Week 18/19: Can you relate your newsletter to Eurovision-winning artists ABBA more often?
money, money, money
I kicked off this little mini-series by noting that to understand book collecting, we have to understand the history, priorities, and trends of book collectors, librarians, and book sellers. We’ve covered the first two, so a brief review of the methods of private and institutional collecting that I’ve covered in the last two issues:
In Week 14/15, I discussed high-spot and list collecting, as well as originating areas of interest as a private collector. The former modes can get expensive: if you’re buying works that are already popular, you will compete with a lot of other people who also want to have popular things. The latter mode can be very time-consuming: if you’re pursuing a less-established area, you will do more leg work to track down works that might not pop up in dealers’ catalogues, and you may spend more time justifying your collecting area. But innovating a new collecting niche can be extraordinarily influential for institutions, which benefit from donated collections that expand their holdings.
In Week 16/17, I sprinted through a few modes of institutional collecting: highly individualized, preference-based purchasing done on book trips (a method that is rapidly disappearing); indiscriminate aggregation in pursuit of a mission (understandable but perhaps inefficient); and directed interpretation of existing strengths and areas of improvement, attending to contemporary priorities (which often means challenging the status quo). I talked about how libraries are constrained by levels of purchasing power (meaning only some people get to make decisions on what they spend money on) and by funding (especially funding that is tied to specific purposes).
This brings us to booksellers, the primary conduit for materials for many collectors, private and institutional. John Carter writes in Taste and Technique in Book Collecting that “booksellers’ tastes precede our own,” a premise I’ve already pointed to in the last two issues: if booksellers are not interested or knowledgeable in a subject area, they will likely not sell it, limiting routes of discovery for both private and institutional buyers. That’s a powerful position to hold.
To address the elephant in the room, most antiquarian booksellers are white and of varying degrees of wealth; booksellers tend to be, but are not always, highly educated, with one or more postgraduate degrees. A friend and fellow bookdealer once described bookselling as a “lower-middle class service profession to the uber rich,” which is true, but it obscures how many booksellers rely on generational wealth to begin their businesses and keep themselves afloat. Our client base also skews wealthy and white, both from private and institutional collectors (meaning institutions with lots of money, or at least certainly more money than their employees have). And we’re nowhere near gender parity: When my boss joined the book world in 2004, she was told that the book world, which was then 85% male, was on the precipice of a massive gender shift. Sixteen years later, this shift has yet to come.
Just an aside, because we’re here and talking about sexism, the eternal burden of women in the book trade (and also everywhere, I realize this is not unique to books) is having your expertise questioned. Embarrassing to use Harry Potter as an example of anything in the Year of Our Lord 2021, but the last time I was at a book fair, I saw one of those deluxe editions of the series (fancy binding, signed by the author, priced disgustingly high), and starting rattling off a million facts about the various editions. The monologue took a turn to the other volumes in the case, much to the shock of the guy staffing the booth, who made zero attempt to hide that he was utterly perplexed that this small lady person knew things about both Harry Potter and its next-door neighbor, a second edition of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. I’ve got range, baby!
Anyways, even as we actively work against the biases of the trade, the overwhelming interests of antiquarian bookdealing skew white and male, interests that reveal themselves in those jaw-dropping prices attached to those high spots. In short, our prices reflect our priorities.
But not all booksellers are tied to selling high spots. Certainly, many booksellers do stock those titles because they are reliable sellers (or as reliable as anything is in bookselling), but many booksellers get into the business because they have their own niche interest area that they would like to study and supply (which means room for change!). Rebecca Romney, of Type Punch Matrix, has talked about this extensively, most recently in an episode of the Shelf Love podcast. She says as much early in the episode (which I really recommend listening to, even if you’re not interested in romance genre. I’ve listened to it twice and I learned things both times):
The thing people mostly associate with rare book dealing is like selling first editions of those big canonical books. They get the headlines because they tend to hit really big prices, like a Shakespeare folio selling for $6 million, that kind of thing. And I do deal in that type of material because often that is what keeps the lights on for me as a business. Like I can't afford to turn my back on them.
