, but no Blues and Haikus or Call Me Burroughs. Last year, Mystery Train was a two-floor operation. This year everything was on the first floor. It appears that many of the books on the second floor did not make the trip downstairs. The store is concentrating on music, not books.

Ten Pound Island is also in the process of changing focus. When I last talked to Greg Gibson at the New York Book Fair, he planned to transform his shack / store in Annisquam into an art gallery to be run by his wife. In April 2008, Gibson had yet another book published. This one is a real life thriller involving the intrigue of the book trade centered on a group of Diane Arbus photographs entitled Hubert’s Freaks: The Rare Book Dealer, The Times Square Talker and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus. From what I understand, Gibson will still be at the book fairs, but the flagship bookstore has gone down like the Pequod.

Besides Rue Cottage, all the usual suspects were up and operating in Maine. The area around Acadia National Park still has plenty of bookstores. The Bookshelf in Ellsworth was open. Last year I found a library copy of Stephen Jonas’ complete poems. Jonas is largely a forgotten figure but the experience of finally reading a large sampling of his work was a great memory from 2007. This year I found a second edition of Charles Olson’s Reading at Berkeley published by Coyote Press in 1966. Olson read at Berkeley on the night of July 23, 1965, and it was a wonderful surprise to encounter the book almost exactly 43 years after the reading. Of all the books based on Olson’s lectures and readings that I have read (Olson in Connecticut, Causal Mythology, Poetry and Truth), this was the best. Causal Mythology documents Olson’s lecture at Berkeley on July 20th. The Coyote Press book documents the later reading which has become legendary in literary history as one of the great spoken word performances on record. The reading is a glorious drunken mess. Olson as Falstaff. Part showman, part shaman, part senator, Olson gave the reading of his life. By that I mean it was a defining experience for him as well as a recounting of his biography. Olson tested the patience of his audience (Robert Duncan walked out) as well as their endurance (Olson stopped after several hours only because the building was closing). All in attendance would agree that they had witnessed a spectacle.

The Berkeley Poetry Conference engendered a new generation of poets (I am thinking of Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh) as it celebrated the vitality of the poetry presented in the New American Anthology of Donald Allen. By 1965, the poetry represented in Allen’s book proved to be the poetry that mattered. Olson was in many respects the king of the hill. From the audience, Duncan called Olson the “boss poet” at Olson’s reading. Earlier, Jack Spicer compared Olson to President Johnson. Just as Olson had conquered Eliot, Pound and Williams before him, the “boss poet” must have realized that the upcoming generation would have to slay him in turn. The Berkeley reading was Olson’s confession before his execution. I had flashes of the end of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now as I finished the book. Olson as Brando as Kurtz.

There is not as much in-depth information on the internet about the Poetry Conferences of Vancouver and Berkeley as I would expect, though Wikipedia and the university have some information. Our friend Brian Cassidy has a cool flyer from the Conference for sale for $125. The importance of these events is immense. I would love to see a blow-by-blow account of these conferences in book form with reproductions of ephemera, photographs, personal accounts, and critical essays. I don’t think such a book exists. The most detailed study that I know of is a chapter in Libbie Rifkin’s book Career Moves, which details Olson’s reading at Berkeley.

Reading over what I have written so far, I wonder why I feel such optimism about the state of the bookstore. Rue Cottage and Ten Pound Island have shifted gears. Mystery Train has downsized. And what does any of this column have to do with Burroughs? Well, to paraphrase John Landau from 1975 when he heard Bruce Springsteen for the first time, I have seen the future of the bookstore, and it is Hermitage Books in Beacon NY.

As for Burroughs, most people make a big deal of the fact that Burroughs hung out at Bickford’s, the Bunker, or the Beat Hotel. I like to think that one of Burroughs’ favorite hangouts was the independent bookstore. Let me say that Burroughs would have hung out at Hermitage Books. Think Better Books, Indica, Peace Eye, Le Mistral, Unicorn Books, the Eighth Street Bookshop. Burroughs prowled the aisles of those stores like he did the alleyways of Tangier. Burroughs needed stimulants, and books were a drug of choice. If owner Jon Beacham (along with co-director Christian Toscano) has his way, Hermitage will rank with these great bookstores of the past.

Why? Because Beacham realizes that a truly important (and I mean culturally important) bookstore is about more than the books. It is about a community. See my piece on Burroughs and Bookstores. Do not get me wrong, Beacham has the books. To my mind, he is the go-to-guy if you want second and third generation NY School material. United Artists, Angel Hair, Kulchur Press, C Press. He has your Berrigan, your Brainard / Guston / Schneeman covers, your Padgett, your Waldman, your Mayer. If it was NY School, Beacham just might have it. There are around 278 Angel Hair Press titles on Abebooks; Hermitage has 38 of them ranging from $15-200. Yes, he has Burroughs. He recently had a copy of Time as you might expect. He has the Yugens, Kulchurs, Big Tables, Art and Literatures, and Locus Soluses with the Burroughs appearances along with some modest “A” titles. I do not want to make Hermitage sound more specialized than it is. Beacham procures all types of experimental literature from the 1950s to the 1970s. There are a lot of great San Francisco Renaissance, Fluxus, East and West Coast Language, and Black Mountain titles. Flip through Clay and Phillips’ Secret Location on the Lower East Side, and you will have a good idea of what is available at Hermitage.

Yet Beacham’s approach is self-described as minimalist. He has three small bookshelves, a small glass case, and some books on the wall. His entire stock online (He operates as The Brother in Elysium) is only 618 books. The highest asking price is considerably under $1000. Think bigger is better? Think again. Years ago I went to visit Skyline Books in Forest Knolls, California. James Musser directed me to a small closet in his home. It could have been Fort Knox for all I could see. Everything was desirable. It was all cream. Beacham is not on Musser’s level but you have that same feeling that his stock is groomed. The books on the shelf are an expression of Beacham as a person and an artist.

And that is another aspect of the Hermitage that makes the store special. It is a gallery, a studio, a reading hall, and a printing press. Again think Peace Eye or better yet Jim Lowell’s Asphodel Bookstore in Cleveland. Like those stores of the past, Hermitage functions as work space and art space. Beacham incorporates this idea into his business model, if you can call Beacham’s methods that. Beacham gathers together material for exhibitions to display on the second floor of the store. He has featured Auerhahn Press and da levy already. After the exhibition, Beacham attempts to sell the collection to fund the next show. A show dedicated to the Zephyrus Image is next up. Of course, Beacham has Poltroon Press’ bibliography of Zephyrus Image for sale at the publisher’s price of $40.

I saw the leftovers from the da levy show, which closed two weeks before my arrival. Most of the collection had already sold by the time I got to Beacon, but what I saw was incredible. There were two issues of levy’s early mimeo mag, The Silver Cesspool, printed by levy’s Renegade Press in 1963-1964. I had never seen a copy of any of the five issues up close before, and these examples (Issues four and five) were extraordinary. After viewing the Cesspools, C and Fuck You have the feel of a Sears Catalog to me. Those magazines are bulky, unwieldy. They have all the nuance of a blunt instrument. levy could do that act as well, but not with The Silver Cesspool. Issues Three and Five were like chapbooks, almost fine press. Sanders’ Roosevelt After Inauguration comes to mind. The dimensions of these two mimeo masterpieces are the same, but the paper that levy used sets The Silver Cesspool apart. The paper is delicate like Japanese rice paper, and I love how the paper contrasts with the poor inking off the mimeograph. Beacham also had other examples from levy’s Renegade Press. These were beautiful as well but none of them captured my attention or my imagination like the Cesspools.

Exhibitions dedicated to Auerhahn Press, da levy, and Zephyrus Image are major events in my opinion, but what really gets me excited is the new direction Beacham pursued in connection with the levy exhibit. Beacham printed a collection of levy’s poems entitled: [can we hold hands out here]. Beacham produced 125 copies on a pilot press operated at Hermitage. I bought a copy immediately, and it is a simple but beautifully crafted object. The title highlights Beacham’s attention to typography, and each page demonstrates a similar care with spacing and layout. Beacham did levy proud. Beacham hails from Cleveland, so he has a special connection with that city’s largely forgotten son. It was Beacham’s first major printing project, and it bodes well for his efforts in the future. He plans to further explore this aspect of the Hermitage experience. A recent book art project by Beacham was a success with a museum or two sniffing around for a possible acquisition. Clearly, Beacham and Hermitage would have fit right in on the Lower East Side or Cleveland in the mid-1960s.

The store is much more than a financial venture. It is an experiment in living and an art project. Will this experiment in the book arts in Beacon be a success? I think we have to reassess how we judge success and failure in the case of Hermitage. In my eyes, Hermitage is a ray of hope, not just for the independent bookstore, but for the vitality of print and printing in general. The failure of the store would be yet another example of the bankruptcy of American culture. Beacham, I am sure, would chalk it up as a valuable experience and fodder for his future art, writing and other endeavors. He is already planning for the future outside of Beacon, but I know I’ll be heading up Route 84 to that town by the Hudson River as long as Hermitage and Beacham are there. It is worth the journey.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Brian Cassidy runs a rare and antiquarian bookshop in Monterey, California. He will be familiar to readers of RealityStudio for his input on Early Photos and Collages by Burroughs, a Rare Burroughs Letter, and other articles in the Bibliographic Bunker.

These interviews on the economics of the rare book market stem from a recent blog of yours in which you mentioned that you have seen a rise in customers selling books recently. Do you believe this is directly related to the down economic market?

I think it is. Over the past two months, I’ve been offered about twice as much material as I normally do. Ironically, the more I’m offered, the pickier I generally have to be about what I’ll buy.

In a down market do you find that serious collectors sell their holdings, buy aggressively, or hold tight? Can a generalization be made on this or is it a case by case issue?

It’s hard to generalize. I do know that one client of mine is liquidating some of his collection to raise capital for a large upcoming purchase. His reasons for doing so, however, I don’t know. All things being equal, the book market is like any other. The down time is the time to hold and buy, not sell.

How about booksellers? Do they greatly increase their general stock in a down market or a strong market?

Well, you have to increase stock no matter what the market. A dealer lives or dies by his new acquisitions. But to give you an idea of how the market is affecting book price… I and another dealer recently bought a very nice collection of autographed material from a Nobel-Prize-winning author. My colleague and I went back and forth on what we should pay for the collection. We had a high and low range of possible offers, and we debated what to present to the seller in order to feel confident he would agree to an acquisition. On the one hand, we very much wanted the collection. On the other, the current market left us wary of paying too much and finding ourselves deep into material we’d have trouble moving. We settled on an offer (which was accepted) at the lower end of our range, but I can tell you a year or two ago we probably would have initially offered at least 20% more.

In my experience, I have found that more books are available in a strong economic market. The dot-com boom of 1998-2000 was incredible for me as a Burroughs collector. So much was available. Is this a false memory on my part? Is this remembered in the industry as a special time for Beat material?

Well, I think there are three things contributing to this impression. First, it wasn’t so much that the internet brought so many more books onto the market (although it did), as it just made them infinitely easier to find. Second, those early years of the internet provided some great buys as dealers had less access to pricing information than they do now. Couple all that with the fact that The Beats were really starting to emerge into their own critically during those years and I can see how it might have felt like a special time. The steals may be harder to find today, but there’s still a ton of good material out there. Indeed, I still think there are great opportunities.

How does the rare bookselling industry do in a recession? There is an argument that the used book business is recession-proof. But what about the rare book business? For instance, do more people buy rare books as a hedge against inflation? Do you see an increase in purchases of blue ribbon collectibles like Ulysses or The Sun Also Rises, i.e. books for which there will always be a demand and market?

Books have traditionally been considered recession-proof because a buyer could get more “bang for their buck” so to speak. In other words, they could spend $20 on a new book which would take many hours to read, or go to a movie which only lasted a couple. Plus, a book is a durable good that retains some value and is more lasting. So when one is watching the budget these can be more attractive qualities. That said sales seem softer to me for more common books than they did the same time last year.

As for rare books, the top of the market remains strong. The best books continue to sell well. But everyone I know is proceeding with caution.

Can rare books truly be considered an alternative asset to the stock market in a portfolio like art? Can Beat highspots like Howl, Naked Lunch or On the Road?

Yes and no. But mostly no. For the simple reason that books are not liquid like other assets. If you want to turn your books into cash, you basically have to either pay 20% or so to an auction and get (uncertain) auction values, or sell to a dealer and get wholesale. This means that your original purchase has to appreciate at least 50-100% before you can earn your original investment back. This is not true of more easily traded assets like stocks which can be liquidated more cheaply and more quickly.

Further complicating the equation are the fickle tastes of the marketplace. This year’s Joyce can be next year’s Galsworthy. In other words, the very foundations of judging value can change. This is less true in other assets, where methods of determining price (P/E ratios, for example) are much more established and transparent.

That said, I often look at auction results and think to myself “In ten years, that’s going to look like a great buy.”

What is the health and future of the William Burroughs market?

To me, Burroughs seems more and more relevant and prescient with each passing year. For better or worse, our world increasingly resembles Burroughs’. This means that readers and other artists and writers will continue to turn to him for inspiration and perspective. All of which bodes well for the Burroughs market.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Signs, signs, everywhere there are signs. On Friday March 7th, I saw a robin on the way to the train. The Orioles had a game against the Red Sox in Fort Lauderdale later that day. I can feel it coming in the air tonight. Yes, spring is on the verge of springing, but the most telling sign was the fact that the Washington Antiquarian Book Fair flew into town for its 33rd installment. For going on 15 years, the Washington DC Book Fair has proven as reliable as the cherry blossoms in signaling the change of the seasons for me. In book collecting terms, this time of year is the middle of the book fair season. Boston and California are behind us, and it is time to spring forward. The New York Fair is less than a month away.

