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"You said that we owe literature almost everything we are
and what we have been.
If books disappear, history will disappear,
and human beings will also disappear.
I am sure you are right.
Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams,
and our memory.
They also give us the model of self-transcendence.
Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape:
an escape from the "real" everyday world
to an imaginary world, the world of books.
Books are much more.
They are a way of being fully human."
My name's Henry Wessells.
I work with James Cummins Books in New York,
and it's another New York Book Fair
which is the roller coaster ride between tedium
and great bits of commerce and discoveries.
My PhD is in 16th century Spanish lyric poetry,
which explains why I'm totally broke
after 15 years of academia.
I left that in order to become an antiquarian book dealer.
So I have had the pleasure of having
really fantastic books in my hands.
We have a Third Folio,
which was J.P. Morgan's copy,
which he bought in 1897,
and at the same time, he bought a first edition
of the first book ever printed, the Gutenberg Bible,
for 2,750 pounds,
on vellum,
which is probably now a $40 million book.
What we just got in like a few days before the fair,
which is always exciting, is a Hemingway archive,
and there was a Castro doll in the archive,
which we were a little surprised to find.
It's been a pretty good show.
I mean, it's, you know, a little less to carry home.
As you can see, I deal in really big books,
so I really like it when some of them go away.
Lift it up and put it back where it was.
Oh, God.
About a third of what I do is,
I broadly refer to it as esoterica,
which is to say, cult material, demonology,
witchcraft, fetishism, subculture, and counterculture.
I'm fond of saying, "The more uncomfortable
a piece makes other dealers,
the more likely it is to appeal to me."
New York is the best antiquarian book fair in the world,
mostly because of location.
Slap-bang in the middle of where you want to be
in the Upper East Side and in a gorgeous historical building,
and a gorgeous historical building
which is slightly overripe as well.
This building, you know, has been here since the Civil War,
but after that period, in the early 1900s,
this floor we're standing on now used to be tennis courts.
So as a young man,
I used to play tennis in this great building.
I went to the opening this year, and when they have asked me,
"Do you want me to show you this,"
see me looking at something in a glass case, I always say no.
Don't bother showing it to me because I promise you
I don't happen to have $85,000 to buy a book.
One person did show me a book
even though I told her I cannot buy this.
"Would you like to see that? It's okay.
Would you like to look at it?" I said yes.
So she was nice enough to show it to me.
I'm afraid even to touch a book like that.
I feel my life would turn into an O. Henry short story.
Now I have to spend all my money for the rest of my life
trying to pay you back for this thing!
I was surprised at how cavalier people were around the books.
I saw a guy put a drink on a book.
If he did that in my house, I'd kill him.
The world is divided between people who collect things
and people who don't know what the hell these people
are doing collecting things, and if you're a collector,
you're just a sick, obsessive-compulsive person
who would sell your grandmother to buy something
that you really like, even if it's like an Elvis plate.
For me it's like a fantasy fair.
Unlike going to the Morgan Library
or the New York Public or the Library of Congress,
everything's for sale!
What rare book dealers really do is inculcate neophytes
into the wonder of the object of the book,
but when you go to a rare book dealer,
they're cultivating customers-- all the good ones are--
for 10, 20, 30 years.
So, the rare book dealers are transmitting
the ability to learn how to appreciate the books.
I just was there with a friend
who's a fantastic novelist from Spain,
and he almost started crying when I showed him
the fourth or fifth edition of "Don Quixote de la Mancha,"
published in Brussels in 1611
during the lifetime of Cervantes,
but that's not when he cried.
He cried when-- well, he cried a little
when he saw the price of $120,000,
but then he cried, he really cried
when he saw that the first edition
of Ian Fleming's "Casino Royale"
inscribed by him was $130,000.
That would make anyone cry.
It's very significant, I think, that the clock in the Armory
is actually stuck at an impossible time.
It doesn't actually exist, the time that it indicates.
Like a casino, the good book fair hall
has no clock so you got no sense of time.
Sometimes it feels as if you're actually on a spaceship
being sent to repopulate a distant galaxy
with a slightly odd choice of genetic markers,
but nevertheless.
Certainly collecting books used to be a very rarified pursuit.
It wasn't everybody who did it, it was the noblemen of England.
The typical picture of a book collector
was an older man
in a tweed jacket with elbow patches.
- And a pipe. - And a pipe.
And a glass of sherry.
They seem to always be wearing tweed.
I think a lot of people, when they think of
what is a rare book dealer, they may turn to movies,
I think television, I think popular literature.
- No, I was just-- - The video arcade
is down the street.
Here we just sell small, rectangular objects.
They're called books.
- You here? - Hello, Witkin.
You didn't waste much time.
Listen, there's a small fortune in there, help yourself.
You're a vulture, Corso. A vulture.
Who isn't in our business?
Pardon the mess.
Are you a writer?
- I'm a book dealer. - Oh.
Would you happen to have a "Ben-Hur" 1860 Third Edition
with a duplicated line on page 116?
We'll put that one aside for Ms. Hanff.
It would be a very interesting sort of mental Rorschach test
to stop somebody on the street and say,
"If I say 'rare book dealer,' what do you think of?"
You know, they're not gonna think of, you know,
some runway model.
They'll probably think of an older person.
Everybody has their own idea,
but I think it's a wonderful and romanticized idea,
and if you walk around
one of the big antiquarian book fairs in America,
you're gonna see people who sort of fit that mold.
Well, in the 20th century,
the most important bookseller in the English-speaking world
was unquestionably A.S.W. Rosenbach,
and he reigned supreme until the 1950s.
This is from the classic Rosenbach biography
by Edwin Wolf II and John Fleming.
"Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach had plump pink cheeks,
a twinkle in his eye,
walked--as a friend once said-- as a penguin would walk
if a penguin could walk like Rosy,
puffed everlastingly on a pipe or cigar,
drank a bottle of whiskey a day,
and was the greatest antiquarian bookseller
the world has seen.
Without much pressing, he would admit as much.
The Doctor, as he was familiarly known
to collector friends and employees,
for decades bought most of the important rare books
and manuscripts sold at auction in England and America."
Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern were dealers
who began right after the war around 1944-'45,
and they had an enormously long career
spanning over 60 years as partners.
And when they first started, this was very unusual
because they were women dealers
in pretty much a majority man's world,
at least in the level of business owners.
And they really made a name for themselves early on
selling incredible finds to libraries,
and they became famous for taking trips to Europe
and bringing back these things, discoveries,
that no one realized were still around.
One thing that's great about Rostenberg and Stern
is that they discovered that Louisa May Alcott
had a secret life as a pulp writer,
often a very sexy, very violent pulp writer.
They're the ones who put it together,
who found the pseudonyms, who found the material,
and were able to piece together this whole part
of an American writer's life
that people hadn't fully realized was happening.
I got nothin' yet.
Rob Tuchman said no, Mike Wolosky said no,
Jimmy Robinson can't play.
Right, all right.
And you heard nothing from...?
No. Let me think of who else.
I kinda--believe it or not,
there's a film crew here at the moment.
You have a film crew in your apartment?
- Yeah, so-- - Why?
A friend of mine's doing a documentary on booksellers,
and guess what, I'm a bookseller.
Oh my God, I know so many booksellers
that are more appropriate than you,
and better looking too.
Great.
How did you get in the book business?
Oh, I always kinda joke, I'm not fit for anything else.
I was trying to figure out
what am I gonna do with the rest of my life?
And there was this little book shop in Queens
I used to stop in on my way to and fro,
and I ended up buying, actually, that set of books.
The four volumes of the Coues editing
of Lewis and Clark's journals.
He had it in a window for $75,
which was more than I had ever spent on a book before.
Oh my God.
I saved up my money for a couple of weeks
and I was able to buy it,
and he needed someone to work part time,
and next thing I knew, I was in the book business.
All right, so this is a photo album from 1907
titled "The Search for Mammoth."
So this expedition found this fabulous frozen mammoth
and they dug it out of the mud and blah-blah-blah-blah,
but what makes this album really special:
They actually mounted a couple examples
of actual mammoth hair into the back of the album.
So that's real mammoth hair from, you know,
probably 15,000 years ago.
