Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller

by Oliver Darkshire

The first is that the specific language of the book trade allows you to be exceedingly accurate and precise without using hundreds of words, and the second is that the elegance of it serves to dull the blow a little. Most rare books come with some minor defects, but that doesn’t mean one has to be rude about it. It’s much more charming to describe a book as ‘foxed’ than to tell someone that the pages have developed an unsightly mottling, and that if this were a zombie movie we’d already have taken it out back and put it out of its misery. It’s convention to call a sheepskin binding ‘roan’, and parchment made from calfskin is oft baptized ‘vellum’. If we call a book ‘sophisticated’, we’re saying that we know the book was tampered with, faked or ‘someone tried very hard to make this look like a first edition’, but that we also feel this perhaps adds to its historical value rather than subtracts. It’s a feature, we argue, not a bug. Using the correct terminology is part of a performance, an elaborate ritual, a secret handshake performed on the part of the bookseller to entice discerning clients.

You may only describe a book as Fine if it has recently nestled in the bosom of an angel, and a Good book might as well be on fire, because you’ve inadvertently just called it a dog’s breakfast.

Unlike other disciplines, book cataloguing is less an art, not really a science, and more of a completely unstandardized, decentralized carnival fire.

The truth of the matter is that bookselling is the ugly stepchild of the antiques business or the art world, and our shelves are filled with a great many fascinating and peculiar articles that go entirely unremarked on by visitors, unless we go to great effort to point them out.

All anyone can do is take reasonable precautions. Keep the books away from fire. Don’t throw them in a puddle. And remember to take delight in them.

To follow a path so peculiar, with so few opportunities, and with no real prospects for wealth or prestige, I think you have to have a fickle relationship with rationality.

Just as soon as I’d been at Sotheran’s long enough to find my feet and start feeling like I might finally be getting a grip on things, the questions started about what my prospects were from here, and I didn’t really have the heart to say that there were no prospects whatsoever, that this particular career path involved being impoverished until I died of scurvy or something.

It’s that feeling you get when you meet someone with whom you share a deep affinity, in my case someone who understood that (a) everything is a bother, and (b) sometimes the bother is absolutely worth it.

It’s my belief that anyone worth knowing enjoys spending time in a bookshop. I may be biased, but I can’t think of a more pleasant place to spend one’s time. The floor space and quiet make them suitable for all kinds of events and functions, even if they might not always be strictly book-related. Further, if you’re of the means to do so then it stands to reason that you would make good use of the highly atmospheric antiquarian bookshop that you happen to own for this very purpose. If I owned a bookshop, I imagine I would do exactly that (as often as I could force myself to socialize).

When you’re handling sensitive material, you have to be prepared to handle a difficult topic very sensitively at a moment’s notice. People often ring in asking for all kinds of uncomfortable books, and the right response can be elusive. I once had a man who rang in asking for, and I quote, ‘a book about praying the gay away’. When he was tersely informed that this would not be possible, he switched tack to ‘a book on how the Jews control the weather’, at which I will admit to disconnecting him. It should probably concern us all that this is not the strangest nor the most offensive call that Sotheran’s has ever received, but I digress.

There’s never any question of whether a book is ‘appropriate’ – all books have something to teach us, but the nature of the lesson varies wildly.

one has to be guided by the cardinal rule which supersedes all others: one does not sell books to Nazis. A bookshop is not a court. As a custodian of books you can use your discretion to decide who you sell to, and unlike a court you don’t have to give a reason. If you sell to one racist, you’ll just attract more of them. It’s your responsibility to try and make sure that important materials about topics like the Holocaust end up with institutions and with collectors who are not going to destroy them (and yes, this is absolutely a possibility). Some of you will undoubtedly baulk at this – ‘it’s not your job to decide whether I’ll be a responsible owner’, you might say. And indeed, we don’t hand out a quiz to everyone who steps over the threshold, we assume people are fundamentally decent unless they show us otherwise. However, if it looks like a goose, honks like a goose and steps like a goose, then it’s probably a Nazi, and there’s honestly only one kind of person who complains when I say ‘I don’t sell books to racists’, whatever they are calling themselves right now.

everyone has to draw the line as to who they choose to sell to, and the choices that we make on those occasions will shape the kind of world we find ourselves in. The rare book trade might seem like it is located in its own sphere of existence, but it’s not true. We are connected to the world by a thousand invisible strings, and each time we make sure a book on something unpleasant gets to the right place, or we block a homophobe from shopping with us, it’s a tiny step in the right direction.

The only real solution, I have begun to advise, is that your average book collector choose to live as a hermit. This is a foolproof way of avoiding judgement. Alas, in many ways the life of a book collector is doomed to the distraction of romance, if only because the zeitgeist is infected with the idea that a bookshop is a great place to romantically approach strangers, a plague for which romantic comedies have a great deal to answer.

Hell hath no fury, they say, like a man treated the same way as he treats women.

Dietrich was firmly anti-Nazi, and the copy was given to her while she was in Hollywood by Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front,as a sign of all that was rotten in the Fatherland. Sotheran’s has a strictly No Nazis policy. Nazis don’t get to have nice things like books or bookshops.

Social media is one of those skills that everyone thinks they’d like to be good at, until they realize that it actually just involves managing thousands of emotional strangers for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Not a day goes by but someone comes in and confesses that they’re really just here because they love the smell, or because they felt the need to be around books. Some ask us to open cupboards because they want to touch something. There’s something quintessentially human about the need to be around books, and in taking comfort in their presence.