It seemed the perfect time to make Friday a bibliophile’s holiday and to sample some of what DC has to offer for the book lover. Shopping-wise that means two stores in particular: Second Story Books and Bridge Street Books. For me, these two stores are the core of DC’s book culture. Not all the chains, nor the independents like Olsson’s or Kramerbooks. Not the Library of Congress, although I have spent many an hour there researching a finer point of law and have on occasion requested an old lit mag or two while waiting for a yellowed legal article. Not the Folger, although I have attended a few readings there including the recent John Ashbery reading. No, Second Story and Bridge Street, along with the Washington DC book fair, are what I think of when I consider DC as a book town.

My feelings about Second Story Books are completely out of whack. I cannot be unbiased about it. I worked there for two years, and the experience was one of the defining periods of my life. In a sense, working there was like going to graduate school. It revolutionized my views on book collecting, literature, art, and most especially, music. So every time I go to one of the two Second Story locations (Dupont Circle or Rockville), it is a powerful experience. The Bethesda location has since closed down. This closure speaks volumes to just what type of community Bethesda has become. Second Story was a fixture on Bethesda Avenue for years, but the lease came up and so did the rent. The landlords wanted a Pier One Imports or a Starbucks or a Crate and Barrel on the block. Second Story did not jive with the Bethesda image. It was too shabby, too unwashed, and too rough around the edges. In short, it had character, and characters shopped there. I assume that the Second Story clientele have been encouraged to move on as well, to make room for the nice coiffed and nicely cultured. Bethesda must be content with the Barnes and Noble at the end of the block to provide all its book needs. The newly located Second Story never caught on. I am sure shoppers will find what they need at the superstores. Everything in the right place and everything attractively packaged saying all the right things.

The fact that the Dupont Circle store still hangs on tells you something about Dupont as a community in DC. Years ago, Dupont and nearby Georgetown were book central for used and rare books. This has been changing for years. Kultura on Connecticut closed years ago and headed west ending in (I believe) Santa Monica. Larry McMurtry locked up Booked Up in Georgetown many moons ago as well. As I remember there were a handful of other rare bookstores in the area that have closed as well. I am sure others carry on the good fight, but Booked Up, Kultura and Second Story were the stores I always browsed on the weekends. They were part of my rounds. Only Second Story remain. From what I hear Bartleby’s Books in Georgetown still thrives and has really stepped forward as a great destination for Americana collectors. I would love to hear from readers in the DC area about their favorite book places.

Ordered and organized, Second Story is not. Compared to the Rockville location, the Bethesda store was as orderly as the Dewey Decimal System. The Dupont Circle store is somewhere in between. In an effort to impose some structure on the store, I have a routine I always follow when browsing. I go straight to the S section in fiction and look for Iain Sinclair books. Then I thoroughly go through the Poetry section casting a wide net for anything related to modern poetics, be it a book of Walt Whitman to a slim volume of George Oppen. Anything is possible. I still remember walking in the Dupont location just after somebody dumped a small Olson collection and picking up the first four issues of Olson, the journal dedicated to mining his archives. On my most recent trip, I found a collection packaging 3 long Michael McClure poems including Dark Brown ($7). Dark Brown was initially published by Auerhahn Press in 1961, and I have always wanted to read it after hearing Kerouac rave about it. Right next to the Penguin reissue was a copy of Kerouac’s Buddhist musings Some of the Dharma for $10. I bought them both.

Next, I go to the literary criticism and biography section. There is always something of interest here including without fail a Burroughs book or two. On this trip, they had the Miles and Morgan biographies in hard cover, Last Words (hardcover), The Job and The Adding Machine (both in paperback). Usually there is a good selection of Kerouac and Ginsberg material. I found a copy of Faas’ Young Robert Duncan and a copy of Daniel Kane’s All Poets Welcome with the CD. My copy of Kane’s book came from Amazon without it, and I have wanted to replace it. And so it goes through the Art Section, Film and Music, and then ending up in the America History section. Next thing you know a couple of hours have gone by and a good amount of money has changed hands. It is time and money well spent.

Bridge Street Books is about a 15 minute walk from Second Story Books in the direction of Georgetown. The store is right next to the Four Seasons Hotel where M Street splits by the gas station. Usually there is a small table of discounted books outside for browsing. Usually something interesting comes to hand there, but not on this day since it was raining steadily. Without a doubt, Bridge Street is the best independent bookstore in the DC area, and from what I gather talking to those with literary and artistic interests, one of the best in the country. I must be honest; I have not shown this store the love that I should. I always stop in when I am in the area, but I should set aside more time and money than I do. I need to become a regular. Quite simply, the poetry and theory sections at Bridge Street are without parallel. If it relates to the poetic tradition of Stein / Williams / Pound in any way (predecessors / peers / heirs), it is at Bridge Street. This should come as no surprise since the store is managed by Rod Smith. Some consider Smith DC’s poet laureate. Clearly, he is a fixture in the city’s literary scene, and Bridge Street is ground zero for that community’s reading needs.

The store has all the in-print Burroughs you could want, including the RE/Search book on Burroughs and Gysin. I went to the store to buy Philip Whalen’s recently issued Collected Poems. Instead, I came out with a lavishly illustrated book on Document, a surrealist magazine edited by Georges Bataille. I also bought a copy of Aerial, a magazine edited by Smith. The issue I bought centered on Douglas Messerli. Messerli himself edited La Bas, a “newsletter” out of College Park, Maryland. He also ran Sun and Moon Press. La Bas was in the spirit of Floating Bear, a rapid form of communication for a dedicated and tuned-in audience. Finally, I picked up a copy of Talisman 23-26 edited by Edward Foster, which was dedicated to essays dealing with the direction of poetry and poetics after 1970. I could have spent thousands of dollars at Bridge Street. The Collected Joanne Kyger, Walter Benjamin’s Arcade Project and a companion book providing images of the Archive, the Selected John Wieners, the Angel Hair Anthology, the complete reprint of 0-9. If you are in the area and if you are interested in the cutting edge of DC’s (and the larger) creative community and in how it got that way, go to Bridge Street Books.

I include this personal tour of DC bookstores because used and independent bookstores and the experience of browsing their brick-and-mortar locations are essential to a thriving literary community. In an earlier post, I wrote about the importance of bookshops to Burroughs’ creative life. As The Road to Interzone demonstrates, Burroughs was always surrounded by books. The independent bookseller serviced Burroughs’ book jones. Be it Indica, Better Books, the Unicorn Bookstore, the Mistral, the English Bookshop, Eighth Street Books or the local paperback store in Lawrence. Such places were a lifeline for Burroughs. This lifeline is in danger of being cut. If this occurs the results will be catastrophic. The future of literature and a healthy society is at stake. Robert Bank, our European correspondent, emailed me recently lamenting the possible closure of his local library. Brick and mortar structures, like bookstores and libraries, are essential to living a fulfilling and rewarding existence. I am sure that readers of RealityStudio have as intimate an experience with bookstores and libraries in their hometowns as I do. If so, please provide a comment about your favorite store or library in your area and what you find there. I would love to hear about it.

The Washington DC Antiquarian Book Fair has been at the Holiday Inn in Rosslyn for what seems to be at least a decade. There is something familiar about the DC show that I always enjoy. Stepping off the elevator onto the second floor you know for certain that Bookworm & Silverfish is going to be in the far corner of the Rosslyn Room. You know that Allan Stypeck of Second Story Books is going to be there. JoAnne Reisler is going to be there with her children’s and illustrated books. Tucked in the back corner of the Shenandoah Suite (you really can’t get further from the action) will be Charles Agvent and Colebrook Book Barn. I have fond memories of most of these dealers. I bought my set of Big Table from Bookworm years ago. I overpaid, but he threw in a later printing of John Rechy’s City of Night, because I did not haggle about the price. Charles Agvent sold me a signed copy of Exterminator! at a Washington DC Book Fair years ago. I had no idea what I was doing at that time, and this particular book really stands out in my collection since it doesn’t quite fit in. As I found out later, I was more interested in the earlier Burroughs material. Every time I visited my father in Connecticut we would stop at Colebrook Book Barn. Years ago they were bursting at the seams in terms of books. They built sheds to house the overflow. Quite literally, books were housed in any and every available space. The Book Barn’s stall at the fair captures that sense of ordered chaos.

In one sense, the books at the Washington DC Book Fair are as familiar as the dealers. You are going to see signed copies of Katherine Graham’s Personal History. There will be several copies of Best Addresses. When I worked at Second Story, having a copy of these books was like having an ATM machine. As soon as you had a copy, you sold it. At a hefty profit. Reprints and proposed reprints have made this less the case, but these books are still popular.

Washington is above all else a zoo for political animals so books related to politics and Americana are all over the place. Probably a stereotype, but I have always felt that DC was a town that collected signatures, especially Presidential ones. This proclivity comes honestly to the city inside the beltway (or dishonestly depending on your view of the political game), and as a result there are a good number of signature-related ephemera at the DC show. Again, this is only my sense, but maps are big in the nation’s capital. DC residents generally are very driven, and they know where they want to go, so you would think maps would be unnecessary. Yet DC is a place of transients and maybe maps help ground its inhabitants in a single location or remind them of where they came from.

What the Washington Book Fair does not have in large numbers are little magazines and mimeo, counterculture material, or Beat collectibles. You have to go to California or New York for that. I would expect that browsing the San Francisco book fair shows you just how far away that city is from DC on several different levels. Yet you never know who is going to bring what and that is the beauty of the book fair circuit. You are always surprised. In fact DC’s 2008 show seemed to have more items that caught my eye than any I can remember. Take mimeo. Alexander Rare Books of Vermont had a beautiful copy of The Fugs Songbook (4th printing) mimeoed by John Sinclair’s Artists’ Workshop in Detroit. The associations here are endless. Yippies and White Panther. MC5 and the Fugs. Lower East Side and Detroit. What ties it all together is mimeo culture. The item really fit into present-day Washington given the political climate. Agree or disagree with the current war on terror, you have to wonder where the energy of the Sixties is today. I could not help but think of the Fugs performing at the Pentagon in 1967 to protest the Vietnam War. Is anybody trying to levitate the Pentagon in 2008?

It was a wonderful piece, but at $395 I got the sense that it was overpriced. This might be a case of a dealer having an item that he normally does not come in contact with. This usually goes one of two ways. Grossly underpriced (dealer doesn’t know what he has or its selling history) or grossly overpriced (dealer doesn’t know what he has or its selling history). I felt compelled to go through the archives since the Songbook can tell us a lot about the mimeo market. Ten years ago, Ken Lopez had two copies: one from the Fuck You mimeo ($375) and a second printing from Detroit ($125). Back then a fourth printing would have been under $100. I doubt if this item has quadrupled over that period. If Skyline Books or BeatBooks had the fourth printing right now, I think you would see a lower price on it than at Alexander. I could be wrong as The Fugs Songbooks, no matter what the printing, are unusual. A BeatBooks catalog in recent memory had a Fugs section, and there was nary a Songbook in sight. The condition of Alexander’s copy was extraordinary. Nobody else currently has a copy online, but they turn up on eBay from time to time and online. One (I don’t know the printing) sold on eBay in January 2007. This upcoming eBay auction will tell us a lot about the value of later printing Fugs Songbooks. The fourth printing was estimated at auction in 2004 at $150. Clearly the Fuck You printing is the one to have and the scarcest. If the $395 price holds up, it proves that mimeo rarities from 1945-1970 are only going to get tougher to find in any type of condition. No matter the price, it was fun to see it. And more important, it was relevant in more ways than one.

Generally, book fairs are all about the Gump factor: You never know what you are gonna get, although on a Burroughs level, you can safely bet that a Naked Lunch will be front and center. Royal Books had an absolutely beautiful copy of the Grove Naked Lunch for $1500. For a Burroughs collector, this is probably the key book at the fair. Is a Grove Naked Lunch no matter the condition a four figure book? Check the Bookride blog on this issue. He thinks paying such prices is foolish. This is the front line of Burroughs collecting. In my opinion if you can find a find a truly fine copy of the Grove Naked Lunch on eBay throw in a bid at $300-500. You might get it if there is no reserve. Dealers are asking astronomical prices for this book. The question is: are they selling at those prices? The Grove Naked Lunch will not get any cheaper. The same goes for signed copies of the later Groves. These are becoming truly rare books in fine condition despite the print run. If the condition is right and the signatures look legit (big ifs, especially the signature), avoid the dealers and get these titles on eBay. I hate to harp on this topic, but the Grove titles are where most Burroughs collectors start, and you don’t want to get off on the wrong foot.

At a book fair, one dealer can make or break the whole experience. For a Burroughs collector, Joe Maynard out of Brooklyn was that dealer. Do not confuse Maynard with the bibliographer. I did when I first came into contact with him years back. He hears it all the time from Burroughs collectors, but for the beginning Burroughs collector Joe was the man at this show. He had a nice selection of titles to choose from. The Ace Junkie always catches your eye when you see it. Maynard had a very nice copy at $950. Like the Grove Naked Lunch at Royal Books, this is a key book for a Burroughs collector. Let’s face it: the Ace Junkie is not an unusual title. One hundred thousand were printed. They show up on eBay everyday and sell for $350 or so consistently. Like many Burroughs titles, this is a case where condition is paramount. Truly fine copies of the Ace Junkie are really rare. No creasing on the spine or covers. A bright cover. No browning or yellowing to the pages. If you have the money, hold out for the stellar copy. It will stand out. I did not, and I made a mistake. If I had to do it over again I would have paid more money for a crisper unsigned copy or gone whole hog and bought a signed copy. This is a key part of a Burroughs collection, one that will be sought after by more than Burroughs collectors. Do it right. Do not skimp on condition. Was Maynard’s copy a $950 copy? I don’t know but I do know it was better than the one I have and I paid a pretty penny.