Two down, two down.
I'm out here almost every day.
How many teams do you play with?
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday...
Seven.
I sub on an eighth, but only sporadically.
- So, not every day. - So you're a softball nut.
Pretty much.
Where is it? Oh, come on.
How long have you been in this apartment?
Eighteen, nineteen years. '98.
So that's 19 years, isn't it?
Wow. That's frightening.
Basically it took me three months to move.
I'd get up in the morning, I'd come here,
I'd spend a day building bookcases
and sheetrocking and everything else.
I'd go home, I'd pack books until midnight,
go to sleep, get up in the morning again,
ride my bike here, and build more bookcases
and on and on and on, ad nauseam.
It's gotten to the point where every time I buy another book,
I have to rearrange the entire place.
I have nowhere to put anything anymore.
This is a thing on the Catacombs of Rome
that is so heavy that I haven't taken it off the shelf
since I put it on the shelf 15 years ago.
I brought it to one fair and I said, "Never again!"
So there it sits, you know,
until somebody happens to come over and says,
"You got anything on the Catacombs of Rome,
by any chance?"
Where is it? Where are you?
This is a late 18th century monograph on these fossil fish,
and it's a big book with these fabulous plates of...
of fossil fish,
and they're all life size,
which means that the big fish
have really big plates.
So we got things like that.
But they get even bigger than that.
Playboy, eat your heart out, you know.
Go, go, go, go, go.
Make the turn, watch in front, watch in front.
The Strand was founded by my grandfather in 1927
in an area that was famous in New York.
It was called Book Row.
There were 48 bookstores at its height,
and today the Strand is the only one left.
My dad came in working at age 13.
He always wanted to be on the main floor.
His book-buying desk was front and center.
I encountered the most lovable, eccentric, charming human beings
I've ever known in my life on those 4th Avenue bookstores.
One of the things I remember about those guys,
they were all guys, they were like
all little, dusty, Jewish men
who were very irritated if you wanted to buy a book
because they were not really in business.
They were there so they could read all day,
and if it was, you know, warm,
they would be sitting outside, like, on a box.
They were covered in dust,
their hands were yellow from nicotine,
they always had glasses, of course,
'cause they'd been reading in the dark since they were,
you know, six years old, and if you would, like,
go up to them and ask very politely,
"How much is this book?"
Half the time, they wouldn't even look up.
I always imagined I would be like that
if I owned a bookstore.
And you could just crawl around in there,
and you would find stuff, they didn't know what they had.
If you could get his attention, he'd make up a price,
but the price would be, like, 40 cents, so I liked that.
The Strand was never like that 'cause it was so big,
but very often I would find books at the Strand,
I would bring them to the guy, and he would go,
"Where did you find this?"
And then I would say, "Oh, you know, behind that door."
He'd say, "You're not supposed to go there!"
You know, that stuff hasn't even been priced yet.
So I think part of my affection for this is
crawling around in the bookstore,
which I still do even though you're not supposed to do that.
I'm really sorry I never took photographs over the years
of our street.
It has changed dramatically.
Originally, 59th Street was a two-way street,
and it had a two-way trolley going across town.
It was started by our father in 1925.
He was one of the 4th Avenue book dealers.
When he opened the store,
he didn't have enough books to fill the shelves,
so he would put books sidewise to take up room.
We would come down on Saturdays
and sharpen pencils, browse in the children's section.
I remember wanting to work here during college in the summer,
but I couldn't type, so he wouldn't hire me,
and I got a job doing something else elsewhere.
And the same thing happened the next summer.
"Can you type yet?" "No."
So he wasn't--he wasn't aching to bring us in.
People always asked him,
"How did you get all three daughters to work for you?"
And he would just say, "I guess I'm just lucky,"
but actually it was because he never let us know
that's what he wanted.
We all decided on our own, we thought.
My mother was very important.
She joined the business when I was 10 years old.
She was fantastic. She created the second floor gallery.
She told my father,
"Don't ask the girls to go into business with you."
She was the one who was wise.
We are on the top floor of our building.
It's the autograph department.
I started it just to have my own space
among a lot of sisters.
I'm a huge baseball guy,
so I love all the signed baseballs that we have.
I think we have Bill Clinton who signed a baseball
just sitting on the desk there.
But it gets really random.
There's colonial money that might be signed,
and sometimes it's in different languages
and it's handwritten and the handwriting is impossible.
It's like a constant scavenger hunt.
So why have you guys been able to stay open
when so many have closed?
Real estate. We own the building.
Our father had the foresight to buy this building,
and we've had many offers.
The brokers call five, ten times a week
to try to get us to sell the building,
and that's not happening.
I won't say there's no amount of money, that it wouldn't happen,
but no amount that they're offering.
It would mean going out of business.
We like being here.
So in essence, we're paying for the privilege of working here.
It used to be that if I was in Midtown
and I had like an hour between things to do,
I would just go into a bookstore.
And I always say to people, "You know what they used to call
independent bookstores? Bookstores."
All bookstores were independent.
The people who worked there were real booksellers.
They decided what would go on the window,
what would go on the counter.
It's not like when Barnes & Noble came in,
which, now people who are young constantly say to me,
"Oh, my Barnes & Noble closed," and I think,
we hated Barnes & Noble.
They put everyone out of business!
It was an old-school-looking store.
Just books everywhere.
We had a pretty cool cat, Linda.
This was Skyline Books, 13 West 18th Street.
Our specialties were Beats, photography, art.
I think we were known as, like, a store for collectors.
I was behind in rent.
It was an easy decision.
I had to get out.
Business was way down.
People were shopping online.
It was a really awful time for me.
You know, we had these horrible sales at the end,
like, 75% off.
I think at one point, even 90% off.
It was a good shop, we had our day, no doubt.
In the 1950s, there were 368 bookstores in New York City.
Today, I went and counted, and there are 79.
The evaporation of the general used bookstore
has had a real impact because that was, for generations,
a really traditional path into the trade.
As a kid growing up in suburban Delaware in the '70s,
my real exposure to the history
of print culture was through used bookshops.
That was the chance to just keep seeing different copies
and get a sense.
I lived in bookstores, you know, that were available,
either new, used.
I mean, I would go from New England to New Jersey
stopping all along the way at used bookstores.
Road trips were basically an important source of material,
and we filled a station wagon full of books,
shipped boxes back.
It was bookselling in the old style.
People don't have the patience to go look
at a shelf of books like that.
The average buyer wants to buy a particular book.
I mean, it takes a certain kind of interest in books
to begin with to even arrive at the stage
at which you want to be surprised by something,
that you want to find what you aren't looking for.
You've gotta see a lot of material.
That's the only way to really know how to price books,
and the more copies you see, the more you can know
when it's just an ordinary book that needs an ordinary price
or whether it's something to apply your imagination to,
and I have a pretty good imagination at times.
My first job in books was at the Strand
when I was a teenager, and watching Fred Bass
handle thousands of books coming across the transom,
just every day the way that he sorted them so fast.
I'd show up with his lunch and I'd, you know,
I'd look at the books and say, "Oh, that's a good one."
He'd be like, "No, it's not."
I mean, watching him do it like that so fast.
I felt like, I think I know about books,
I think I understand what books are,
but he sees something in these objects
that I can't even begin to understand.
I mean, one thing that's happened
in New York City in just the past year has been
a kind of explosion of street-level,
brick-and-mortar, used and antiquarian bookshops
devoted to post-war, avant-garde material.
But it's no substitute
for the kind of general antiquarian bookshop
that, you know, you used to see around.
So this is our new store, or going to be our new store.
We're in the West Village.
This is a shoe store currently.
We're taking it over. We got the keys yesterday.
We're gonna open in March.
I mean, I think we're part of a real boom
in independent bookshops
that are really kind of communally based,
that really engage with their neighborhood
and, you know, sort of address the interests
and the needs of the people that live locally
in a way that the old chain stores never did.
Just one second.
Adam Weinberger, Rare Books, how can I help you?
It's a little hard to hear you, so--
Oh, you said plays from the 1800s?
You fill up storages and storages of books,
so I got a little overwhelmed in storage.
I didn't want to pay Manhattan storage prices any longer,
so I thought it'd be better to stick everything
in a studio apartment, you know, make it look nice.