But in terms of where I'm personally most interested and motivated, like as an ideal for me, I use rare book selling as a way to provide the funding for my own research. So I can kind of justify spending this time because if I've done it well, then I can sell that book afterwards to a collector or institution. And that kind of pays for my time. And so that allows me to function as a scholar, like somewhat independent of academia.
In Rebecca’s case, that research has resulted in a 282-page catalogue, The Romance Novel in English, which will surely serve as the kind of highly-specific reference source born from personal investment and love of material that I’ve talked about before. Her work exemplifies how booksellers and collectors who are really passionate about particular areas become experts in them and then contribute the foundational bibliographic and historical research that ends up underwriting all of our cataloguing for like two centuries. (Recall that we still use bibliographies written in the 1800s for some subjects because they’re just unbeatable, and few people are fussed enough to try to update them). This catalogue also serves as a preliminary record of the collection of 100 lots (books and archival materials) that Type Punch Matrix plans to sell as a group to a single institution, in hopes of establishing or strengthening a popular romance collection.1
Booksellers are necessarily researchers (when we’re being thorough). As we catalogue books, we necessarily learn more about them and their specific features. Bookselling is attractive for autodidacts, who thrive on teaching themselves about lots of things all of the time. This brings me back to having your own niche area that you want to study: at my first bookselling internship, my immediate supervisor was particularly interested in artist books and fine press books, which he developed as a subset of the Modern Department. Of course, everyone in the Modern Department had their own specialty: autographs, manuscripts, and archives; modern firsts; philosophy and economics; Irish literature and poetry, and so on. People are very effective when they have a vision, and I’ve found that the most successful dealers are those with clear visions about what they want to buy, research, and sell, and to whom, and for what purposes.
It is harder (though possible!) to sustain a book firm from niche specialties alone, unless they are particularly popular. Golf, for example, is a huge collecting area, and while I’m sure many booksellers are not remotely interested in golf, materials relating to golf still show up in their stock because they may have a consistent client who will buy it. Those sales (and, like Rebecca said, high-spot sales) support the more specific stuff, the counterculture or region-specific travel literature or artist books. I once catalogued an odd print of a cricket stadium for this reason alone.
It feels we have reached an impasse: booksellers need big-ticket items to survive, and they’re partial to their own interests, and they’ll stock what they think will sell, and that’s influenced by who is buying, but who is buying besides the people who have always bought? Bit cyclical, isn’t it. That’s why the book collecting prize Honey & Wax does is so exciting, because it shows just how many women are collecting in areas most people haven’t really thought of, and certainly areas that few dealers work in. A lot of those collectors purchase within very specific communities, outside of what dealers would think to pursue. That’s where we’ll leave off this week. If book [selling/collecting] are indelibly tied to value, money, and profit, where do we go next?
housekeeping and birdseeking
house
A few weeks ago, I wrote about repatriation and my cousin Peter asked how many objects have been repatriated. I couldn’t find official numbers, but we can add two more to whatever the official count is: the Met is returning two Benin Bronzes to Nigeria this year.
What I read this week: I finally finished Libertie! It was excellent. I also read Nimona, a graphic novel by Noelle Stevenson, the creator of one of my favorite shows, “She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.” It was also great and generously leant to me by my friend Jeremy. The last time Jeremy leant me a book, I lost it (it was a copy of A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin, and I left it in a hotel room in Montreal). He periodically reminds me of this, but he doesn’t actually want a new copy because he prefers being able to annoy me about it. This time, as he handed me Nimona, he said, “If you lose this one, I am actually going to want a new copy.”
What I’m currently reading: How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill, which was apparently one of my Grandma Van’s favorite books; Cannibal by Safiya Sinclair, a book of poems; and The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability by Kristen Hogan, for the Bookish Book Club’s Pride-themed choice.
bird
Yesterday, my father saw two robins fighting in the gym parking lot.
More later.
Another recent behemoth catalogue that comes to mind is Oscar Wilde & His Circle, compiled by Ed Maggs of Maggs Bros, the first in a series of catalogues from the collection of Philip K. Cohen, who exemplifies how a single collector can amass incredible amounts of material that, when documented thoroughly, result in an extremely useful record.