Maynard also had an Olympia Soft Machine for $450. This is the rarest of the Olympia Press titles in fine condition. This copy wasn’t bad for the price. For the beginning Burroughs collector, this would have been a nice copy to buy. The real star of Maynard’s books was an inscribed copy of the first edition Dead Fingers Talk. The copy was signed by Burroughs to his British agent Michael Hershaw. It was $400. This book was in great condition and the association was good. Another book that caught my eyes was a paperback edition of the British Ticket That Exploded inscribed to Allen De Loach. De Loach died recently, and his estate has been appearing on eBay for awhile now. Be warned this was the paperback edition, not the hardcover. Both versions were issued at the same time. They are identical. I have never seen this particular Ticket That Exploded in softcover so it caught my eye. I checked Maynard and Miles and this copy was not a review copy but a simultaneous paperback printing. In collecting the hardcover is generally the more valuable book. If that holds true here, the softcover was grossly overpriced at $400. In fact that price is too high for the hardcover even though the association is a nice one. Go with the Dead Fingers Talk if you have a choice. It is one of the coolest hardcovers in the entire Burroughs bibliography.

For me personally, the most interesting title Maynard possessed was an inscribed copy of the Calder Naked Lunch (1964) ($1000). I need this book, but with the A items condition is key. If the Calder Naked Lunch was in the same condition as the Grove Naked Lunch, I would have bought it. In addition the signature was from 1992. Call me prejudiced but the later loose signatures turn me off. Jeff Hirsch had a copy of The Retreat Diaries ($175) with a beautiful tight signature. Maynard’s Dead Fingers Talk also had a great signature. The Calder Naked Lunch was the perfect book. The Grove Naked Lunch was the perfect condition. The Dead Fingers Talk was the perfect signature. Sadly the stars did not align matching all three (does it ever??), but for other Burroughs collectors, particularly beginners, there were some very nice titles available at the DC show, although there were few, if any, deals to be had. Washington DC is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States, particularly in the real estate market. Everybody wants to live inside the beltway. Location, location, location. Every book collector wants the fine book with the impeccable signature. Condition, condition, condition. Be it a dream house or a dream book, perfection comes with a price. The key to happiness in any transaction is that your passion for the purchase greatly exceeds the price you paid.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The network re-broadcast of Forrest Gump coincided with the arrival of the latest BeatBooks catalog. Gump hit the nail on the head when he said, “Rare book catalogues are like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get.” Or something like that. I guess Gump was more of a doer than a reader, but you get the idea.

That said, I am like a kid in a candy store when a new catalog comes it. I rapidly flip through the pages looking for items on my want list. It’s like rushing through the gates of Wonka’s Chocolate Factory and all of a sudden my inner Veruca Salt comes out and “I don’t care how; I want it now.” Next thing you know I have gorged myself like Augustus Gloop and the Oompa Lumpas come stage left singing a song about impulse buying and credit card debt. It is said that a great collector needs money and time. I seem to have a short supply of both lately, and the check from George Bush’s stimulus package can’t come soon enough. Somehow I think that spending all my check on rare books was not what economists had in mind when they drafted the plan.

So I open a new catalog with anticipation and trepidation. I secretly hope that there will be nothing of interest for my collection. My ambivalence stems from the fact that I don’t want to scurry around my sofa cushions gathering up money for a mimeo mag that once sold for fifty cents or in the case of Semina was free. No such luck with the latest offering from master bookseller Andrew Sclanders. This is his 48th catalogue, and he gets better as the years go by. BeatBooks along with James Musser’s Skyline Books are the Kings of the Hill in Beat and Counterculture collectibles.

It excited yet pained me to see a copy of Semina 4 featured in the latest catalog. Shirley Berman stares at you from the cover of the hard copy catalog seducing you to reach for your wallet. Oh god, how much is this going to cost me? A lot. $2500. Sclanders assures you that Semina 4 is one of the scarcer issues. Isn’t it funny how all the issues with the Burroughs appearances are always the scarcest issues? Floating Bear 24 or Insect Trust 2 comes to mind. I seriously considered buying the Semina 4. It is crazy but single issues of Semina are four-figures approaching five figures for the very scarce issues like Issue One. To think they were once given away. Then I re-read the item description online. It is missing the Peder Carr insert. Sclanders mentions that the Semina Culture exhibit copy was also missing this insert. As a consolation, the BeatBooks copy possessed an extra copy of Stuart Perkoff’s contribution. But the real added bonus was the Berman photograph inserted in the BeatBooks copy that is unlisted in Duncan and McKenna’s Semina Circle. Peder Carr was not a major player in the Semina Circle although he also appears in Issue two contributing a poem. Carr is described in Semina Circle as a poet and a literature student. He doesn’t show up on a Google search but if I am going to pay $2500 for a copy of Semina it has to be in great shape and it has to be complete. With Semina, complete is a relative term and maybe not truly in keeping with the spirit of Semina. As I was reminded when I commented on the incomplete nature of Semina 4, it is possible that not every issue of Semina was uniform throughout the print run. My mind flashed to the differentation between issues of My Own Mag or The Outsider, two other mags that aspired to be works of art. This lack of a stable contents, a lack of completeness, if you will, gets to the core of what makes Semina a form of personal and artistic expression by Berman, an art object and not a traditional magazine. In a sense, the BeatBooks Semina 4 is an ideal copy, because of the fact that it differs from other copies. It has missing pieces, but it also has extras.

Yet rightly or wrongly the missing insert was a deal breaker for me. It reminded me of the copy of Semina 2 that was recently on Abebooks that was missing the “City of Degenerate Angels” label. In some ways that is the most important part of that entire issue, although not every issue was affixed with the sticker. This adds weight to the theory that Berman varied the contents of his issues slightly particularly with tip-ins like labels or photographs. Clearly, the missing piece in Semina 4 is not on that level (and the added material makes up for it) but it is still important to me. I passed. Yet thinking of the added Berman photograph and my appreciation of the recent book on Berman’s photography, I think I may have made a mistake here. Somebody else did not. I checked the catalog online the day it went live, and the Semina 4 sold in a matter of hours.

I went through the entire catalog online on February 21 about a week after the catalog went live. Roughly 50% of the items had already sold. Fifty-Eight of the 128 items in the Beat Art section sold. Forty-two of the 116 Burroughs and Gysin items sold and ninety-two of the 168 Beatnik items did not last more than a week. From what I am told this is a remarkable statistic in such a short time frame, especially when you consider that Sclanders does not list on Abebooks. Of course, this has added financial benefits for Sclanders if he can pull it off. He cuts out the middleman. In my opinion, Sclanders is one of the few dealers who has developed considerable name-brand recognition through his own website and catalogues. Collectors eagerly await a new BeatBooks catalog and save their money to spend on its contents. I know of a few collectors who have passed on purchasing items recently available on eBay in order to concentrate on the BeatBooks catalog. Between the Covers, Ken Lopez and Skyline Books are a few leaders in modern firsts that I have mentioned in the Bunker, but even these stalwarts in the field maintain a presence on the major bookselling databases. Sclanders chooses not to and does not have to.

I have heard that there is a trend among the elite dealers in this direction. For example, William Reese is not on Abebooks. Dissatisfaction with Abebooks appears to be growing and in my opinion the quality of the dealers on the site has dropped considerably. Quite literally there are a whole new group of dealers on Abebooks who have no idea what they are doing. The prices are ridiculous. The descriptions are inaccurate and border on fraud in some cases. Read Joe McCann’s column (Honest Joe) entitled “Don’t Believe the Hype” in the February / March 2008 issue of Rare Book Review for an example. Check out what scholarly Beat titles are going for on Abebooks. It is common for books of this type to be over $100. There are several copies of Oliver Harris’ The Secret of Fascination for over $75. It is still available in print on Amazon for $45.

As a result the trend might be back to catalogues. Sclanders’ new catalogues usually deliver the goods. Number 48 did. I have been harping on the fact that catalogues are great resources. There are some wonderful nuggets in Number 48. Naturally, there is a wealth of bibliographic information. You can find out that Evergreen 32 is a scarce issue that was seized by police in Hicksville, Long Island (as Burroughs wrote, “Boy, are we ever in Hicksville”) for obscenity. The problem was not Burroughs (“They Just Fade Away”) but an article by Wayland Young (a history of the word fuck) and a portfolio of nudes by Emil J. Cadoo. The issue was banned from distribution to England so copies are rare there. They are tough to find State-side as well. Not a single copy is currently available online. Hence the $110 price tag. My copy has a revised price sticker that raised the cost of the issue to $1.50. This testifies to the issue’s rarity and desirability in 1964 to say nothing of the present. The catalogue also reminds you that the Crestview Lord Buckley album along with an issue of Ira Cohen’s Gnaoua (in which Burroughs appears) is prominently displayed on the mantelpiece on the cover of Dylan’s “Bringing It All Back Home.” Sclanders’ description for Lot 302, the LP “How to Speak Hip,” is a mini-history lesson in Beatnik and psychedelic culture.

This extra attention is greatly appreciated. Like sex (on display in the Beatnik section of the catalogue), information sells. In fact, the really desirable items sell themselves and seemingly minutes after the catalog becomes available. This is true for one item that really caught my eye. A signed copy of Icarus 46 edited by Iain Sinclair. I like the link to Sinclair, an author I have been dabbling in but not diving into head first. What I have read I have really enjoyed: namely Downriver and Kodak Mantra Diaries. Maybe now is the time. He has a new book out I hear. His foray into the little mag was published in May 1965 and was associated with Trinity in Dublin. Burroughs contributes “A Short Piece.” Icarus gets special mention in the Maynard and Miles Bibliography. Icarus morphed out of the abandoned Albatross. Daniel Lauffer, editor of Brown Paper and a collector, mentioned Icarus to me in an email, and I have been looking hard for a copy ever since. It is in a long list of University publications, starting with Chicago Review that flirted with Burroughs, often sparking the creation of a new magazine. This is the first issue of Icarus I have seen, and it was signed by Burroughs, so $190 seemed fine with me. But it was gone in sixty seconds, and my hopes for acquisition plummeted earthward.

The Burroughs and Gysin section is selling a bit slower than the rest of the catalog but the little magazines in that section are almost sold out. Many of these little mags had an added twist that set them over the top. An inscription or a signature. Sometimes several. The My Own Mags sold well, including an inscribed copy (with references to Szabo and Burroughs’ former teacher A.J. Connell) of the Special Tangier Issue with the incredible drawing of Burroughs in a fez on the cover ($220). That is a great price when you start shopping around and see signed My Own Mags (usually the later issues) are over $300. I really should have bought that copy but I have this problem about buying books and magazines that I already own even if they are, as in this case, a wise and considerable upgrade. I probably made a mistake passing on this item. Somebody else did not repeat my folly or Martin’s for that matter. A signed Bulletin for Nothing 2 sold for $200. C Journal 9 and 10 sold for $150 and $130, respectively. Issue 10 had the added bonus of being signed by Ron Padgett. A complete run of San Francisco Earthquake sold with signatures by Carl Weissner and Jan Herman for $400. The first issue was signed by Burroughs. A signed Dead Star, another publication edited by Herman, awaits an owner for $200, as does a signed Insect Trust Gazette 1 also for $200. This might seem a bit high but Burroughs signed the Gazette to John Montgomery, a friend of Kerouac who appeared in The Dharma Bums (“Henry Morley”). The Insect Trust Gazette has yet to sell. It has considerable condition problems. This issue gets to the heart of the debate between association / signatures versus condition. What is more important to a collector, to future value (many ways to define that obviously)? Based on this item, it appears that condition is king. Yet it is the added touches that Sclanders always seems to get his hands on that make his catalogue special. In my mind for such unique items the price is not an issue. These items will appreciate. Signed little mags don’t grow on trees. The sale of Bulletin for Nothing 2 establishes a nice precedent and, I think, one that collectors will look back on over time as a deal. Even the Insect Trust has potential for growth. Two hundred dollars is for the most part something of a glass ceiling right now for a Burroughs signature on most of little mag appearances. Yet they are inching in that direction.

Generally the “A” titles are not fairing as well. The Grove and Olympia titles that are available remain largely unsold. Besides the Semina, the one item that caught my eye (and the eye of many other Burroughs collectors I know) was an “A” title listed as Lot 208: a beautiful copy of Minutes to Go signed by Gysin, Burroughs, Sinclair Beiles as well as the publisher, Jean Fanchette ($1700). Last time I checked it was still available. This really surprises me. Most of the collectors that I have talked to singled out this item as one of the special ones in the catalogue. See my piece on Burroughs and Bookstores for the literary history on this title. I have a comparable copy signed by Gysin, Burroughs and Corso. Sclanders’ copy is the better one as it has the wraparound band as well as lacking the customary fading. From experience, the band is tough to find intact, if at all. I find that the wraparound bands are more common on the Two Cities magazines than the Minutes to Go title. This is a true find. In addition, it has the added bonus of being signed by the publisher in the year of publication. I have never seen his signature on any copy of this book. I have searched and searched and cannot place Silvi Natacha. Any help out there? The only advantage of my copy is the Corso signature. He was notoriously reluctant to sign copies of this book that he repudiated as contrary to his poetic soul. Burroughs as the devil and agent of temptation: a fitting image. $1700 is a fair price on this book. Check Abebooks if you don’t believe me and remember back to the $30,000 plus copy on offer from Nudel Books. That copy is no longer on Abebooks. Maybe it sold. What a coup if so!!