Kansas.
Adam Weinberger, Rare Books, how can I help you?
Uh, sure, what are the books?
They're all, you know, parchment or vellum leaves,
so you can imagine how many cows it takes
to make one of these things.
You know, it's always hard to tell
whether someone's willing to sell or not.
Once I showed up at somebody's apartment,
you know, with empty bankers boxes,
which are very good for transporting books,
but, you know, this old woman opened the door
and she basically looked at my empty boxes and was like,
"You're not gonna be needing those today!"
And I understand that's, like, you go in
and you suddenly show up with boxes,
it's like you're gonna ravage their, you know,
collection that they've had for decades or something.
So he bought all of them from Gotham directly?
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm a big cat lover like you, so, uh,
that's why I particularly fancy Gorey.
A lot of the general Beat material,
if it's, you know, not signed
or if it's not in the original dust jacket,
it's not the early ones, you know,
there's ten copies of everything online.
And that goes for most Kerouac things, yeah.
Yeah.
In August of '72...
This is an apartment that belonged
to my uncle Jack Allentuck and his wife Marcia Allentuck.
They were both academics.
So I'm dealing with everything that they left me.
A lot of stuff.
I think you could call this the detritus of their lives.
This was an interesting-sounding one.
The woman was a professor of art history.
She was a scholar in Blake
and people in the Romantic circles,
so immediately my ears pick up, I think there's potential.
I always take a peek just to...
There can be some decent ones in here.
Every apartment you get a sense of adrenaline,
it's exciting, you know, you're basically in a place
where somebody has put their life energy into it,
and not only their physical presence,
but their intellectual energy and their being,
and you see what they were thinking,
what they were interested in.
More has changed in the last 15 years
in this pursuit than changed in the previous 150 years.
For generations, there were people--
runners, book scouts, whatever you want to call them--
who existed on the periphery of the book world,
using their knowledge to connect books
with dealers that they knew.
They'd go out and they'd hit church sales and estate sales
and library sales and so forth,
and it was a very happy, symbiotic relationship.
Now, book scouts, they are a vanishing breed.
The legendary runner of modern times was Martin Stone.
Very charismatic rock 'n' roller,
great musician, important.
Nearly a Rolling Stone.
When traveling with his bands,
he'd have a lot of time off,
and he'd spend that time going around bookshops.
An amazing book scout, great taste,
understood the connections between books.
He was an encyclopedic mind at work.
I have just found a very nice book
which is pleasing me extraordinarily.
He was always surrounded by plastic bags
and holdalls, this kind of thing.
You know, he'd already done his shopping
when you were just getting going in the morning.
So he'd show the things he'd bought,
and he'd quietly infuse about why they were important,
and I learned so much from him.
Martin was one of those people
who was, often as not, the jam in the sandwich
as well as the sandwich in that he knew so much
and understood so well that he'd take it all the way
from the 50p box to the 10,000 pound vitrine.
The business tragically changed with the rise of the computer.
All of a sudden, all those $50, $75, $100, $125 books
became $20 or $25 or $30 books,
and there were a lot of copies of those books.
It was almost harder in those days
to find a relatively inexpensive book
than it was to find a very expensive book
because you had to go out and find it yourself.
Basically, in the last ten years,
every piece of shit that's been laying around somewhere
is suddenly out on the internet,
so there's been this incredible upwelling of stuff,
be it books or Beanie Babies or whatever it is.
It's become ruined by the internet.
It's great for collectors that the internet exists.
They find books that they spent decades
trying to find unsuccessfully in the past
at the touch of a key,
but to be a surviving used bookseller,
really is mostly what I'm talking about,
is almost impossible.
Collecting is about the hunt.
It's not about the object.
You look for 20 years, and then you find it.
You have your orgasm,
and you put it on the shelf and never look at it again.
The internet has killed the hunt.
You know, if you collect Edith Wharton,
if you give me your credit card and 45 minutes,
I'll build you an almost complete collection
of Edith Wharton first editions.
You know, done.
Why bother, what's the point?
The internet is always, for the antiquarian book business,
going to be a double-edged sword.
In the modern marketplace, you either have to have
the best, the cheapest, or the only copy.
What the internet did was to really change
the way we talked about what was rare.
For people at the top of the trade
or dealing in really specialized material,
the internet was a huge godsend because, in a way,
it just validated their position.
"I have material you can't get."
But for a lot of people who dealt
in fairly common, modern firsts, for example,
it was devastating, you know,
and it destroyed their livelihood,
and they've had to pivot or die.
Buying and selling the way we do it now is a bit colder a thing.
It's a passing of an era, bookselling,
and while the internet's a great democratization
of supply and demand, it also has taken
some of the dark and murky and fun aspects of it away.
One of the problems everybody in the trade faces these days
is, more and more, the printed word
is disappearing.
I mean, you say the word Kindle,
and I think you'll get some members of the book trade
who feel a shudder go up their spine,
and a lot of people wonder,
"Where's the future of this industry going?
If we don't have books printed anymore
and you can buy books directly sent
to your electronic device without there ever being
a hard copy, what are we gonna sell?"
And I think that's a very fair concern,
and I think a lot of people feel that,
and probably the most incredible example of that
was in 2006 at the Academy Awards
when Larry McMurtry with his writing partner
was awarded Best Screenplay for an Adaptation from a Book
for "Brokeback Mountain."
And finally, I'm gonna thank all the booksellers of the world.
Remember that "Brokeback Mountain" was a book
before it was a movie.
From the humblest paperback exchange
to the masters of the great bookshops of the world,
all our contributors to the survival
of the culture of the book, a wonderful culture,
which we mustn't lose.
Well, I just think there's continually a movement
toward things that are more unique.
Yes, people are less interested in modern firsts
and more interested in ephemera, more interested in manuscripts,
more interested in strange printed materials
that, in the past, might not have been seen
to be collectible but now seem to have
a kind of cultural interest.
It's technology that has made archives
that much more interesting to institutions.
We did a series of deals recently
with a foundation in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
the first one being for Woody Guthrie's papers
and the second one being for Bob Dylan's papers.
And the ability that these people have
to take all the audio/visual material
and turn it into a gold mine
for users, for fans, for scholars, is remarkable.
Ten years ago, you couldn't do it.
I was clearing out my office
and had all the material from all of my books,
all my "New Yorker" stories, all my notes and research,
and I began thinking,
"This feels like something I shouldn't throw away."
I've known Glenn for a long time
and I knew that he had actually sold other people's archives.
He came and looked at what I had,
and then we brainstormed about where it would go,
knowing that it was most likely best suited
in some academic library.
That was a strange feeling,
imagining yourself as homework for somebody.
The good thing is that it's now very organized
and indexed, and the irony is that it's at Columbia University
and I have to go there this summer
and look through my own archives for a book that I'm working on.
But going forward,
when so much work is being done on a computer,
I wonder how we're gonna really learn about writer's process
given the kind of invisible hand of computer editing.
I think the difference between an archive
and, say, something someone collected
is that it contains the whole of the work
and it contains the messy bits and the unexpected bits.
At the Schomburg, in terms of rarities,
we have everything from Malcolm X's papers
to Lorraine Hansberry's and James Baldwin's papers,
and Baldwin was born and raised in Harlem,
and he learned to read, some say, at the Schomburg Center,
so it's very much him coming home here,
and what I love about his archive
is that it contains everything from notes for novels
to the finished novels
to the many drafts that he would do.
There's notes taken in bars,
there's things written on hotel stationery.
There's the full array of Baldwin
as a learning-to-be writer,
including early poems and things like that,
to him becoming the writer that we know and love.
A curator is yet another role in the library,
and the curator, which is what I was for years,
thinks about the ways that material can
not only come into the institution
but, I think, go out into the world,
but I think also thinking about the collection
in a holistic way,
thinking about the future of the collection
and what it means, how to show the connections
within material.
I do think it has to come, in some sense,
with a love of the material,
and that's what I had as a writer
but also as a book collector.
So I had experience buying books.
I actually knew booksellers
who are very much partners in building collections.
At the same time, what's really interesting
is the way that collectors shape collections
that end up at archives.
