Suddenly it seems there’s no end to the incoming stream of intellectually-serious-but-not-very-valuable books pertaining to various aspects of what our advertising blurbs refer to as “The Sea and its History.”
In Seattle last month I stumbled onto the remains of such a collection and purchased all I could of it. Then last week, when I returned from Cape Breton, where I was putting the finishing touches on my next Great American Novel, I found 25 cartons of books in my downstairs hallway. They’d been delivered in my absence – not without my knowledge, of course – and now they were blocking traffic. They had to go!
So I did a quick sort, picked out about 130 of the most sellable tomes,
and put the rest downstairs,
along with the 40 cartons still left from this summer’s 70-carton load,
the 25 cartons of yacht club histories also left over from the summer,
the dregs of the Howland collection, and all the stuff I’ve put off cataloging for years – including local history and a huge pile of manuscripts.
I suspect this influx of goods has been caused by the death or retirement of an entire generation of customers – robust collectors like Mickey Martelle (Maritime List 316),
or Gary Eckstine (List 317, just posted this morning). Indeed, much of the good-but-not-great material pouring in bears identifying marks of other 20th century dealers – the distinctive pencil price code of Ed Lefkowicz, or the labels of Caravan or Francis Edwards.
Early in my career I was determined escape the draggy life of bricks-and-mortar retail and become a rare book dealer. I had no idea, really, what a rare book dealer did, but I knew he wouldn’t be trapped behind his desk listening to the endless rambles of tourists, genealogists, and the lonesome dispossessed. I imagined such a career would involve lunches and dinners with clients, and hush-hush telephone negotiations, and long-term relationships with institutional librarians and, to some extent, it has. What I didn’t understand was that even rare book dealers are subject to the harsh realities of cash flow, and that, if I didn’t have anything to sell while I was waiting for another rare book deal to come my way, I’d starve.
These days, I take whatever comes in and sell it. And while these reliable old titles are paying my rent, the rare books accumulate.
Maritime List 317 is a good example of such merch – good, solid books in uniformly excellent condition. The rares I’ve managed to accumulate over the past few months will be spilling out of my stand at the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair, November 11-13, at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. See you there, I hope.
You are still the number one Maritime dealer in America.
Glad to see collections getting redistributed— I see some titles in list 317 that have passed through my hands. Gary was a real stickler for condition—he once spent 20 minutes sitting on the floor of my office going through a box of new books from the New Bedford Whaling Museum to ensure he’d get one with no printing or binding defects. There were none in any of the books, of course, but he had to be certain.