Another great thing about Sclanders’ catalogues is that they are timely. His Summer of Love catalogue celebrated the 40th Anniversary of that miraculous year in a level of detail that rivaled the Whitney Show. Catalog 48 capitalizes on the increased interest in Semina artists as well as the 50th Anniversary of the Beatnik phenomenon. The Beat Art section performed very well, particularly the critical books on the topic. Interest in this area is clearly growing and has been ever since the landmark 1995 Whitney Show on the Beats: Beat Culture and the New America 1950-1965. I would guess that the market for this material will only increase as time goes on.

I was surprised to see that a few Burroughs paintings sold ($2500 and $1700, respectively). This is not my cup of tea, and in fact, the manila folders that get passed off as paintings I find funny (to put a nice spin on it). Sclanders has one of those available for $800 and it remains unsold. I get the sense that the price on Burroughs’ late art is leveling off a bit and may be dropping. I remember seeing works for $12,500 years ago but this was probably a major work as opposed to the minor material on view in Catalogue 48.

I do enjoy and appreciate the art of the Berman circle and I consider this important Beat art. The book on Berman’s photography blew me away and his influence stretches to photographers of the Larry Clark School (if such a grouping exists). I am a huge fan of the verifax collages as well. The offset lithographs (photographed from an original Verifax) of the iconic radio (Radio/Aether Series 1966/1974) was out of my league at $10,000 but it would be on my shopping list if I won the lottery. Berman signed this set (Number 10 of 50) and they were printed by the publishing workshop Gemini G.E.L. that “pioneered new printmaking techniques and collaborated closely with many contemporary artists, among them Robert Rauschenberg (with William Burroughs), Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol.” It is good to see William Burroughs among this group of artists as it highlights Burroughs position in the post-WWII art scene.

I was surprised to see that Brion Gysin sold well as artist and author. This catalogue featured Gysin as a collaborator with Burroughs but previous catalogues showcased Gysin as a solo performer. As I remember they sold briskly as well. The forum shows that there is a dedicated group of Gysin supporters out there. I always envision them gathering with their scissors and tape recorders at a café in Paris sitting in the back with their backs against the wall. Gysin seems a European taste to me like mayo on French fries.

I guess I am prejudiced about the Beats as visual artists: Ferlinghetti the painter, Corso the painter, Kerouac the painter. I have no time for this stuff which is somewhat strange since I am a great supporter of Burroughs as a visual artist in the scrapbook and three-column period. I believe that the scroll manuscript of On the Road is a work of performance and conceptual art. Furthermore, I consider Allen Ginsberg an important photographer, not as a stylist, but as an archivist. It is all a matter of taste.

What really caught my attention was how well the Beat exploitation material performed. The interest in Beat exploitation films and vinyl I have always been aware of. From MGM’s The Beat Generation memorabilia ($90 for a press book related to the film) to Lord Buckley LPs ($150 for the 10″ Euphoria on Vaya Records) to Rod McKuen Beatnik LPs ($120 for Beatsville with a great cover shot of McKuen), they all sold in catalogue 48. Seemingly all the Beat-related sleaze paperbacks sold as well. I know of a few collectors who specialize in this area and they are extremely active and passionate about it. Waikiki Beachnik ($20), North Beach Nympho ($16), Bohemian Stud Bums ($36) Sin Hipster ($40), and Black Stockings for Chelsea ($20). The titles are hysterical and the cover art is priceless. Their popularity should come as no surprise but my dislike of what the Beatnik label in the popular culture and scholarly sense meant to the Beats’ reputation blinded me to the importance and camp qualities of this material. This aspect of the Beat story is represented by numerous articles on the Beats in glossy mags (Life — 9-21-59 and 11-30-59 both for $40) and critical journals (Norman Podhoretz’s notorious “The Know-Nothing Bohemians” in the Spring 1958 Partisan Review for $20). But I should get a sense of humor. Of course, I have some of this stuff in my collection, and they are key items at that: the Ace and the Digit Junkie or Wildcat Adventures. Burroughs’ debt and link to the world of sleaze and pulps cannot be underestimated. The history of the pulps and men’s magazines are key aspects of the Beat story and legacy. Yet my interest in Beat vinyl, magazines and paperbacks does not extend to the Beatnik novelty material. As Catalogue 48 shows, plenty of other collectors’ interests lie right in this area.

So BeatBooks Catalog 48 had a little bit of everything for all manner of Beat collectors. I’ll give Andrew a few weeks to rest up and then I’ll send him an email asking about that next box of chocolates. I am sure it will prove once again that Andrew Sclanders is at the top of his profession. And as Forrest Gump said, “That’s all I have to say about that.”

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Call it a lost weekend (with a few great finds). For the past four years, Max’s of Broadway’s three day Belgian Beer festival has been held on President’s Day Weekend. This is must-see TV for beer lovers, and they come from all over the country to sample the Trippels, the Grand Crus, and the chocolate stouts. Get there early. I was there on Saturday around 1pm and it was packed. A few beers had run out already and that is tough to do given that there were about 75 Belgians on tap and another 150 in bottles. Seemingly they had everything but it was only the tip of the iceberg for a country that is more than Germany the Mecca for beer. With all the beer, you had to have something to eat as well, and the French Fries sprinkled with rosemary and served with a garlic mayo provided a perfect base for a day of drinking. After spending a few hours with a bevy or browns, blondes and reds, I decided to indulge in my other passion. You can call it an addiction if you are feeling less romantic about it. I stopped at a small used bookstore on Light Street just to nose around. After poking around for about 15 minutes, I noticed a sign for another section of the store next door that was a new addition full of books on art, film, music and poetry. Now we are talking. I dug in the small poetry section and pulled out used paperbacks of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, the complete Rimbaud, the complete Edwin Denby, Lorca’s Poet in New York, and the complete Marianne Moore. Given the ties to New American Poetry, Burroughs, the Beats, and the little magazine, I might actually read all these books in the next year.

The Book Escape was just the appetizer for Sunday’s main course. On Friday I received an email from a friend alerting me to a special event at Second Story Books in Rockville Maryland. If you follow book news you may have caught a snippet of this story. In July 2007, noted book collector Rolland L. Comstock was murdered in his home in Springfield MO that housed over 50,000 books. Nicholas Basbanes wrote about Comstock in the Madness Redux section of Patience and Fortitude. If you are even remotely interested in the Bibliographic Bunker pick up everything Basbanes has written. I admire his columns and books greatly, as Basbanes is the best reporter on anything relating to book culture that I know of. The Comstock family had to deal not only with the shock of Rolland’s untimely passing, but also with the shock of 50,000 books. They contacted the only bookman they knew: Nicholas Basbanes. Turns out Basbanes is a good friend of Allan Stypeck, owner of Second Story Books. Stypeck and Allen Ahearn of Quill and Brush are dealing with all book matters for the Comstock estate. From what I understand no stone is unturned and even film and book rights have been tied up. No surprise really. Stypeck runs a huge operation in Maryland and DC that covers every aspect of bookselling, including a radio show. Ahearn is a giant in the book game. He and his wife Patricia wrote a price guide that was a book-collecting bible before the internet took over pricing for the majority of modern first titles.

About 1500 books, I suppose the crème of the Comstock collection, found their way into a catalog under the direction of Quill and Brush. Certain favorites of Comstock, like Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, Penelope Fitzgerald, John Banville and Edna O’Brien, were offered by Quill and Brush before the catalog was assembled. Tens of thousands of books went to Comstock’s alma mater, Drury College. That left 25,000 titles, and they are now housed at Second Story Books’ warehouse at 12160 Parklawn Drive in Rockville. The warehouse, along with the now defunct Bethesda location on Bethesda Avenue, was my old stomping grounds when I was in the bookselling game. A book could be written about all the comedy, tragedy, and drama behind the scenes of running a used and rare book business in the digital age.  

As I walked in the warehouse on Sunday, I have to say it was good to be back. It had been quite awhile since I set foot in Rockville, but a collection like Comstock’s brought me, like a groundhog, out of my hole. The books occupied roughly 7 rooms at Parklawn that previously held Nelson Freck’s science fiction and mystery books, as well as a catch-all “stuff” section that awaited distribution or didn’t fit in anywhere. Back in the day, I spent many an hour in that holding tank looking over a host of little magazines that sat and collected dust. Those books have been cleared out, and Comstock’s mother lode has been moved in. Every title with the exception of a single small room was $30. This is a variation of a Dutch Auction and it made for some high comedy. Literally, copies of Cliff’s Notes were listed at $30. I assume this can be negotiated down. To be fair, the average price of all the titles was probably around $30. Yet I saw tons of items that seemed like quite a deal at $30. I viewed it as a buyer’s market. Many seemed to agree. On Saturday, the first day of the sale, Second Story did a brisk business. You know that several experts had been through the collection before you, but the sheer size of the collection was so daunting that gems slipped through. And as I can attest they did. Quite frankly, the powers that be could not catch everything. 

So what did I see at Second Story? The scene at was quite overwhelming. About 25,000 first editions by British and American writers almost solely of the post-WWII era. In the 1990s Comstock realized that signatures enhanced a book’s value and desirability so he largely abandoned dead writers (at Springfield, the living writers were separated from the dead ones) and concentrated on those still writing, and key to Comstock, those still on tour. Comstock spent one third of every year attending readings, signings, lectures and other book events for the authors he collected. He would bring boxes of books, early titles to several copies of new releases, for signatures and inscriptions. In addition, Comstock nurtured a correspondence with many of his key writers and solicited signatures over the mail. Comstock was meticulous, even if his collecting focus was scattershot. Most of the books are covered with acetate and have color coded labels for British or American editions, signed or unsigned copies. “[R]ed for signed or inscribed books, blue for unsigned American editions, green for unsigned English editions.” Comstock strove for shelves of red and by the look of the shelves at Rockville; he did a very thorough job.  

As the above attests, Comstock had quite a few quirks as a collector. There are two that I find especially interesting. First he was not averse to acquiring more than one copy of the same title. Famously, he bought over 1000 copies of Jim Crace’s first novel, Continent, (all the remaindered copies he could get his hands on) and had them shipped to Springfield. So looking over the catalog and going through the stacks, the same books turn up again and again. This is totally foreign to me. I hate buying more than one copy of a title. In fact, I probably am too strict on this. I hesitate to upgrade copies I already own for better copies. I am always looking for what I don’t have and not improving my current holdings. I feel I can come back and tidy up my collection at a later date. This is not the smartest tactic as certain items in my collection are only going to get harder to find and more expensive as time goes on. If I see a good opportunity to upgrade an existing title at a good price, I should do so. The replaced title can always be used for sale or trade, another aspect of collecting that I have yet to fully explore. Comstock goes too far in my opinion. How many copies of Martin Amis’ The Rachel Papers can you have? Seemingly, Comstock had an endless supply. Surely this only floods an already flooded market for this common stuff. The Crace market must be absolutely saturated with the release of Comstock’s collection.

Secondly, Comstock affixed a custom-made bookplate to his collectibles. Generally they were placed on the left side of the front pastedown under the dust jacket flap. Bookplates are very polarizing for a collector. In the catalog to the collection, Quill and Brush assures collectors that the plates are easy and inexpensive to remove, but the booksellers stop short of encouraging collectors to remove the labels. Let’s take the bright side on Comstock’s bookplate. It could be argued that as a “famous” collector the bookplate serves as an association. In that way, they are similar to signed or inscribed association copies. Comstock had tons of those as well from a variety of authors. For me, the link to Comstock adds no associative value to the book. I don’t get excited over his bookplate or ownership inscription in the same way I did Timothy Leary’s. Having Leary’s copy of Naked Lunch means something to me on many levels, and to my mind, the association justified the $7500 price tag Skyline had for it years back, even if I could not afford it. Yet I do agree that the Comstock bookplates are useful to establish provenance and to help legitimate many of the signatures in the collection since in many cases Comstock got the signatures himself and not through dealers.  

That said the bookplates are an eyesore and decrease the value and desirability of the book. Why would any book collector, a breed that is so sensitive to the importance of condition, mark a book? Comstock clearly valued condition. He did not buy indiscriminately. His books are generally fine or nearly so. He clearly understood that markings in books affected value. He sought signatures with a passion bordering on madness. So what is up? What Comstock’s bookplate tells me is that Comstock had a high opinion of himself as a collector and felt that his ownership increased the books’ value and desirability. This is rarely the case for any book collector. Another possibility is that he had an overwhelming desire to mark his territory like a possessive dog does a fire hydrant in front of his house. This is somewhat more understandable to me. The desire to collect, particularly on the level that Comstock did, reveals an extremely possessive character. These impulses are unfortunate. I have never felt the need to use bookplates (or ownership inscriptions for that matter), although I appreciate them for a writer like William Burroughs for his own library. In fact, I hope that writers, artists, and the like do mark their books, be it annotations or ownership inscriptions, since such markings are of immense importance to scholarship. For years, Michael Stevens has been working on an in-depth listing and analysis of William Burroughs’ reading and library. The Road to Interzone is available online, and I encourage anyone interested in Burroughs to check it out. (Note: it currently works only with the Internet Explorer browser.) Studies of this kind are incredibly useful, interesting, and insightful. Ralph Maud’s analysis of Charles Olson’s reading is one of the best critical studies I have ever read. This study is especially pertinent to Olson since he performed the same task on Herman Melville. Yet ownership inscriptions and bookplates are a fine line. Who is worthy? I guess what I am saying is that collectors are just not important as individuals, as personalities. It is the act of collecting that is important, and in fact, it is that act that reveals the individuality and personality of the collector. The totality of the collection is really the book collector’s signature, his fingerprint. These imprints are all over the books and do not need to be drilled home with a bookplate or ownership signature.