And I think where we have been telling the story
of black people's existence and black people's creativity
and black people's cultural significance
for nearly a century, I'm not sure we've--
as a culture, a society--
fully understood or taken in what all that meant.
I never thought I would be a bookseller, to be honest.
Never.
I had no idea that was my future.
I started from high school.
When I graduated,
I started working for J.N. Bartfield
on 57th Street specializing in finely bound sets.
I worked there for 13 years,
and then I decided it's time for me to quit,
and so I started going to estate sales,
like 6 in the morning, 5 in the morning.
I was just starting out, you know, at my parents' home,
working in the basement in the Bronx.
And I remember I went to an estate
in Greenwich, Connecticut, and I was number one on line,
and I walked into the room, and there on the shelf,
a beautiful set of Balzac works,
like 40 volumes,
and it was like maybe $200 for the set,
and I went and I ran up,
I said, "These are mine, these are mine!
Nobody touch! These are mine!"
It was a find.
I never forget that, never.
That's how it all started, funny enough.
What we deal in is luxury items.
I think books are still undervalued.
People don't appreciate the workmanship
that goes into having a book bound today,
and leather-bound books need to be cleaned and polished.
That's another thing that people don't know how to take care of,
and oiling and polishing,
as long as the books are in very good condition,
once every five, ten years is good.
So even saying, "I'm a rare book dealer,"
the first question everyone asks is, "What makes a book rare?"
If you say a rare book, you mean both hard to find
and highly desirable.
Scarcity just means hard to find.
There's, I would say, three categories
of people who buy books.
There's private collectors, there's dealers for their stock,
and also there's institutions.
The problem in the trade today is
private collectors are becoming increasingly scarce.
We were just talking about the smell of old books
and kind of the magic that is in, you know,
some of these, like, beautiful editions,
It was interesting to me how they decided to, like,
how they priced various things.
I think we both have very specific research interests,
and if there's something cool,
we pick it up if it's not too expensive.
Yeah.
I forgot to bring money and my credit card is maxed out,
so, which is a good thing because I was tempted.
My parents were interested in antiques,
and so I would be given five cents
for every antique shop I behaved in,
and always, at the end of the day,
we had enough nickels to buy a book.
I began collecting, not intentionally, rare books,
but I liked the stories by Frank Baum
of "The Wizard of Oz," and at the age of 12,
Columbia University was doing a centenary presentation
of Frank Baum's writings,
and they were looking for a few things
they weren't able to find elsewhere.
My parents noticed that newspaper article in the "Times"
and consequently I became the youngest lender
to Columbia University in its 200-year history.
And it was at a time when children's books themselves
were not really thought of with any seriousness.
You had famous books like "Alice in Wonderland,"
but when I bought my first edition
of "The Wizard of Oz,"
certainly the person who sold it to me
didn't realize it was a first edition,
but it cost $5.
I just loved dealing with books.
It never seemed like work.
It was, in 1967, that Maurice Sendak
was looking for early mechanical books
by a man named Lothar Meggendorfer,
and I had a few of them,
and we gradually developed a friendship,
and by the time I had formed a corporation
at the end of 1969,
I felt it would probably be useful
to have Maurice Sendak design a catalog cover for us,
which he agreed to do,
and part of Maurice's genius in doing caricature was,
he drew both me and my business partner
as teddy bears.
I was wearing a proverbial waistcoat or vest,
that was clearly me.
And that began, really, the start
of a much closer friendship.
This is our gallery, which is on Broadway in Kingston,
and we pretty much use it for storage nowadays,
and the combination of Maurice Sendak
original art and posters, and also our other interest,
which is Chinese propaganda with Chairman Mao.
And Maurice once came over to look at our gallery,
said, "It's a Mao and Mo show."
Mao on one side and Sendak on the other.
Mo was his nickname.
I bought the most expensive American book ever sold
in 1989 for a customer.
It was Poe's first book called "Tamerlane."
They call it "the black tulip
of rare books of American literature."
There are a handful of copies.
It had been found in a junk shop.
It's a famous story.
Guy had paid $15 for it,
and I paid $200,000 for it.
It makes a great coaster.
The upper cover, someone had put down a glass,
and there's a ring of the glass around the cover.
The range of material that comes across my desk
is maybe broader than for some people.
I'm one of several people who've handled books
bound in human skin.
I've had two of them come across my desk.
Both of them were English bindings
on the Hans Holbein "Dance of Death."
One was bound by George Sutcliffe,
the great English bookbinder,
and it had a roundel of a skull made of bone and teeth.
It was a powerful philosophical object.
And some people didn't want to come
within six feet of it, and others said,
the natural question is, "Can I touch it?"
These are jeweled bindings.
In the history of the book,
these are the most beautiful bindings.
And each copy of a jeweled binding,
you would take a book to Sangorski and Sutcliffe
and they would encase it in 24-carat gold,
they would put rubies and different gems
all around the book, and you would then open the book
between the gold.
I think people are probably surprised to know
that rare books go through vogues.
I think you think, "Well, they're just old books."
But there was definitely the time when, like,
a perfect dust jacket was the thing in the trade
in the '80s and even into the early '90s.
It used to be they were just like
the wrapping paper that the book came in.
They were to keep the dust off while it was in the store,
and then you threw that away and you had a pristine copy.
You take a copy, best example is
F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby."
The first edition, in very nice condition,
is a $5,000 book.
A first edition with a tattered dust jacket
may be a $15,000 book.
A first edition with a fine dust jacket,
complete, what have you, is a $150,000 book.
And it comes back, I believe,
to the visual object of the dust jacket.
It's art.
And thank God for collectors and rare book dealers
who kept jackets and made us aware of the value,
not just monetarily, but of information.
That's why I like jackets is because, you know,
someone's first book, they say very different things
in their bio than they do in their tenth book,
and I think that that kind of biographical information
sometimes only appears there.
Let's try to cover a book in Mylar.
We use the, uh...
the five millimeter.
And then, with any luck,
it fits on the book nicely.
I've had, you know, book people tell me,
if a book is signed to a specific person
and that person is famous, it makes it more valuable.
If it's signed to, you know, Joe,
and no one knows who Joe is,
it makes it less valuable than if it's just signed.
To me, this goes into like the stamp collecting category.
I don't know about this.
This notion of association copies
of books inscribed from a writer
to a significant figure in his or her life
or a literary figure
suddenly began to overwhelm the book business
where, prior to that, people were crazy about finding
fine first editions and beautiful dust jackets.
The jacket took a secondary place,
for the most part, to major association copies.
I'm open to any book that's sufficiently interesting,
but I became interested in books that had
some kind of special history.
For me, the best books are usually, you know,
they look like they've been run over by a truck,
but they have to have been run over by the right truck.
As a general matter, rare is rare for a reason,
and it's not because everybody in the world wants it, usually.
The people who appreciate something rare
in the realm of books are just as rare
as the things themselves, usually.
And opening now for the Enigma machine
and starting now with bids at $45,000, going on $50,000.
At $50,000, now $55,000...
Rare books, the field really falls
into what we call items of antiquarian interest.
These are items that don't clearly fit
into a paintings category or a furniture category naturally,
and they often don't meet the same customers
as a collectibles field.
I think that's one thing that's shifted in the trade
is things that used to be thought of as ephemera
now are central to the trade,
and they're central to collections in some ways
because they help tell a slightly different story.
It all falls under what I call the general heading of evidence.
From the very beginning of my career,
I was interested in dealing in that very, very broad base
of historical evidence, and that was at a point
when many traditional historians would've argued to you
that visual material did not constitute evidence,
as strange as it may seem to us now.
I think a good bookseller absolutely is another kind
of discoverer and historiographer
and thinker of history.
And they see it in its raw form.
And the good ones, of which there are many,
may also provide a really important context.
That's why, when you acquire things,
you generally keep the descriptions they gave
because sometimes you see a box.
It doesn't tell you that history
that they understand
and have done work to understand.
I'm always very suspicious of people who are precious
about the antiquarian book trade
and the notion that we're some sort of guardians
of sacred flames.
That's too easy, too glib.
But this stuff matters.
Let me also make an argument for the importance
of the printed physical object in the age of digitization.
