A Better Class of Goods

I was cataloging the journal of a man who went on a China trading voyage in 1838, when I came across a sentence that made my blood run cold.

He was a young fellah, 27 years of age, and he only stayed in China for a year. He  made a bundle over there, and came back home to Norway, Maine. Here’s how the town history of Norway summarizes his life:

…he went to China, and was absent about a year, when he returned, and bought land in different parts of the town, and engaged in farming. He went into trade in the village about the year 1841… He occupied the old Barton store, which he remodeled and fitted up in modern style. He kept a much better stock of goods than had ever before been kept in the village, and the prices he was obliged to ask, placed them beyond the reach of the average farmers in this vicinity. The result was that in three or four years he failed. When he began trade, he was worth about ten thousand dollars. After going through bankruptcy, he went to Portland, and was clerk for Emery & Waterhouse until his health failed, when he went to Boston, and died at the house of his nephew.

So, obviously, he came back home, set up in business, and made a mess of things. $10K in 1838 would be something like $350,000 today. But that wasn’t what grabbed my attention. Hell, I’ve pissed away tens of thousands of dollars in my stellar career, and if I’d had the money, I could easily have wasted more. No, what stopped me in my tracks was the following sentence:

He kept a much better stock of goods than had ever before been kept in the village, and the prices he was obliged to ask, placed them beyond the reach of the average farmers in this vicinity.

That pretty much describes my first 10 years as the proud proprietor of a bricks & mortar Old Book Shoppe… in fact, I had several Shoppes during that time. But more was not better. Those first years were the most difficult period I’ve ever experienced in the trade.

I felt like the starving bookseller in one of A. Edward Newton’s genially braggy accounts. You know the schtick… A. Edward (what kind of a first name is “A.” anyway?) walks into a little shop in London or Paris or Rome. The place is filthy, the proprietor is dressed in rags, and his long-suffering wife and snotnosed kiddies turn the scene into something out of Dickens. Eddie finds a rare tome in tattered covers. He’s been looking for a copy for years! He approaches the bookseller who, it turns out, has little idea of the current value of that particular rarity. (Either that or he needs money for groceries or rent, a sort of desperation Newton has never known, and thus identifies as ignorance.) Newton buys it for next to nothing, and crows modestly about putting one over on the poor schlemiel.

But it wasn’t the schlemiel part, annoying as it always is, that got me. It was the fact that the poor young man up in Norway, ME kept a much better stock of goods than had ever before been kept in the village.

That was all I aspired to, ever, in my career. I wanted to have the best stock my brains and luck and finances could provide. Why else do this job? I loved books, and I loved good books better than not-so-good ones. Of course I was going to fill my several Shoppes with merch that far exceeded the Jacqueline Susann type schlock the people were always coming in and asking for. I’d send them to the library or the second-hand shop.

Finally, the day before yesterday, it landed on me, like last week’s foot of snow sliding off the roof onto my new Weber Outdoor Gas Grill.

a much better stock of goods than had ever before been kept in the village

That was my problem, right there. My stuff had always been too good for the people who patronized my Shoppes. And, though I worked my ass off trying to round up that “better stock of goods,” there was simply no market for what I was trying to sell in my little town. I needed to get out of the Shoppe, out of Gloucester, into the world.

Because,

the prices I was obliged to ask, placed my offerings beyond the reach of the average farmers in my vicinity

You could substitute “fishermen” for “farmers,” but it still came out the same. The people of my town, for the most part, couldn’t afford my books, and even if they could, they didn’t understand them.

This wasn’t their fault, it was my own egotistical fandango, and I deserved to not get everything I did not get. It took me a long time to realize that perhaps I should try selling my precious books to people who understood what they were and who could afford them.

It took me even longer to find those people, but that’s another story.