So with that in mind what does the Comstock collection say? For a man with such a large collection, he had a narrow conception of what comprised Literature. The collection could not be further removed from my own and in fact, Comstock might be my bizarro double in this regard. Walking through the stacks at Second Story Books answered one of the burning questions that always haunted me as I leafed through countless catalogs and roamed through endless book fairs: Who buys all these boring modern firsts? There are seemingly millions of copies of Martin Amis, Madison Smartt Bell, Julian Barnes, Kate Braverman, Maya Angelou, T.C. Boyle, John Banville, Rick Bass, Larry Brown, and Charles Baxter — the authors for whom Comstock criss-crossed the country. Comstock collected what passes for “Literature with a Capital L” in the post-WWII era according to the critical and publishing mainstream. Comstock prided himself on finding and speculating on new authors. In Patience and Fortitude, Comstock states, “I buy Publisher’s Weekly to read the forecasts, and I pay attention to what the important critics have to say. What I am emphasizing now is young writers nobody ever even heard of.” This is precisely the problem with the Comstock collection. Nothing of value comes from a starred review in any of the mainstream publishing rags. Important critics are slaves to the mainstream media machine that pays them through advertising budgets. They champion what they are told to. The truly new and innovative does not come (and has never come) Athena-like out of the mainstream publishing houses. The big houses may co-opt it later, but by then such books are already old news and are often watered down and neatly packaged. Take 2007 literary sensation Roberto Belano as an example, although I strongly feel that Belano rises above the hype. The Savage Detective was the best work of fiction I read in 2007.

Generally, Comstock did not collect literary magazines, but those he did seek out tell an interesting story. He acquired them because they had stories or poems by his key authors. Stories by John Hersey or Robert Stone for example. Comstock gathered together individual issues of Story, Paris Review, Encounter, Partisan Review, Esquire and Poetry. These publications define the 20th Century literary establishment. Story dictated the form and content of the short story. Poetry did the same for the poem. Paris Review was the establishment of the little magazine. Partisan Review cornered the critical market, and Esquire was the literary glossy. Comstock collected Evergreen Review, but this proves my point. Evergreen was the establishment in avant / experimental circles. All these magazines are traditional in format (Evergreen is one of the most boring little mags in this regard) and content. They do not push the envelope. They strive for a broad audience and mainstream acceptance.  

Let’s look at what for the most part was not in Comstock’s collection. He did not collect any experimental magazines on either side of WWII. No modernist mags, like Broom or Blast, and nothing from the mimeo revolution. This is in line with the fact that Comstock did not collect experimental / alternative literature, particularly poetry. J.G. Ballard is a case in point. Clearly Ballard would be on Comstock’s radar screen: British, post-WWII, critically celebrated, active and touring. Yet I did not see a single Ballard title. Don’t get me wrong, they may be there, but Ballard was clearly not a major writer for Comstock. Ballard was too edgy, too transgressive, and ultimately, too important, a writer.  

Granted Comstock did not collect dead authors, but there was no Stein, Pound, Williams or Zukofsky from before the War. You were more likely to see Stevens, Eliot and Frost. Or their children: Lowell, Plath, Sexton, Galway Kinnell, Seamus Heaney. Post-WWII, do not expect much from anybody in the New American Poetry or the New American Story anthologies. Very little San Francisco Renaissance (where is Everson, Duncan, or Spicer?), Black Mountain (no Creeley or Olson), Beat (no Kerouac — he was safe in heaven dead — smatterings of Corso, Di Prima or Ferlinghetti), or New York School (no O’Hara or Koch, a smidge of Ashbery). If you are looking for anything avant or experimental after the Allen anthologies forget it. According to Comstock, literary innovation ended right where according to the catalog his collection began: 1960.

Take a close look at Burroughs and the Beats in the collection. It is a testament to the achievement of the Beats that Comstock had to acknowledge them. They are too important to ignore. That did not prevent him from completely bypassing Kerouac, but you get the sense that he had to grudgingly include Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, Corso, and Di Prima. After all these writer were alive, active, and could sign. By and large the Burroughs titles in the collection are consistent with Comstock’s M.O. The Burroughs titles were almost all late titles from the major publishing houses. Interzone, The Adding Machine, Literary Outlaw, Place of the Dead Roads, Western Lands etc. The Holt and Viking titles. Quill and Brush pulled out the Grove titles (a Naked Lunch, Ticket That Exploded and Soft Machine, both signed) for the catalog. Yet there were next to nothing of the small press or little mag titles. The copy of Corso’s American Express from Olympia Press stood out for me since there were no other titles from that press. No Lolita, no Pinktoes, no Ginger Man, no Watt, no Candy. Later printing of some of these titles were present but not the true first editions. Comstock disrespected the alternative press. There was a copy of The Exterminator by Auerhahn Press but the condition was abominable: water damaged, missing pages, probably a bookplate. The small, fine, or alternative press did not command his attention. Comstock collected Ginsberg, but Ginsberg was the most mainstream of the Beats and the most accepted by the “important critics” that Comstock looked to as a guide. An author only appeared on his radar screen if they made it to a mainstream publisher. Comstock might then work his way backward through their bibliography.  

This disrespect was seconded by the booksellers selling the collection. Given the $30 price on titles, there were some deals to be made if you kept your eyes out for alternative titles. I found a fine first edition of The Yage Letters by City Lights signed by Ginsberg for $30. That is a deal anywhere. Some of Comstock rubbed off on me in this case. I already own a fine, unsigned copy of The Yage Letters, but this signed copy was an upgrade. What is a common book unsigned now with the Ginsberg signature becomes something special. In fact there were signed Ginsbergs all over the place. I found a copy of Seymour Krim’s The Beats signed by Ginsberg and Hubert Selby for — you guessed it — $30. You would be hard pressed to find a better price than that. Surely a Ginsberg signature is worth $40-50. Pair that up with an unusual title, like the Coyote Journal printing of Wichita Vortex Sutra, and you have a nice find. There were also signed Anne Waldmans, Diane Di Primas and Ferlinghettis around. A fine first of Di Prima’s Dinners and Nightmares, published by Corinth Press in 1961 was a nice find for $30.  

If Comstock hoped to speculate with his collection, the lack of interest in the alternative press was a major error. This is where the new talent comes from today and historically. In addition the books that possess value on multiple levels are not the large print-run hardcovers published in London or New York, but the small and fine press gems that come out in small print runs in distinctive softcover formats. As I mentioned above, I looked high and low for such material in the collection and it was few and far between. There was nothing after 1970 in this area. There were a couple Auerhahn titles, a few Olympia Press titles, and a Coyote Press title by Ginsberg. If it was in Secret Location on the Lower East Side, it wasn’t at 12160 Parklawn. Why didn’t Comstock collect the small press efforts of his stable of authors and get these rare items signed? Because these authors never published there, even starting out. His authors were / are the darlings of the media conglomerates and their academic / critical counterparts. Writing programs with their journals are the farm system for these writers. The New Yorker is the big leagues. The books in his collection are basically generic hard covers. The books themselves have limited value as literary history and none as an art object. Libraries and institutions do not want this material. There is no research or historical value here. I would suspect that Drury College took the non-fiction of the Comstock collection. I saw very little literary criticism or biography at Rockville. The text has value to interested readers, but the books themselves are mostly widget-like in their design, phone book-like in their content, and rabbit-like in their print runs. This is the type of stuff that will do well on Kindle and other e-Book platforms. The vessel just does not matter. In my opinion, Comstock’s collection will not age gracefully. The print runs are too large; the books were the subject of book tours and signings, so copies and signatures abound; the design is pedestrian, and the content just is not there.

While looking through the Comstock collection, my mind flashed to the David Oakey collection of Gary Snyder placed on auction by PBA Galleries. Oakey’s collection was far smaller in size and seemingly less valuable on a financial level, but his collection was the more significant and important one. To my mind, Gary Snyder is far more important as a writer and as a cultural figure than a gaggle of T.C. Boyles, William Boyds, and Jim Craces. Comstock placed his bets with the Craces of the literary world, and literary history, if not financial trends, will show that such faith is bankrupt. Scroll down to July 27th to see one assessment of Crace’s value. The future of literature as a living breathing entity is with the writers Comstock excluded from his attentions. But collecting takes all kinds and without a doubt the literary world, not just the small realm of book collecting, suffered a major loss with Comstock’s passing. He was a passionate, dedicated collector, and as such, a true patron of the arts.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Be sure to read part 1 of Jed Birmingham’s interview with Dan Gregory of Between the Covers.

You say there is a dearth of originality and inspiration in the rare book trade. Who are the dealers and web sites whose work you admire or who inspired you?

With our catalogs, we’re known as one of the few dealers to regularly issue full color catalogs with a photograph of each book. We usually do them every six to eight weeks. Other dealers have copied our format (sometimes with our help and training, I admit). But the great children’s book dealers, Helen and Marc Younger of Aleph-Bet Books, led the way with fully illustrated catalogs which they had been issuing on a regular basis for I don’t know how long before I joined Between the Covers.

Regarding dealers on the Internet, there was a site in the late 1990s that I admired a great deal. I think it was called Purple Cloud Books, though I’m not sure. It’s long-gone. (I’ve looked through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine but I couldn’t find it.) It didn’t last for more than a year or two, but its concept was way ahead of its time. The main page showed a bookcase of book spines, created from photos of real books the dealer had in inventory, and when you clicked on the spine, it brought you to a photo of the front of the book and a description. The scale of the photos of each spine was even in proportion to the whole, so that it really looked like a single photograph of an entire bookcase, rather than scores of individual spine photos. Here was someone, limited by the html coding of the era, but taking great strides in recreating the experience of actually browsing books in a store. It was an inventive concept, and I thought about doing it with our relaunched site. But at the time we were also prototyping our rotating books and the initial tests on that were so successful we ultimately went off in the direction of our current site. Another consideration was that we already had about 35,000 books scanned a certain way, and in order to make the new site consistent we would have had to go and take new photos of all 35,000 of those books. But the spines-on-a-bookshelf would still be a cool presentation, and could now be done dynamically and really make for an incredible site.

The Purple Cloud site with the spines inspired me in another way as well. Of course I bookmarked it and went to it often, but it never changed — the selection with the neat bookcase effect was hardcoded. He was offering about 100 books, and those same 100 books were all you ever saw. I realized you can’t create a great web effect if it takes just as much work for your second hundred books as for your first. So when we designed the features of our new site I was dead-set on making every element I could dynamic, so that it could change with our inventory with automatic revision. For example, if we were to add another signed William Burroughs item to our inventory, it would automatically come up randomly in various features on our home page such as the top “today’s highlights” box or the lower “signed” box. If we were to photograph it for a rotation display, our system would check the images, feed them into our array, and display them as a 3D book, all automatically.

On the other hand, switching gears from high tech to low tech a bit, another dealer site that I must credit is the Philadelphia Rare Book and Manuscript’s site. I sent several emails to our designer early on singing their praises because it was the only bookseller site I had seen that was clearly made by people who love what they are doing. And the structure, which doesn’t try in the least to be slick, demonstrated to me that you could build a content-rich web site where the engaged visitor would want to spend significant time and go deeper and deeper. It was a site built by hand for browsing rather than searching. I contrasted this with a few of the smoothest and clearly most expensive book sites, which though they were always tastefully designed, were very antiseptic in their approach to books. PRBM also were possibly the first and I think the foremost promoters of offering books exclusively on their site. For years they advertised this and major collectors in their specialties learned that if they didn’t want to miss good material they had to go to that site. Collectors were not going to see these great books on ABE or Alibris. Furthermore, I guess it’s no coincidence that both their site and ours devote a section to the shop cats wherein the cat “offers” special books and sales. I admit we stole that from them. But we used our own cat.

And finally, Mark Hime of Biblioctopus has done unusual projects and “thought outside the box” for years. In the late 1980s he issued catalogs which were posters, with a single item pictured on the front (like the only surviving first-state dustjacketed copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) and item descriptions on the back. Then he did an elaborate joke catalog of “literary objects” that he supposedly had collected. I think someone actually tried to order Huck Finn’s original fishing rod from it. He was the driving force behind the three Classic Book Cards sets we did together, and we’re working on an entirely different project at the moment which will, I think, present books in a way that hasn’t been tried before. What works so well with Biblioctopus is that he has not only the necessary insanity to try the unusual, but incredible books with which to play. You could make a poster catalog of $30 books, but it’s not going to have the same “Wow!” effect as if you can do it with $30,000 books.

What is your thought behind the return of the personal touch in bookselling (such as the return of the more detailed and ambitious catalog, the re-emergence of the book fair, and the rise of interactive web site)?

I think the luster and novelty of the Internet have faded a bit. It is still the best way to purchase and sell books under certain circumstances. But it also has many limitations. There was a period right around the millennium when we saw a number of seasoned collectors trying out the Internet and doing a lot of buying that way. How could you not? If you had been collecting for a long time, you had probably built up a wish-list, and suddenly this tool comes along that allows you to fill most of it quickly. But after a while you realize that the number of good booksellers hasn’t increased, and as a buyer you still have to find dealers whose knowledge and ethics you can trust. I don’t think we’re quite out of the “now-I’m-going-to-buy-everything-online” dip, but I think we are definitely coming out of it. We are at the Churchillian end of the beginning. Obviously the Internet is here to stay, and its role within the larger scheme of all bookselling will continue to evolve, but the pendulum for many books, and collectors, is swinging back to a more balanced approach to collecting.