Physical objects often contain evidence
that's part and parcel to their physical makeup.
And that might be things like ownership,
annotation,
how the book has been treated by the owner,
what kind of binding it's in,
the paper it's printed on.
There are all kinds of things you can find
in the physical body of a book
to tell a story in and of themselves.
One of my closest friends and customers
is a man named Michael Zinman.
Michael formed one of the greatest collections
of early printed material,
things printed in the United States.
Well, it's like this:
I started asking myself,
"What's left of early printing in America?"
And the only way I found out was I went around
and starting buying and looking and asking.
I never questioned, if I had a book,
about buying a second book or a third book
or a fourth copy.
I just kept buying.
And at some point, I started comparing what I had
and you learn from what you have.
You start to find all kinds of variations.
And you can really draw conclusions out of that
that you never could have drawn
from having one perfect copy of the book.
Michael and I dubbed this the critical mass theory,
that by building a big enough pile of the stuff
and then looking at it and seeing
what kind of connections and patterns we found,
we would come up with a more reliable historical thesis
than if we set out with some notion
of what we were going to prove
and went to find the material to prove it.
We're in Hackettstown, New Jersey,
where they make M&M's.
Can't go to the factory, though, they don't allow--
they don't allow tourists.
We have our warehouses here.
And we have about 300,000 books
in three different units
from valuable books to $20 books.
Every one of these shelves has a story.
I can tell you pretty much where every book came from
and the story that goes with it.
See, we still got a little space
up there, up here.
You could always buy another warehouse.
Yeah, no, I'm not gonna do that.
Does anyone have more books?
Uh, well, Tom Congalton says he's close.
This is enough, believe me.
Yeah, with 300,000 books, you can imagine,
once in a while, they get misplaced.
So, this whole section,
from ten shelves in each section,
there are eight or nine sections here.
So, you got a lot of poetry.
Say, nine sections times a thousand or more
because poetry books are very thin.
You got 10,000 books of poetry right in this aisle here.
He thinks that poetry is coming back.
Whether it is or it isn't, I don't know.
Whistler, this is all Whistler.
These old bindings here.
And here's an unusual title.
"Amish Love."
So...
No pictures, though.
Oh, I guess there are pictures.
I guess there are pictures.
Wow.
That's quite a picture.
Jim doesn't just collect books.
He collects everything.
As you can see, we have a Masonic throne.
We have tribal masks from God knows where.
Don't know where we got the seagulls,
but those are interesting as well.
You know, it's like a treasure hunt,
especially here in six, but in all the warehouses,
you never know what you're gonna find.
Some dealers say you shouldn't collect
if you're gonna be in competition
with your customers.
I try to avoid that, but I love collecting
and I love selling books.
Once I buy a book, I don't mind selling it.
This is part of the aviation collection over here,
the lesser stuff.
A lot of Amelia Earhart.
We have a piece of the Hindenburg.
We have a piece of that. Where's that, in the other...
It might be down the end of this aisle.
Then, I have a big collection of purses.
They're all up there, and hats, oh my God.
Seventy-five, 500 bid online.
Five-hundred dollars bid online.
550.
550 now at the front desk.
Six hundred in the room.
The rare book trade is an ancient, ancient trade.
It's existed for hundreds of years.
The first auctions that were ever held
in modern times, in the 1600s,
were auctions in Britain of books.
Now, it's completely different.
You have the introduction of telephone bidding
and now internet bidding.
I go to lots of auctions in New York,
and I've been at auctions
where there have been three people
and I'm one of them sitting in the room
and then the auctioneer is the other.
And the rest of it is staff.
19,000. 20,000.
At an auction like, say, the Frank Siebert sale in 1999,
the strategy of how you conducted yourself
when you could literally look across the room
and see the person bidding against you
and they could look back at you
was different than bidding against a telephone bidder.
At $300,000 on my right, at $300,000...
If you're in the room, you actually really still have
an upper hand because you have a better sense
of the rhythm of things.
And you have the eye of the auctioneer,
so you can speed things up, you can slow things down.
You can play some mind games that way.
Fair warning now, 360,000 on my right.
360,000, 833, thank you very much.
I'm fascinated with the history of auctions,
I'm fascinated with the psychology of auctions,
I'm fascinated with what drives people at auctions.
And if you read some sort of Auctions 101 article
in any publication and the journalist
is giving you the standard rules
for attending an auction,
every single one of them will always say
as one of the cardinal rules,
"Figure out what you want, set your limit
and stick to your limit."
That's great, it makes great sense
until it actually happens,
and I've experienced this myself, so I don't think
I'm speaking in the abstract about somebody else.
If I want something and I can afford something...
I mean, my limit is the amount of money
that's in my bank account, my limit is
how much food I'm prepared not to eat next week
because I can't afford it, I'm gonna do that.
Ownership and possession and competition, I think,
drive people to do very unexpected things.
And from the podium, it's wonderful to see.
Maybe you could tell me a little bit
how you got into the business.
Well, it's a one-word answer.
It's nepotism.
And I'm third, definitely, generation
antiquarian bookseller.
My grandfather came over to London in 1888
to be in Pickering & Chatto.
And my great-uncles had stores in Cork and Dublin.
And Joyce mentions the store in "Dubliners."
"Nearly every day when his teaching
in the college was ended
he used to wander down the quays
to the second-hand booksellers,
to Hickey's on Bachelor's Walk,
to Webb's or Massey's on Aston's Quay,
or to O'Clohissey's in the by-street."
To give you an idea, perhaps, of some of the material
that was available in the '20s,
one could look, for example, to the availability
of the original manuscript of "Alice in Wonderland."
Alice Liddell, Mrs. Hargreaves as she later became,
the Alice of "Alice in Wonderland,"
sold the manuscript at Sotheby's.
And my grandfather was at the sale in 1928,
and Rosenbach succeeded in purchasing it
for 15,400 pounds.
In 1958, my father really started
the book department proper at Christie's.
And by 1964, I was the third person in there.
In 1978, I sold the first Gutenberg Bible I handled
for $2.2 million, and that was considered
a huge price.
And in 1980, the Leonardo manuscript for Leicester Codex
was sold to Armand Hammer for the equivalent
of about $5 million,
which Christie's had considered
a bit of a disappointment
because it was touted as a collection of drawings
rather than as a scientific manuscript.
And by 1994, when it came around again,
the interest in science had increased hugely.
The Leonardo da Vinci Codex Hammer.
5,500 to start.
55--$5.5 million to start.
Good start.
I bungled it to start with,
and people were laughing and that kind of thing.
At 14 million in this room, then.
Fifteen million on the telephone.
And it was free to sell at 15 million.
And then it was the second row against the phone.
Just two people all the way up.
In this room at 23,500,020.
Four million on the telephone.
Twenty-five million.
Bill Gates certainly didn't come and see the manuscript.
He bought it sight unseen.
On the telephone in this room at $28 million.
Last call, 28 million.
Thank you.
And it remains by far and away
the highest auction price for any book or manuscript.
I think there's a world of difference
between rare book auctions and art auctions.
And I think one of the obvious differences is
that when you're talking about books,
they are not unique, nor one of a kind.
When you talk about a painting,
they are one of a kind.
Now there are certainly extremely rare books.
There are exquisitely rare books
of which only a few copies are known
but with the exception of illuminated manuscripts,
with the exception of medieval codex, for example,
which would be one of a kind
because they are manuscript and handwritten,
these items are multiples
and I think that really affects the price.
The antiquarian book trade is so established
and so, sort of, grounded in history
that there really is no comparison.
It's not just a difference of scale.
I truly feel it's like a difference of gravity.
I think books are not trophies in the same way
that other fields in the art market are.
- Another bid, please. - Four hundred.
Four hundred million.
Collecting art is, in many ways,
the "not yours" object of collecting.
By my owning this picture,
I deny you the right of ownership.
I am the greater, bigger person
because you can't have it.
I have it.
The people who collect rare books
have a very deeply, personal connection
to the material that they are collecting.
Books are going to be on a shelf in a library,
so you almost have to be invited in
to the collector's mind a little bit more.
The reason that there are many, many more art collectors
than there are book collectors
is because it's a display of wealth.
It's boring and it's a cultural dead end.
And I've never met a swaggering book speculator.
I've never met that guy who's like, you know,
owns houses all over the world 'cause he just bought in
right at the exact right moment
for, you know, James Bond novels.
First of all, when I was young,
when I first came to New York,
it was called the "art world."
Okay, now it's called the "art market."
I rest my case.
I started out in the magazine business.
I was working for "AB Bookman's Weekly"
which was the magazine
that everybody in the trade read,
love it or hate it.
I was the managing editor and staff writer.
I was also the first person they let go
when they decided to close it down.
The owner had made a lot of the wrong decisions
about the impact of the internet,
including declining an offer to partner with a new startup
who wanted to get more exposure in the book world,
a guy named Jeff Bezos and Amazon.
This summer, I finished writing a book
I've been working on for about a year and a half.
It's entitled "A Conversation Larger Than the Universe"
and it's the subject of a Grolier Club exhibition.
It's rooted in the books that I've been reading
and thinking about for the last 25 years.
And Mary Shelley is, for me, the starting point
for science fiction.
One of the metaphors that I play with
in the course of my conversations
is the idea of a walk in the woods.
That's my favorite recreation.
Not necessarily with any aim in mind,
but I keep my eyes open for edible wild mushrooms.
Science fiction might appear like a forest
to somebody who doesn't know anything about it,
but there are pathways.
You can learn to identify the trees
and the relationship between them.
It also allows me to think about science fiction
as a constantly renewing literary form.
This book, the title is "The Smell of Telescopes."
And it's in the exhibit almost entirely
because of the title itself.
Of course, in 1986, when the artist
was thinking about the future,
yeah, pay phones, along with robotic eyes
and, you know, portable keyboards.
Science fiction isn't about prediction,
it's about looking at what's going on
right in front of you.
If you have the gene to collect things,
then you collect things.
Needless to say, I have the gene.
So does my father.
The English has no word for what room I have is,
but the Germans have an excellent word for it.
It's "wunderkammer"
which is "a cabinet of wonders."
My library is unique in a variety of ways.
This is the only library that I'm aware of in the world
that's focused entirely on the history
of human imagination in all of its many forms.
And then, it's also unique
in that it's a purpose-built space
that's about the subject.
So, the subject is imagination.
The library is designed as an homage to Escher
who, needless to say, had quite an imagination.
And then, in the scale of a private library,
this probably is, you know, if not the largest,
one of the largest private libraries in the world.
And then, the library is unusual
in that the books are organized randomly by height.
So, you create the connections in the library
as opposed to me saying,
"Here's the section on naval warfare
and here's the section on flowers."
We don't do that around here.
And eventually, as we move into the virtual world,
I fully expect the library
will make the jump quite easily.
And then as soon as 3D scanning
gets to be good enough,
my goal would be to 3D scan every book
and manuscript and object in the room,
and so that any 3D printer would be able to make
anything that was out of copyright.
Assuming I live long enough and I'm fortunate enough,
that's just what I'll do.
I don't know why I collect.
And I seem to be at the extreme end
of the bell curve.
I own many tens of thousands of books.
I bought a lot of defective books
or what people consider defective.
And that's a moving target.
What was defective then is not defective today.
And I benefitted greatly
from that observation early on.
Books are a pain in the neck, they're heavy.
You have, you know, 20,000, 30,000 books,
you have a lot of books.
Carter Burden had as many books as I did, if not more.
He spent a million and a half dollars
on structural reinforcement of his apartment
just to put his bookshelves in.
The relationship of the individual to the book
is very much like a love affair.
It's hard to explain to other people,
if you can at all,
and it's totally satisfying to yourself.
My wife said, "I realize I'm not first in your life,
your books are.
Where do I stand?"
And I paused for about 20 seconds, counting.
"Sixth."
Anyway, and that was not the thing to say,
but you live by the sword, you die by the sword.
I mean, I describe myself as a hunter-gatherer
because I want the wow factor of having a look
at all of these thousands of books.
And these are all women who were important
and their stories were important,
but they've been ignored.
I was always a reader.
But, then, when I was at the University of Pennsylvania,
I got a job at the Library Company of Philadelphia.
And then, in the meantime, the women's movement started.
I was too lazy to march and do political stuff,
but from the library background,
and the Library Company collection was Americana,
I noticed that there were no women.
It was though the history of women didn't happen,
that they were just sort of there on the side
knitting or something like that.
And it was just a great chasm.
I thought it was just a little narrow gully,
but it was a chasm into which I jumped
and started collecting.
And I had to educate the dealers,
I had to educate the librarians
as to what I was looking for.
And most of the dealers were men, and I would say,
"Show me where your women are,"
and they go, "We don't have any."
And I would come back with a stack, and they go,
"Ah, okay, so now we know."
And they were not expensive.
I mean, except for the Indian captivity.
Those have always been collectible and collected.
And then my second husband was also a book collector,
and we traveled and hunted books.
She was really one of the first to recognize
the importance of collecting women.
And not collecting men writing about women,
although she occasionally does let the--
you know, a male author in
if he's done something worthwhile,
but collecting women talking about women.
It's almost 25,000 items,
but that also includes art, photography,
all sorts of tchotchke.
I mean, if you're gonna have a collection
and you intend to exhibit it,
having a whole bunch of books open
at the title page is really boring,
so you need things like Annie Oakley's gloves.
Caroline has got an eye for the quirky
but also for the historically important,
and she's built up a fantastic network of people
who can help her realize
what will be her defining role in life
which will be to have the greatest collection
of American women writers and history makers
that there is.
I feel I have a responsibility to form this collection.
I mean, it's enormous fun, but it has evolved
into something that I feel is important
and other people will see that it's important.
And, you know, I don't have kids,
so I can spend my funds however I want.
Yay.
In 2017, we started an annual prize of $1,000
for the best book collection built by a young woman
in the United States.
And we did this because we wanted to encourage
young collecting, generally,
but also because we really wanted
to encourage women who are collecting books
or accumulating books
to start thinking about themselves critically
as collectors.
Many people think that collecting
is just about high spots and first editions,
and you need an enormous amount of money.
The truth is, the most interesting collections
are built by people who see something
that other people don't see.
It's not people who are buying the books
everybody already knows.
I think most people stumble into this book world.
They don't look for it and aim for it.
And my stumbling upon it was a job application
in Las Vegas, of all places.
I was on my way to graduate school,
planning on becoming an academic
and, instead, I thought, "That sounds interesting,"
so I applied.
And then, within only a few weeks
of starting there, I thought, "Oh, no.
No, this is what I'm doing for my life.
This is my career."
Judging the condition of a book
is sort of like an art form.
- How is it going? - Not bad. How are you?
Good.
That's why I called in Rebecca
'cause she knows how to do it.
There were a lot of results from being on Pawn Stars.
There were some good things, there were some bad things.
But in the end, the thing that mattered to me about it
was that it was an exercise in bridge-building.
The idea was that
for up to seven million viewers in a night,
people would see the basics of rare books and collecting
on the show.
If it works out nicely, it could be up to 14,000,
I would say.
Okay, now she just made everything more complicated.
It's what I do.
Yes, there's something inherently funny
about a pawn shop in Las Vegas
being the bridge we're using to introduce people
to rare books and manuscripts.
But if that's the vehicle?
Fine, I'll take it.
Can I hold it up to the light?
Sure.
But one of my favorite, favorite things
is when I get messages from parents who talk about
their little girl who is a bookworm,
who saw me on Pawn Stars, and they're saying,
"Oh, now she wants to be a bookseller too."
One thing that has been frustrating to me
is when I started in the rare book trade
full-time in 2004,
the ABA was about 85 percent male.
But I was told that, like,
"At any minute this is gonna change.
There are waves of women coming.
Just give it a second, the demographic is gonna tip.
It's gonna be all different."
And, you know, now it's 15 years later
and it's 85/15 still.
Yes, there are famous women book dealers
who own their own business like Rostenberg and Stern.
But looking at them as these sort of exceptions
and a small percentage of business owners
that are women is undercutting
what's really the case in the culture of rare books
which is that women have been here
and contributing the entire time.
They have been cataloguing, they've been doing
a lot of the work behind the scenes.