Each way of buying books offers a different experience, but we’ve always been very strongly a catalog-driven business at Between the Covers. For one thing, we offer a lot of weird and unusual material. You try selling a 1930s book about the American pie industry on the Internet. It ain’t gonna happen unless the author’s great-granddaughter discovers ABE. No one is looking for it. But we can put a book like that in a catalog and get multiple orders. Some might be from customers who appreciate the kitsch element as much as we do, and some from institutions that realize that a treatise on Depression era baked goods is a valid primary cultural artifact. (Anyone? Anyone?) Catalogs always offered a pre-selection of books, but now, in the age of information overload, the pre-selection that a catalog offers is actually MORE important than it used to be to collectors. Online we offer about 40,000 books in our primary business and another 160,000 books from our used book warehouse. Computer searches are great for finding specific things you might be looking for in that pool of 200,000 books. By comparison, in our catalogs we usually offer about 100 books at a time, all specifically chosen, and not just the 100 most expensive ones either. In our catalogs we try to cover the full spectrum of our inventory in both price range and subject matter. What are the chances that one of those 100 books is something you’ve been looking for? Not so great, but that’s what search engines are for. What are the chances that you’ll actually notice something interesting and new to you in the catalog that you would never have spotted otherwise? Much, much better. And most definitely these same virtues of pre-selection are at play at bookfairs and on web sites that categorize books and make suggestions.

After over ten years working with bookselling and the internet at Between the Covers, how do you react to the statement that the internet has put the nail in the coffin of the traditional used and rare bookstore?

It’s no secret that the Internet has eroded the traditional used-book business. All the ubiquity of information, the frictionless market, the auto-repricing, and similar web factors have made it very difficult to sustain a viable business selling used books online. (By viable business I mean for the full-timers who have to sell books or starve.) When market forces take so many decent used books, which had been $10 books, and $20 books, and $40 books, and makes them 99 cent books, there is almost no way you can make money selling them online unless you are willing to sell an awful lot of them and smart enough to create a hyper-efficient operation around that. And if you actually manage to do that, and only a very few people have, you’d be running a widget factory, that is, a business that is pretty far removed from the joys that I associate with bookselling anyway. Think about it this way — to sell books for 99 cents, every time a human being in your business touches the book you’ve lost money. Selling books without ever touching or seeing them — not my idea of fun. So the online market is not only soaking up customers, it is also driving the prices of perfectly good books down to outrageously low, insupportable prices on the Web.

Despite this, one of the greatest surprises for me since joining the faculty of the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminars has been the number of participants (i.e. students) who have open shops. I went in thinking it would be almost entirely online-only sellers and that is very far from the case. Many of these open shop owners are also selling online, but they are very committed to keeping their shops open. A good number of them are doing this as a second career, and I suspect that is a factor. The romanticism of owning a bookstore is very appealing. And if you’ve already had a soul-eroding career that was geared toward just making money, you might be more receptive to the feel-good upsides of owning a low-profit or break-even only business you genuinely love. So the Internet has made it much harder to run a traditional used bookstore in many markets without adapting to market changes, but despite this used bookstores are still around and new ones are still popping up, God bless ‘em.

Now when it comes to antiquarian or rare books, the Internet at its height of effect only dented the upper end of the traditional selling market. There is a pretty stiff price ceiling when it comes to books being sold on the Internet. It’s probably different for different kinds of books and different dealers, but in general once you get past $2000 – $3000 for a book the sales on the Internet thin out quickly, whereas those books in the four and five and six figures will sell at book fairs and through catalogs, etc. I’m not certain which of several potential factors contributes most to this disparity — why would an expensive book from a well-known dealer fail to sell on the Internet but generate multiple orders out of a catalog? But it happens all the time. And there are many very good books that are simply not offered on the Internet. There are a still lot of Internet-only bookbuyers out there who don’t know what they are missing, who haven’t been to a major fair or who don’t receive catalogs. Sometimes we’ll run into a collector who tells us they built their entire collection on eBay. The fact of the matter is you can spot those collections pretty easily from the lack of discernment — bad copies of good books.

The Internet, however, has affected the high end of the market on the supply side. There’s no shortage of good books, but it’s very difficult for us to buy the more obvious ones advantageously. When everyone “knows” a certain book is a $10,000 book, no one wants to part with it for less. It doesn’t mean they can sell it for $10,000, but the Internet has engendered an obstinacy that was perhaps less prevalent before. It’s harder to buy the Faulkners, Fitzgeralds, Hemingways, and Steinbecks. We see books that would fit in with our inventory, but there’s no margin on them for us. So we’ve been forced to move into books that are not collectors’ darlings, such as obscure poetry, obscure early 20th Century literature, archives — material for which price guides and the search engines offer little pricing information, books where our experience and feel for the potential of the material gives us an edge. So again, adapting to a changing market is essential.

What directions do you see the Internet taking used and rare bookselling in the future?

If I tried to predict rare bookselling on the Internet in 10 years I’m sure I’d get it wrong. But I know what I’d like to see and some of the changes we’re already starting to see. I hope we’ll see more standardization of data, so that when you search for a title, all copies of that title show up in a way that makes it easy to compare apples to apples. When data is more standardized, not only will consumers be able to, for example, sort by condition easily among copies of the same edition, but data systems will be able to match individual copies listed with titles in data libraries that could contain information about the books that is not just copy-specific, such as the book’s weight, dimensions, and subject categories. I think the importance of these attributes has been underestimated.

We’re already seeing some good work being done with subject information. If you look up a book now on some web sites, you’ll see alternate title suggestions that are not dissimilar to the suggestions made by a knowledgeable clerk in a bookstore. So, if you’re looking for a copy of Jamie Russell’s Queer Burroughs, these sites might also recommend Regina Marler’s Queer Beats. Library systems link the two by subject, so why shouldn’t online bookstores? Once data systems recognize that a single book being offered can be linked to a “record” of information about the book, not just the copy, then all kinds of interesting things are possible. At present, from what I’ve heard, most online book buyers don’t browse to discover new titles. They may look at lists and recommendations, but they don’t “go down an aisle” as you would in a store. Hopefully better information display, coupled with relevant data (i.e. suggestions of related works) will get Internet book buyers to learn about books they weren’t searching for, instead of just finding the ones they were searching for. We do this a little on our own web site — making algorithmic suggestions based on the book a person was searching for or a book they are viewing the details on. Our system is just in its infancy; I would like to expand this feature over the next few years. Also, on our site we offer biographical information and collecting tips on hundreds of authors, linked to our copies of their books available. This just seemed to make sense from a data perspective. Once you input a short critical blurb about Allen Ginsberg, for example, you never have to do it again and it shows up with each of his books. I was pleasantly surprised when customers actually told me they found these features helpful.

Getting back to the weight and dimensions of books, this is something about some of the big used book vendors that really bugs me. There is really no reason that we couldn’t see far more accurate shipping matrices. Many dealers have to cancel foreign orders for books over a certain size or weight because the Internet listing services offer rigid and unreasonable compensation on shipping. But let’s say there is a data library of book specifications. When a dealer offers a folio photography book that weighs four pounds, just about every copy is going to be the exact same size and weight. With size and weight, plus some calculable extra for packaging, you can reasonably predict the shipping costs. This would be a tremendous service for both sellers and buyers, and there is no reason it can’t happen.

I want to talk about one of your innovations to the internet book-buying experience: the rotating-books technology. You explain how it works on the site. What has been the reaction to this from customers and what do you see as the future of the technology?

That was something I had wanted to do for a long time. Even on our old site some people may remember that you could view a couple of rarities rotating, like a first edition of Ethan Frome in dustjacket. But I was using a very primitive technology, it was over 400KB to load, and it only spun around on a single axis. And worst of all, it was a lot of work. It took a couple of hours to create a rotation for a single book. I did two books that way, and I did the principle photography for about two dozen more, but I never finished the coding for them. I never found the time. In our new system it takes about eight minutes to load the book into the system from start to finish, and we can add as many books as we want without having to program them into place on our site. We still only get around to it periodically, but it’s much easier, more effective, and more efficient than my early attempts.

Customers definitely appreciate it. A person might call to order a book and I’ll say, “Well, just to warn you, there is a little chip on the rear panel.” And they’ll reply, “Yes, I saw it on your site. That’s not too bad.” It’s hard to quantify how much it helps. We’re at a stage now with our rotations that most other dealers are with merely taking pictures — you devote the extra time to the best and most interesting books, and when they sell it can be hard to tell how much the extra effort contributed to the sale. Sure it spun around, but it was also a beautiful copy of Gone with the Wind, so someone was going to buy it anyway. But clearly it doesn’t hurt. Other dealers have asked about our making the technology available to them, and that is something we’re looking into. It’s difficult because half the effect is achieved by technology, and the other half by very refined photography parameters.

The rotating books might very obviously fall into the bells-and-whistles category. And I admit, I love it when people refer to it enthusiastically as something cool. But to me it’s never been just a gimmick. For me it is a logical extension of my belief that many antiquarian books are bought, sold, and appreciated primarily as objects. There is very little reason for any sane person to spend a couple of thousand dollars on a text which is exactly identical to what they could easily buy in a paperback reprint for just a few bucks. How many people buy first editions because they’re preparing a variorum of some kind? One in ten thousand? The other 9,999 collectors might feel attached to the book-object because of the text inside, but what they’re paying for is the physical object itself, the possession of which gives them an emotional satisfaction. So when a dealer shows a photo of a book, it isn’t just extending the ability of the dealer to communicate the condition of the book to the customer with a “worth a thousand words” description, it is simultaneously reinforcing the concrete reality of that particular object which the customer is otherwise taking on faith. So by offering a three-dimensional representation of the book, we’re taking both those elements a step further. Not only are we adding to the customer’s ability to appreciate remotely the book’s condition (warts and all in some cases), but we are also, I hope, subtly bolstering the customer’s trust that this particular copy really exists, really is in our possession, and really can be theirs.

I would love to marry the rotation technology with some of the other book display technologies that are out there, such as the turn-the-page tools you can see at the British Library. Imagine being able to inspect the exterior of a book from every angle using our rotation tool, AND THEN examine the interior just as effortlessly. Also, it would be great to see another connection speed jump like we saw from dial-up to broadband. I don’t know if optical lines could deliver this, but if we saw another manifold increase in widespread connection speeds, it would allow for much larger and more detailed images with the rotations. Right now we try to keep the total rotation for each book under 65KB, so there is a limit to how much picture information you can squeeze into that space. But it would be great to see the book at a higher resolution and zoomable to full size and beyond. I think that as the web evolves more and more of the physical world will be represented and recreated online, so that in a decade’s time perhaps people will be accustomed to “virtually” picking up and examining not only books, but much more complicated objects as well.

I see how the book-rotating process is an attempt to recreate the sensory aspect of the book-buying experience but on Between the Covers I always print out anything I want to read. Can the internet or the ebook ever really replace the physical and emotional sensations behind holding and reading a book?

The bibliophilic answer is definitely not, never, books are here to stay. You hear this all the time. And the technophile answer is, probably, eventually it will. I lean toward the latter, I admit. I think many reading activities which have not yet migrated to electronic format will. Some texts lend themselves more readily to becoming etexts than others. Think about encyclopedias: at first of course they were printed, like everything else. Then there were a few years when CD-Rom encyclopedias sold well (mostly packaged with new computers). Now much of the information people used to go to the printed encyclopedia for they try to get directly from the Internet, either for free or, if they are affiliated with an institution, perhaps through a new iteration of old standards such as Encyclopedia Britannica. At some point I think it’s likely to become economically unviable to print encyclopedias.

Obviously reference materials lend themselves very much to the conversion from printed text to etext, not least because they can be sorted, filtered, searched, and updated so much more easily. In many cases they simply become tangibly better as etexts. You can find information in reference etext that you simply would not uncover in the same printed reference. As a dealer, I particularly appreciate the electronic versions of helpful references like the auction price guides and various bibliographies.

But the question is usually aimed at more romantic visions of reading, like fiction and poetry. A few things would have to happen for ebook novels, for example, to replace printed novels. For one thing, you need a convenient, reliable, effective, sturdy, and above all affordable screen. I’ve heard about prototypes that offer a single flexible “leaf” screen that can become any text and does it very sharply. It really does look like print, and you even have the sensation of turning a page. Sell it for $25, make it waterproof, scratch-proof, tear-proof, and cheap to refill with any text, including lots of free ones, and you could see an incredible transformation in the way people read. Still, as has been pointed out so many times, the book really is a magnificent vessel for text already. So for anything else to replace paper in a widespread fashion, and not just as a novelty, the price, ease of use, durability, convenience, and pop-culture appeal all have to mesh just so. Maybe if Apple made an iPaperback — they seem to have a knack for putting all those elements together, except maybe the price. But it doesn’t always work. Every World’s Fair since the 1930s has predicted widespread video-calling to replace telephones, but it hasn’t happened. We should have stopped driving petroleum-fed cars years ago, but that didn’t happen either. There are a lot of reasons these technologies haven’t changed, but it has more to do with psychology and market forces, and less to do with either technological possibility or even economy.

It’s going to be hard for paper books to die out because people like them. Most people who love to read can vividly recall particular editions of works which left a strong impression on them. For example, I have a very tactile association with the 1986 Penguin edition of Moby Dick, annotated by Harold Beaver, which made a great impression on me. But I also listen to audio books a lot, especially while I’m working around the house. So I associate A Tale of Two Cities with painting my basement, and A Gathering of Old Men with resodding my backyard, because those were the projects I was working on while listening to those books. I know what different editions of those titles look like because I work with first editions, but my emotional memories of those books are not connected to any physical objects at all, except a paint brush and a rented power tiller (which, by the way, I cannot recommend highly enough). From my own experience, the association of text with books should not be taken as a de facto relationship.