And these women were really respected
for their book knowledge.
I mean, people like Mabel Zahn and Kit Currie,
they really were forces in the trade
but often are underrepresented in the historical records,
certainly, because their names weren't on the letterhead,
their names weren't part of the owner of the business.
People used to come into the store
and ask a question of the only man there
- rather than come to me. - Who was the janitor.
It could've been the guy on the elevator,
it could've been a customer, whatever.
So, I'd be the last resort.
It still happens a little.
- It doesn't happen much. - Not as bad as it used to be.
One of the oldest institutions for book collecting
in New York, the Grolier Club did have
an old boys club feel to it for a very long time,
not even allowing women members
until well into the second half
of the 20th century.
I'm a member now, Heather is a member now.
But for a long time, this was a space
in which women were not welcome.
Then, when Grolier took the step to say,
"Okay, we're going to allow women members,"
this was well into the period where Rostenberg and Stern
had established their reputation.
Everyone knew them.
And so, they very respectfully just applied,
asked, "What do we need to do in order to become members?"
And they received a letter back from the secretary
essentially saying, "Well, you have to prove
your commitment to books," with this idea that...
It's Rostenberg and Stern, people.
And they themselves thought, "Oh, okay,
so this is just more of the same, is it then?"
And they said, "No, I think we'll pass."
Now, of course, the Grolier has
Rostenberg and Stern's papers,
so they have eventually come around to the idea
that they long since proved their bookish passions.
Fundamentally, the profession has largely been
a service profession that has catered
to the collecting interests of affluent white men.
And, you know, we can't take the standards
of kind of like cultural and political ethics of today
and frame the past as a bunch of...
You know, these were goons and misogynists.
And I really want to be clear about that.
But I don't think the trade will remain relevant
unless the trade changes,
it grows to encompass other points of view
because it won't be reflective of the population of readers
and thinkers and collectors that exists.
Often, I'm the black person at the--walking the floor.
I think that's changing, but we have to think about
the diversity of the material we're circulating
because I think that's what helps
bring people into the trade.
I started collecting because I was writing
about the stuff I was collecting.
And I still remember the books I got from dealers
that were key to me and still are treasured.
There's a lot of people in the old guard
that are not really interested
getting anything new happening.
They don't like the boat being rocked.
It's the same thing that's happening,
you know, in our country.
People talk one way and act another way.
Among older dealers there's just this total sense
of fatalism, that, like,
"Yeah, well, that's just who buys the books."
How are you going to make it diverse?
I mean, I think that's a question
we are all actively struggling with.
It's very difficult to get these people,
many of whom pride themselves on how contrary they are,
to agree on anything.
You just have to, you know, continually try
person by person over and over and over again
to move the needle a little bit.
And if we hit a wall, we'll go around it
and we'll try something else.
This is because we know that change needs to happen
for the future of the trade.
I'm interested in how culture moves
and how culture changes.
I'm interested in archival silences and omissions.
I'm interested in the history of this moment
that we're living through.
And so, I think there are all these subterranean
kind of points of connection that we can look to
that were not given to us in the nightly news
when we were growing up.
I'm interested in conflict materials.
I'm not just interested in Afghanistan specifically.
I mean, that's the place where I've been most involved.
And what I think is fascinating is to find
ephemeral paper traces of those conflicts.
The paper is a psychic capacitor.
And if I get a charge from something,
it's kind of like I know it when I see it,
when I pick it up and I think, "Wow,
this is changing my perception instantly as I read it."
That's the kind of material that's exciting to me.
And I don't think book collectors buy objects.
I think they buy stories.
What are people of my generation
and the coming generations interested in?
They're interested in political economy.
They're interested in questions
about capitalism and socialism.
They're interested in gender.
They're interested in experimental music
and the avant-gardes and the long chain of history
that connects DaDa and surrealism
to punk and hip-hop.
They're interested in drug culture, in sexuality.
They're interested in exploration of identity.
A few years ago, I worked with Michael Holman
on the placement of his archives.
He's the journalist who first used the words "hip-hop"
in an article that was printed in the "East Village Eye"
in 1982.
You know, when you look at hip-hop
as it started to exist in the late 1970s
and early 1980s,
this was a cast of dozens at that time.
And by 1984, Def Jam was releasing
million seller records, right?
And so, MTV takes off and runs with it,
and the golden age of hip-hop by the early 1990s,
you know, you have the world's attention.
And that's that commitment
to this originary space of culture
where people are participating enthusiastically.
They don't believe what's about to happen.
They're not thinking about what's about to happen.
They're doing it authentically on their own terms,
and the culture sees that, the culture wants that.
And that, to me, is what people are collecting today,
what's interesting.
This dreaming together on paper
that happened prior to the internet.
Hip-hop, people didn't think it was gonna last,
let alone us being 40 years in, 45 years in,
like, archiving and preserving it, what?
- What does that mean, right? - Yeah, exactly.
When I started collecting,
I didn't think about it as collecting.
It is literally going down a rabbit hole.
It's like once you start-- once you start,
the fun don't stop.
A lot of people, like, late twenties,
have this crazy sense of nostalgia, right?
So, I think of a distinct moment
in which I fell in love with hip-hop.
I was at my grandmother's house
sitting on a step, waiting for my uncle and my cousin
to come home.
They come home.
How I know that they are here
is my uncle has this SC 400 Lexus.
It's cream, it's '95.
You hear "The Lex Coups, the Bimaz, and the Benz"
by the Lost Boyz blasting out the car.
Him and my cousin walk in, she has on a DKNY bodysuit
that Lil' Kim has rapped about "DKNY, oh my, I'm jiggy,"
and my uncle has on a Versace silk shirt
with the matching shades which is known for something
that Biggie Smalls used to wear.
And they walk in the house and I'm like,
"I don't know what this is,
but I need to be down with it."
And so, I was writing for an online
hip-hop history magazine
and, later, they asked me to become the editor-in-chief.
I said, "Cool," not having any experience.
And then I realized, "Maybe I should know
some writers or editor-in-chiefs
that wrote about hip-hop."
And during that time, the only person I knew about
was Dream Hampton.
So, I started to Google,
but I couldn't find any work online.
Like, a lot of the work, "XXL," "Vibe Magazine," "The Source,"
happened in, like, the '90s,
and none of that stuff is digitized.
So, that led me to collecting their work
because I wanted to read Kevin Powell's Tupac story,
or I wanted to read Greg Tate in "The Village Voice"
and all of these writers.
And the only way I could do that
is if I literally bought the magazine.
Everything that I do is always gonna be
around archiving and preserving.
Like, thinking about what new content can be created
so that the generations that were born
when Biggie Smalls died now has, like, context
around why he was important,
why he was the king of New York, et cetera.
This is what I'm talking about, Phase 2, right?
- Cool. - So, Phase did the layout
and the graphic design for IGT,
the last couple issues of it from issue four.
Before there was television,
I would say probably more people did read
'cause there was no other entertainment
you could have in your house.
More status used to attach to it.
People used to pretend to read more.
'Cause when I was young,
novelists were much more important
in the culture than they are now.
I mean, to me, a book is the closest thing
there is to a human being.
That's why I think that writers are like gods.
Books had a 550-year run.
They were a perfect object in many ways.
But as the interest in the book has diminished,
and I think that the last ten years
has seen the beginning of the end of the book
as a central object in our culture.
And there are a dozen reasons for why,
but you start with the internet,
then move on to mobile devices and the shattering
of people's concentration.
But reading as an activity is receding in the background.
I speak to my friends who work for the "New York Times,"
I speak to my friends who are in the book business,
and people are not reading books anymore,
and that's going to slow down dramatically,
the commerce of buying and selling books.
You don't spend $25,000 on a first edition of "Moby-Dick"
'cause you want to read Melville.
It's the object, and that's what worries me
about the future of the book trade.
It's just not gonna speak to people
the way it speaks to people certainly of my generation.
The natural sort of outcome of that line of thought
is, you know, if books cease to be printed
and if the future is entirely electronic books
and we start living in some kind of
a science fiction world that's like Blade Runner,
I think more and more people
who were never interested in books
will become interested in books again
because they are such an artifact.