So creating an adequate alternative vessel for the text is still only a preliminary step. There also has to be a generational shift. My father is from the old-time radio generation, when “the stories were better written because you had to use your imagination.” And if you listen to recorded episodes of The Shadow or Suspense, you can appreciate some of the appeal of pre-television drama. But the appreciation is an intellectual one, not a visceral one. It’s not the same as if you actually grew up with it, a child listening to a radio drama in the dark. Or to turn it around, think of the film The Wizard of Oz. It’s almost impossible for contemporary America adults to assess that film in the way it was reviewed in 1939, because almost no American since the 1950s has grown up without seeing the film on television as a child. No matter how critically we want to look at the movie, we cannot divest ourselves from the wonder and attachment of our childhood experience with it.

What I’m getting at is, as Buck Rogers as it sounds now, if there comes a time when children start with e-board books, and then graduate to e-story books, to e-chapter books, to e-young adult novels, and so on, they won’t have the same object-to-text associations we have. Are we talking 20 years, or 50 years, or 100 years? I have no idea. But I believe it will probably happen eventually, though you and I may not be around to see it. I don’t think booksellers, particularly antiquarian booksellers, have anything to worry about.

To switch gears a bit, Between the Covers was involved in the appraisal of the William Burroughs collection that sold to New York Public Library. How could archives such as that be best served by the internet?

Suppose all the letters, notebooks, and cutups of Burroughs were scanned in. In theory, the more manuscript and archival material scanned in, transcribed, indexed, and searchable the better. The possibilities for advances in our understanding of authors, their writings and their personal lives, are tremendous. Anybody, anywhere, could sift through the raw material themselves and make connections that nobody else would make. This isn’t the best example, but look at what Scott Brown was able to do with the issue point on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Scott, the editor of Fine Books magazine and a tenacious researcher, examined via scanned archives of periodicals the advertised prices of a certain book over the course of a few weeks in 1929, and in doing so figured out roughly when that book’s price was changed. Since the book is advertised on the back of The Sound and the Fury, but at different prices on different copies, this allowed him to determine which issue precedes (the one with the lower price, rather than the one with the higher price). With an archive of manuscripts and correspondence made truly publicly accessible via the Internet the possibilities for fresh insight are almost infinite.

But there are at least two problems with this information Utopia. First, scanning archives costs money, and institutions need to see a return on their investment in some form or another. Hopefully page views by interested patrons would be enough to justify a grant for further scanning. Secondly, I’ve heard from some librarians, such as Dan De Simone, Curator of the Rosenwald Collection at the Library of Congress, that counter-intuitively the increased accessibility of scanned material leads to an increase in requests to see the real thing. Maybe it goes back to my mantra of appreciation for the physical object — I don’t know. But if institutions are spending more not ONLY on scanning, but also on increased supervision of requests to touch as well, then they might be doubly disinclined to get that unique material digitized. I hope not — I hope one day any person anywhere had as great a likelihood of making a unique contribution to the understanding of an author or a work as the couple of people have ready access to the physical archive.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

In my recent piece on the Baltimore Bookfair and elsewhere, I sang the praises of the Between the Covers web site. It is one of the most innovative on the Web. With his presence at all the major book fairs, in several bookseller associations and organizations, and in book magazines, Tom Congalton acts as the face of that operation, but he has a dedicated, fun-loving, and incredibly knowledgeable staff behind him. In terms of the web site, Dan Gregory is the one of the wizards behind the curtain that makes the site work so efficiently and effectively. Tom Bloom deserves special mention as well. Back in the mid-90s when I first started collecting, his artwork on the Between the Covers catalogs — as much as the books within them — made me eager to get my mail every day. To this day, despite a series of moves, I’ve kept all those catalogs.

Gregory and I have emailed back and forth a few times and the subject of an interview on the Internet and the rare book trade came up. I was curious about the philosophies and day to day activities that made the site possible as well as what betweenthecovers.com means in terms of the past, present, and future of rare bookselling. Besides putting together a wonderful web site, Gregory has developed some interesting web tools that make buying books on the Internet a more personal and more intimate experience. For example, the rotating book technology (e.g. a rotating copy of Burroughs’ Junkie) has far-reaching implications for the development of virtual archives. Not surprisingly, Gregory possesses some interesting ideas and opinions about the relastionship between the Web and bookselling. What follows is the first part of what is shaping up to be a two part interview on the topic.

Interview with Dan Gregory

You began working with Between the Covers in 1996. Did the bookstore consider itself a pioneer in cyberspace? What was the trade’s feeling towards the internet at the time?

When Tom hired me he told me that he wanted to launch a web site of some kind, but he didn’t have very clear ideas. At that point at least several dozen very good dealers had sites, so we certainly weren’t pioneers. We launched our site in early 1997 and I think it was very solidly laid-out, so that we didn’t need to overhaul it for a good long time. I also gave a lot of thought to “what should this web site ‘be’? What should this web site ‘do’ for customers?” So in that sense perhaps we were pioneers because I think most dealers, then and now, don’t really put much effort into giving their web site a purpose. For many it is basically a business card, especially today — they have it because they would feel “unprofessional” without it. Most of the things in the 2006 version of the web site were things I wanted to do in the 1997 version, but at the time both we and the web weren’t ready (that is, neither 1997 software nor 1997 connection speeds would have allowed our current site to work for customers).

As for the second part of the question, I think that in the late 1990s the segment of the book trade that I knew (mid- to high-end antiquarian dealers) was simultaneously optimistic and skeptical. They all understood something big was going on here, but they weren’t sure at the end of the day how it was going to affect their part of the book market. Ultimately I would say a considerable amount of dealing, particularly the really pricey stuff, still goes on outside the Internet. As happy as I am with our web site, and with the number of books we sell online through all our partner-venues, it is still only a fraction of our business.

I started collecting in 1993 and Between the Covers had one of the most distinctive catalogs around with artwork by Tom Bloom. When you started was there a philosophy regarding the appearance of the web site such as trying to recreate the distinctive feel of the catalog or did that come later?

With both our initial and our re-launched sites, I thought it was essential to use Tom Bloom’s work. I am a big believer in branding as one of the most important elements of a rare book business. And branding goes beyond a consistent logo or a consistent font (although that’s a good start). For me, branding is also about presenting a philosophy of business. The reason I like working with Tom Bloom so much, and Tom Congalton for that matter, is that it is very clear from both their artwork and their writing that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We actually enjoy having and selling the books in our inventory. We’re having fun. We laugh a lot.

Other businesses, particularly rare book businesses, are very buttoned-down. And there is nothing wrong with that. It works for them, and it works for their customers. To a degree very rare and valuable material lends itself to hushed tones and cloistered settings. But it’s not what we’re about, either in Tom Bloom’s artwork, in Tom Congalton’s catalog descriptions, or even in his choice of inventory. So for our first site, I used pre-existing Tom Bloom artwork and a very colorful palette to try to communicate that sense of fun. For our current site we got much more ambitious, and commissioned pages and pages of entirely new artwork for each “section” of the site. And of course we added animation and a sense of “depth” to the site in our layout. With the new site we were trying to recreate the experience of visiting our office or visiting our booth at a bookfair.

As it stands right now, what are some of your major tenets regarding bookselling and the internet?

I don’t think any of the elements that went into professional bookselling before the Internet have really changed or become minimized. The one major difference is the tremendous availability of books and book dealers. At the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminars I urge new booksellers to identify WHAT KIND of professional bookseller they want to be. That is, are they naturally inclined toward research? Toward service? Toward competitive pricing? Booksellers need to figure out their own identity, and then communicate that identity to potential customers. You can do that in a limited fashion with your book descriptions, but obviously a web site allows for much more of that. Selling is much easier when your potential customers have the confidence that there is a real and distinct (and hopefully professional and likeable) person on the other end of the Ethernet cable. In the past couple of years we’ve seen many more bookseller blogs, and that is one of the easier ways for a bookseller to personalize the web experience for collectors.

If you are a specialist dealer with unique or nearly unique knowledge, it’s much easier to carve a niche in the marketplace. Now I don’t have data on this, but I would hazard to guess that the percentage of dealers who would define themselves as specialist dealers, or as having genuinely specialized knowledge, against the full spectrum of sellers out there, has probably gone down dramatically over the last decade as the number of people selling books has skyrocketed. In other words, fifteen years ago perhaps 30 out of every hundred booksellers were specialists. Now perhaps the number is not more than 5 out of every hundred booksellers is a specialist. (Again, the numbers are purely speculation.) But, even in the absence of data, I believe for the vast majority of dealers now, there are hundreds of other dealers out there with similar experience selling similar material for similar prices. If you can’t stand out because of your inventory, then you have to try to stand out in other ways. And you MUST communicate to the potential buyer than there is a real, unique and interesting person at the other end of the transaction.

The Between the Covers site must take a remarkable amount of work. Can you give some idea of the daily grind it takes to make the site work? If you can give some idea what are the economics that makes all that work and man hours worthwhile?

Regarding the economics, our first site cost us almost nothing and so anything we sold would be considered a profit. One day a very wealthy person wanting to get a book for his son assigned his secretary to research rare books and she found our site. That resulted directly in a six figure sale, so when it came time to redesign I felt we could devote a lot more resources to it. Of course sometimes throwing money is not a good solution — most of the big book sites are very uninspired, and in some cases just a mess of jumbled data, despite their deep pockets.

Specifically regarding the amount of work that goes into our site, it can be very hard to find time to add non-product data. That is, like all book dealers we are always adding books to our inventory database. And for many years we’ve had a picture for every book. So the books on our site are changing daily. And we built in programming to add a degree of randomness to every load of the home page — every visit gives you a unique initial set of books to view that will never be repeated. Coming from several years of managing brick and mortar stores, I was wary of what I call the “shop window roller coaster.” When you are first put in charge of a shop window you put a lot of effort into the display. Every element is carefully considered, every inch is an inspiration contributing to a thematic work of art. Then you unveil it, and maybe the customers respond, or maybe it falls kind of flat. Either way, in a few weeks you have to do it all over again. You pick another theme and set to work. After doing it a few times frankly you get pretty sick of the whole process: the fun has leached out of it like the colors of the books in the window that have been hit daily by the morning sun. It becomes a chore, and so the results suffer as the enthusiasm wanes. During our planning sessions there were several times when our designer said, “Let’s build it this way so you can change it as often as you wish.” My reply was often, “Let’s build it to change automatically, because otherwise I will never get to it.” We have a lot of algorithms designed to make the kinds of display choices we would make manually.

But much of the content on the site, particularly all the bibliographic and unique content, has to be added by people. Adding articles and reference information isn’t normally part of our work schedule, so it can be tough to find the time. In the summer we usually hire students on their academic breaks, and so we get a lot of data typed in then. And we built the site to be very scalable, so there is infinite room for growth. When I get a chance, say when I’m in between catalogs, I’ll add photos from our archive, or add articles, or award lists, etc. Regarding profitability, our site is just one more “arrow in our quiver.” But in addition to the direct sales it generates, it also I think leads indirectly to a lot of business. More specifically, we make much more from our catalogs and direct quotes to customers. But about of a third of our Internet sales come through our web site, and of course we pay no commission or fees for those sales so they are also more profitable than our other Internet sales. And when people hear about us and look us up, I think it helps that they see a very deep site with a lot of information.

Let’s talk about the current site. You provide a brief description of your thoughts behind the site such as the attempt to recreate the old cluttered brick-and-mortar bookshop in cyberspace. As a result your site is “busy” or “cluttered.” Has this been the major criticism of the site? Can you touch on how “busy” ties into the need for constant content on the internet?

Actually that was only self-criticism — I’m happy to say that quite a few people have written in to say how much they like the structure and look of the site. Some of our more enthusiastic visitors have even posted messages along the lines of “Don’t change a thing!” The only major criticism we received when we launched the site was about the speed. It was pretty slow, especially compared to the normal expectations of page load these days. There is quite a lot going on “under the hood,” so the coding for each page is very complex. But we did a lot of recoding and indexing, and now I think the site speed is acceptable. We’ll try to get it even faster, but that was the main improvement we’ve made since we launched.

Regarding the constant need for content, I’ve never understood why any bookseller would think that a collector would want to go to an individual dealer’s site if all that site had was a search engine no different than all the other book search engines out there. You have to give people reasons to visit. It’s not uncommon for us to have half hour or even hour long visits from web viewers, which I think is great. And happily those aren’t flukes. Our average visit is several minutes long. And we also see a lot of people going from one page to another, to another and only leaving the site after they’ve visited a half dozen or a dozen pages on it. I have faith that “stickiness” pays off, either directly or indirectly.

I often think about the age of collectors. Your site seems to be perfect for younger, more computer-savvy collectors. Is this an effort to get in touch with and spark the interest of younger collectors? Is the print catalog in a similar way a means to keep in contact with your older, more traditional clientele?

Actually both our site and our catalogs are based mostly on personal aesthetics. We try to make catalogs we would like to receive in the mail, and a web site we would like to visit. It’s partly selfish, partly a confidence in our own judgment, and partly a sensibility that there is no point in copying everything else out there, especially when, to be frank, so much of it is mediocre. To a large extent this philosophy comes from Tom Congalton and the way he buys books — he buys things that are interesting to him, taking a calculated risk that if he found it interesting our customers will as well. Early on when we were planning the redesign we were advised to survey web customers and we said, “Nah, we’ll just do it the way we like.” Surveys have their place, but it is also a quick path to mediocrity, especially when there is, I think, a dearth of originality and inspiration in the rare book trade.

Some of our best web site customers are also our steady catalog customers, and they are mostly middle-aged. Since I know them and can see what they buy, I can assess that. But we haven’t bothered to survey our web visitors beyond that, so I don’t know if as a group they are younger than our catalog mailing list.

More to come…

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Labor Day Weekend in Baltimore. For those who decide to stay in town, and there are not many, this weekend is a time for sitting on a rooftop deck (the yuppie version of the good old stoop) and cracking Natty Bohs while deciding whether to head down to Obrycki’s to crack a couple dozen steamed Blue Crabs. The Ravens’ season is just one week away, and thankfully the Orioles season is almost over. Tourists flood into town for one more walk around the Inner Harbor. Down at the convention center just off the harbor is another rite of summer, the Baltimore Antique Show held this year from August 30 to September 2. Baltimore must be something of an antiquing paradise, because the Antique Roadshow pulled into town at the beginning of the summer to tape an episode. Just outside of Charm City, there are a handful of oases, like Ellicott City, for those partial to that which is old and worn. Meccas, like Adamstown and Kutztown in Pennsylvania, are just a couple hours away.

The antique bug never took hold of me although it was not for lack of opportunity. Many a weekend of my youth was spent in an antique mall in Adamstown with my father. Yet the Baltimore Antique Show is must-see TV, due to a small booksellers section that never fails to surprise and inform. I must admit that on entering the Convention Center I never expect much as it is largely a regional affair. There is a strong local flavor, think Old Bay with a splash of John Waters. There is much Chesapeake Bay material. There is much Wateriana, if such a category exists. The local sports teams of yore are prominently displayed. Signed copies of the Johnny Unitas Story or the Earl Morrall autobiography sprinkled with Orioles memorabilia from when Brooksie protected third and Palmer ruled the hill. Superfan Wild Bill Hagy died this summer, and Baltimore’s relationship with baseball is very much in danger as well. Football is now America’s game, and the Ravens clearly rule in Baltimore. Although for the collector it is all about the Colts. For the more literary minded, there is Edgar Allan Poe who died in a gutter outside the present day The Horse You Came In On bar in Fells Point. Word around town is that the bar is not long for this world either having been sold earlier this year. Yet there will always be a place in Baltimore for H.L. Mencken. Decades later Mencken’s critical voice is as much a part of the city’s vocabulary as calling someone “Hon” or exclaiming “Ain’t the beer cold!”

Beneath all the local color, I always seem to find a few items that fit in nicely with my collection. Years ago I passed on a complete run of Black Mountain Review for $400. Looking at it now that is quite a deal as single issues post on the internet for double that. I am still cobbling together a complete set of this legendary little magazine. If only… This year presented another little magazine, one even more iconic than Black Mountain Review if that is possible. Joe Maynard had a full run of transition, Eugene Jolas’ testament to the glory of Modernism. The price was $4500 (a bit high) with some tasty ephemera thrown in. Maynard was ready to haggle a bit. The magazine would have provided a nice sense of tradition to my collection, but I passed. I am sure I will regret it.

I must admit I went to this year’s show not so much to buy something as to find proof that the personal touch was returning to the rare book trade. I have made much of the changes ongoing in the rare book world due to the Internet, and the Baltimore show seemed like a good case study to test my theories. Due to the placement of the show, I initially thought the number of booksellers had greatly expanded. This was not the case. In fact, the fair was smaller than in previous years, and the presence of big name sellers, like Lame Duck Books or Ken Lopez, who attended in the past, were sorely missed. I wondered if the size of the show was indicative of a softening of the market.

Were gas prices too high? Hotels too expensive over Labor Day in the Inner Harbor? There is a fine line on the balance sheet between having a successful book fair and an expensive working vacation. Have collectors tightened the purse strings in this uncertain market? To me this is a buyer’s market. Given the volatility of the economy, the next year has the potential to be an exciting time for the book trade. Those with money to spend and to invest will be looking for alternative assets besides the more traditional stock market and real estate in which to diversify their holdings. Due to unfortunate circumstances, there should also be a lot of good material coming to market in the upcoming year. The book trade is ruled by death, divorce and debt. Debt seems like a runaway train right now so those who bought recklessly in the real estate boom may have to unload books in the bust. I would think that the auction, catalog, and bookshow market will be full of enticing, unusual items this year for those in a position to buy.

So I wondered if the recent reports, including my own, of the triumphant return of the bookshow and the personal touch were exaggerated. I expressed my concern to a dealer at the show, and she did not think so. After looking over the show in full, I agree with this dealer; the personal touch is back with a vengeance in all aspects of the book trade. Three dealers, Royal Books, Lux Mentis and Between the Covers, hammered this point home in various ways.

To me, Royal Books is the king of the Baltimore Area book world. Taking a page from Joe Brainard, I remember Kevin Johnson, the owner of Royal Books, scouting for stock on Sunday evenings as I worked the register at a used bookstore in Bethesda. Kevin always seemed to capitalize on our mistakes in the hardcover fiction section. He is far beyond that now. Royal Books has evolved into a major player with a strong presence in every aspect of the book trade. Royal Books is at all the major book fairs. The store has well-placed and well-designed ads in several magazines. Kevin teaches courses and gives talks on rare books and the culture of the trade across the country. The Royal Books website is similarly well designed, constantly updated, and closely monitored by Kevin and his staff. Send Kevin an email and see how quickly he responds.

For the past couple of years, I noticed that Royal Books possessed a strong focus on books relating to film. Books that were adapted into films, particularly in the noir era. Books on film written by directors, usually signed. Autobiographies or biographies of screen legends again with signatures. This focus has culminated in two of Royal Books’ recent publications. At the show, Royal Books distributed their latest catalog which relates to film. I received a copy in the mail, but it had gotten wet, so I hoped to get another copy at the show. This catalog was worth the price of admission. It is beautifully produced with crisp, clear images and informative descriptions. Part collector’s item, information resource, pleasure reading, the catalog functions on many levels. The items inside are incredible. Take item one: a reel of Stan Brakhage’s Lovemaking distributed by Grove Press in 1968. What an interesting piece! Besides being a Brakhage film in reel-to-reel format (available for $30 at the time), the item highlights Grove Press’ attempt to become a full-fledged multimedia empire in the 1960s. Rosset was nothing if not ambitious with dreams of offering the full range of print (hardcover, paperback, magazines) as well as running a record label and a film distribution company. Barney Rosset as the Rupert Murdoch of the Underground. It is a fascinating story captured by a very rare collectible. Royal Books’ catalog is full of such stories.

Even more ambitious is the limited edition bibliography currently available for order from Royal Books. In a labor of love, Johnson compiled The Dark Page: Books that Inspired American Film Noir (1940-1949). At 400+ pages, the book provides color images and critical text on the first edition sources of noir films as well as commentary on the films themselves. Director and screenwriter Paul Schrader writes the foreword. A limited edition of 100 ($450) are in a slipcase and signed by Schrader and Johnson. The trade edition sells for $95. This is sure to become a collector’s item.

The tradition of the bookseller as publisher and literary historian is strong. Johnson, The Dark Page, and Royal Books are firmly within this noble lineage. Whether it was Sylvia Beach or the Wilentz Brothers, independent booksellers have historically played a crucial role in the publication of what was new and exciting in fiction and poetry. I have written elsewhere on the importance of the catalog as a resource and a collectible. The Dark Page reminds me of a non-fiction publication by Greg Gibson and Ten Pound Island Books in Gloucester. Gibson saw through a collection of letters and poems written by Charles Olson to the editor of the Gloucester Times throughout the 1960s. Garritt Lansing, the editor of Set magazine, a notable poet, and friend of Olson, wrote the foreword. Look on abebooks for the prices of the work published by Gibson, Beach, or the Wilentz Brothers, and you will see that $450/$95 is not out of the ballpark for The Dark Page.

Royal Books’ ambitious bibliography, catalog and website prove that being at the top of your profession as a bookseller is about more than just selling books. Heartfelt passion and hard-earned knowledge are crucial. Hopefully, Johnson’s intellectual sweat equity will be rewarded with lots of sales. Given the high quality of his operation, I suspect that will not be a problem.

In 2006, I went to the Baltimore show and was struck by Ian Kahn and Lux Mentis Books operating out of Portland Maine. At the time, Kahn offered a beautiful copy of Rick Griffin’s Joint Show poster along with the rarer Zig Zag pouch used to distribute the handbills. Having only seen the poster in catalogs, it was a treat to see one up close. I got into a nice conversation with Kahn on a full range of book collecting topics. Talking to him was one of the highlights of last year’s show. I made a mental note to check on him again if he returned.

Well, Lux Mentis was back with a vengeance this year with a selection of books that were dear to my heart. Once again he played to the locals with a nice John Waters display revolving around Pink Flamingos, but the real eye-catcher this year was his recent decision to jump in with both feet into the artist’s book market. A quarter of Kahn’s space was taken up with the letterpress work of artists David Wolfe of Wolfe Editions and his partner Crystal Cawley. Both artists call Portland their home base and according to Kahn, Portland is the ground zero for some of the finest of letterpress work currently available. Based on what I saw in Baltimore I have no doubt. The work was exquisite to say the least. Talking with Kahn it was clear that like the noir genre with Johnson, the letterpress technique and the artist’s book are acts and objects that stir great emotions within him. Kahn spoke with much insight and energy on the topic. Apparently his enthusiasm is contagious, because the collectible market for letterpress and the artist’s book is really taking off. In no small part, Kahn is one of the reasons why. Kahn and others like him are yearning for the personal touch in printing. The human and sensual nature of letterpress is more desirable than ever in a world of offset and digital publishing. In the near future, Kahn will be issuing a catalog of letterpress work of the past and present. Hopefully, Burroughs will be represented as Wallace Berman’s Semina and Jon Edgar and Gypsy Lou Webb’s Loujon Press titles remain to this day towering achievements in the letterpress tradition.

Kahn talks the talk, but he also walks the walk. His appreciation of the personal touch extends in other directions. I have already shown Kahn’s wonderful way with customers. He shares his knowledge and passion freely. Lux Mentis’ business cards are fine examples of letterpress. Rue Cottage Books provides a similar touch. You can feel the bite of the type with your finger. The paper was no doubt chosen with great care and attention. The design is impeccable. Wired magazine noticed and featured it in its pages. Most exciting to me is Lux Mentis’ website. Like many booksellers, Kahn is getting interactive. His recent forays into the blogosphere are detailed, informative and fun to read. Check out his entries on the Baltimore Fair. His pieces on the marketing of the fair are great stuff. Commentary, behind the scenes tidbits, local color, photographs. You even get a restaurant review. What more could you ask for? Kahn really gets that the rare bookstore is about more than just selling books and that book collecting is more than just buying books. Kahn understands the value of capturing the entire experience…

… As well as getting people excited about the experience at an early age. Kahn is one of the sponsors for the Fine Books and Collections Magazine collegiate book collecting contest. The book trade can only benefit from such contests. The result is not only more buyers but more sellers. Given the age of much of the booksellers in the various established organizations, like ABAA, and the age of most collectors, a shot in the arm is needed. It is no coincidence that William Reese, one of the superstars of the rare book trade and a wunderkind when he first opened for business, won a prestigious book collecting award sponsored by Yale University as an undergraduate. Not surprisingly, Kahn sees the big picture and realizes the importance of getting young people hooked as bibliomaniacs early.

Speaking of forward thinking, Tom Congalton and Between the Covers attended the fair as usual. As I have touched on in other columns, Congalton is other bookseller who gets the power of the web as well as the multi-dimensional nature of the rare book dealer. In addition to his site, Congalton writes a column for Rare Book Review. I highly recommend it. He may downplay the column, but such efforts really put a face and a personality to the bookstore. Reading his column made him approachable for me in what can be an intimidating setting. The more a collector feels comfortable with a bookseller the more likely he is going to trust him with his business.

As I expressed to him my appreciation for his column, the subject of Burroughs came up. Turns out Congalton appraised the Burroughs collection that went to the New York Public Library. Ken Lopez handled the sale for collector Robert Jackson. Although I was full of questions about the financial details, I held back, not wanting to violate the appraiser’s code of ethics. Yet the appraisal was a special one. Congalton was particularly struck by the meticulous organization of the collection. As Ken Lopez noted, much of the contents were still in the packaging of the original sale to Roberto Altman in 1973. The pieces were in great condition and well catalogued. Hopefully this will mean that the New York Public Library has a head start on the processing end of things. In addition Congalton noted the incredible number of cut-ups in the collection. This would explain why cut-up manuscripts so rarely come up for sale on the open market. The placement of the papers at NYPL will make it possible for the first time to study the cut-up in manuscript. This coupled with the large quantity of unstudied letters from the 1960s to the likes of Jeff Nuttall, Brion Gysin, Ian Sommerville and others should completely revolutionize the perception of this misunderstood and understudied phase of Burroughs’ literary career.

So even in a city mostly known to collectors for Poe and Mencken from days of yore and Anne Tyler and John Waters from the now, Burroughs can become a topic of conversation. I wish he was more represented at the show. All I saw were a couple of paperback copies of Naked Lunch. The Olympia Press Naked Lunch ($4000) at Royal Books was not the kind of copy I would hope for given the superb condition of most of Kevin Johnson’s stock. A copy of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums ($1100) looked like it had seen the inside of a rucksack or two. But really the Beats and Burroughs are not the strengths of Royal Books. Check out their upcoming publications to see the bookstore in all its glory. There was also a Black Cat edition of Naked Lunch ($40) from 1966. Unfortunately, this is one of the least inspired book designs of Naked Lunch, and given the recent efforts from Grove Press surrounding that title that is saying something. As I said before I was looking at the bookshow as a whole rather than for any individual book, so I was not that disappointed. Instead I saw three booksellers that made me excited about the future of the rare book trade. Based on Kahn’s blog from Baltimore (the show was one of his best ever), things are going well for him and others like him in the present as well.

Written by Jed Birmingham and published by RealityStudio on 12 September 2007.