So if, God forbid, books were to cease to exist,
I think a whole new cast of people
would begin collecting them for different reasons.
I think today, though, as the book transcends
from the repository of knowledge to the artifact,
you're looking at the book in a different light
with different eyes.
The 21st century eye is different
than the 19th century eye.
It's not clear to me that the codex
has lost its magic for people.
We don't really have trouble selling books.
I think the death of the book is highly overrated.
I go on the subway a lot,
and the people that I see reading books,
actual books on the subway, are mostly in their twenties.
This is one of the few encouraging things
you will ever see in a subway.
And I told this to my editor, and he said
that the people who read mostly on the Kindle
are mostly in their forties.
Yeah, I don't know why millennials are getting
so much slack for, like, killing bookstores.
We're carrying it, we're reading, we're buying.
As much as this idea that books are dying
or they are somehow crumbling which is, of course, not true,
try to open a file from your computer seven years ago.
It's a hit-or-miss proposition.
You can, of course, open any book
from 500 years ago and think about
and read what's there.
Books survive in incredible numbers.
People don't like destroying them.
They don't burn very well.
People don't like throwing them away.
Even illiterate people won't throw books away
because they have this sort of sense of magic in them.
I personally have never been able
to throw a book away.
I have seen books, like, in trash
and, to me, it's like seeing like a human head
in the trash, even if it's a horrible book.
There's something fascinating about choosing to burn books,
and it's worked incredibly well
which is why it's been used
since the beginning of the written word
as a way of filling people
with terror and dread.
But it's also symbolically meaningful
because the memory of a culture, of a people
can be erased.
The Nazis definitely were
the foremost burners of books.
Mao Zedong, who had been a librarian,
he was a book burner.
That hits us profoundly
because we really project into books
this very subliminal belief
that they'll outlast us,
that they'll pass our stories along,
our knowledge, our dreams, our visions,
all of what is the product of human thought.
Books survive or don't survive for different reasons.
Some of them survive because they were buried
in deserts or bogs, and so they were protected.
They weren't being handled,
they weren't exposed to pollution.
They were somehow safe from the bugs
that would eat them.
Their longevity is incredible.
They're real survivalists.
I think the main problem now
is that the dealers are aging out.
When I go to an ephemera fair,
almost everybody who is sitting there in a booth
has white hair.
I deplore the state of affairs
on the antiquarian book trade, and my feeling is that
it's in its final generations.
It will be a niche specialty for a certain range of people.
It is consistently my experience
as a younger dealer that I am talking to older dealers
who are so pessimistic and I'm so optimistic.
And I find that dichotomy really striking.
They're saying, "I don't know what you're gonna do,"
and I'm like, "I have so many ideas."
In America, the rare book firms
tend to die with the first generation.
It's pretty unusual to go on to a second.
Third and fourth are pretty much unknown.
Whereas in England, I suppose we're more conservative.
My firm has been going since the 1850s.
Daniel Crouch in London have been going
for the same time.
I think most book dealers in the past didn't look ahead.
When they died, whatever happened, happened.
So, we just keep going the way we have
and don't worry about what happens next.
Luckily, we have another generation.
And we do have Ben who will do
whatever is necessary at the time,
whether he wants to continue or not.
- Are you sure this was him? - Yeah, I'm sure.
One of the reasons I really got into the business
was because of his love for it.
I think if he didn't have to worry about money,
he probably would have been
the greatest collector of all time.
He's not a guy who's generally programmed for happiness.
He's kind of a cantankerous guy,
but he loves everything dealing with rare books.
This is what makes him happy,
and when he gets a new collection in,
it's like Christmas.
So, I think he's happy that this business
can continue on if he's not around.
My father, he says to other book dealers,
"Look, my daughter is in the business.
You know what? My books aren't going to auction."
Like, that's every bookseller's biggest nightmare
is that they have all of these books,
and they die, and what happens to them?
My kids are not interested in running the business
and it will go to auction,
or maybe some of my colleagues will buy.
Hopefully, it'll be somewhere, all my beautiful babies.
I call them "my babies."
It's just amazing if one of these books
could speak to you and tell you
what they have heard.
I own a lot of books that are perfectly happy
to go back into the marketplace.
Once I'm dead, it won't make any difference to me.
There's a handful of things I own
that belong in institutions
and those things will be donated or traded.
However, the vast majority of things that I own
belong back in private hands,
so I'm gonna put them back into the stream
where people will love them and take care of them
just like I did.
The intention at this point in time
is the University of Pennsylvania.
Right now, they have the fiction section
and, of course, I've always wanted to keep it together.
I mean, there's no point in pivoting
and then dispersing it at auction.
That would be completely counterintuitive and stupid.
It sounds ridiculous to say,
"I'm not that much interested in money."
I'll even sell a book for less than it cost us
if it was going to somebody who--
I hate to use the expression "deserves it"
but who really wanted it
and couldn't afford to pay more.
Getting the book to the right home
is the same way as a doctor
works to cure a patient.
Even if they don't like the patient,
it's their obligation.
And I don't regret anything that I've owned and sold.
The only thing I regret are the books I never bought.
This is my third fair in five weeks.
I've been back for a week and a half,
and Wednesday is the next one.
It's always a question of how I get--
if we can get some space for the van.
It's all of this and then I've got some wooden ones.
Yeah, why don't we start bringing the wooden ones in?
Too bad about the snowstorm.
It's messed up the whole thing.
This is my 45th New York Book Fair.
The first fair I did was still the Plaza Hotel.
I think, at that point, there were maybe 85 exhibitors
in the whole thing.
It was a little bit more Wild West in feeling
in the early days.
I've been in business 40 years.
It's hard to believe.
He's not even 40. Come on, you're not even 40.
I'm not even 40.
Everyone is happy about it.
We're gonna have champagne.
I hope you can come and have some.
You have to drop your cameras.
You'll have to use both hands
because we don't want any spillage.
In the immortal words of ,
my catering mentor,
"A bottle of champagne when opened
should make the sound of a lady sighing."
Some of us think about this all the time.
Others, less frequent.
I know what a few of you will say about this.
But, like, if you could do it again...
I mean, like, here we are, we're booksellers, right?
Or we deal in material culture and we gather it,
and there's obviously a love for it.
It's frustrating at times.
But is this something you wake up and you say,
"Thank God I found this"?
What else would you rather do?
- I agree. - I love it, I love it.
In 1999, I was laid off from "AB Bookman's Weekly"
and it was like going from writing the sports column
to playing baseball
and, you know, I would do it again.
- Yeah, yeah. - Absolutely.
I would never go into it.
I would never be a bookseller.
I don't know many people who love it as much as--
What Adam loves is the hunt.
I love finding them, I love the discovery.
But as a business, I mean, the supply is limited,
the demand is limited,
but the business itself is hard.
You have to be a psychologist
to sometimes buy and sell the book.
You have to be a brilliant salesman.
Sales--and sales is not like normally...
No, you have to be a 49er.
Like, it has--you have to find the gold in the ground.
It has all these elements that make it
an impossible business.
And on top of all that, it's hard on the body.
I mean, you talk about getting up in the morning,
but physically.
You look at booksellers walking down aisles
at the New York Book Fair,
it's not all--like the joints are wrong, you know?
The average bookseller loses about seven inches
after the age of 40.
I never had those seven inches.
You were about 6'2 when you were 20, Dave.
In silence, between writer and reader,
a memory of words and hands takes form.
We learn substance and worth through others' eyes.
Cloth, flesh, ink,
skin, paper, dust.
These are but material forms in which ideas dwell.
In the roar of a crowded shelf of books,
desert sun and arctic night,
distant seas of thought awaken, mingle, and are still.
Minds meet where the reading hand
grasps the void and inks its passage in empty margins.
Lost, forgotten, thumbed, split.
We bear the scars of patient decades'
and centuries' dreams.
Whose hands will next hold me, I do not know.
The book, too, reads its readers in real time.
I really don't want people to borrow books.
I don't. They're not gonna give them back.
They don't remember.
I lent a book to David Bowie once.
I said, "I don't want to lend you this.
You can buy this book."
He said, "Just lend it to me,
I'm gonna give it back to you." He never did.
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