JAMES FERGUSSON

(Times Literary Supplement, February 23^rd 2007)

Giles Mandelbrote, editor

OUT O.F PRINT & INTO PROFIT

A history of the rare and secondhand book trade in

Britain in the twentieth century

336pp. British Library. £30.

978 0 7123 4920 8

Siegfried Sassoon, in fox-hunting youth, fantasized about a "book-room" lined with old calf - "the thought of firelight flickering on dim gilt, autumn-coloured backs - rows and rows of them, and myself in the armchair musing on the pleasant names of Addison and Steele, Gibbon and Goldsmith". To this end, in between reading the magazine Golf Illustrated and ordering a new saddle for his hunter, the hero of the autobiographical novel Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man puts himself on the mailing list of antiquarian booksellers the breadth of England. Sassoon bought books all his life and was a connoisseur of the book catalogue. Indeed, unlike most mail-order customers, he found it hard to throw catalogues away. When .Sotheby's sold his library there were masses of them.

Book catalogues are peculiarly ephemeral but addictively fascinating, not only for greedy buyers and collectors but also for biographers and historians of taste. They are maps of our hinterland. How did we come to be reading the books that we are now reading? What do best-sellers have in common? Why do famous authors disappear completely from view? What is good book design? Would the people who now read self-help books have read sermons 200 years ago? Hundreds of these catalogues are published each year in Britain alone. It is astonishing that they get no coverage in mainstream literary periodicals; no coverage at all outside the almost private, esoteric trade journals.

As with "new" bookshops, so with second-hand ones but more so. The quality of the best "new" bookshops is determined by their width and depth of stock, by the taste and wit of their managers. Customers will enter a shop intending, perhaps, to inspect one title but leave having bought three others they had never heard of. That is why booksellers welcome "browsers". Second-hand bookshops not only enjoy multiplied width and depth because they are not confined to titles in print, but also raise the stakes by never guaranteeing duplication of their stock. The chance to buy a particular title (or a book in a particular form, state or printing) may only occur once in your lifetime. You stand by the shelf and wonder, "Do I dare let this book pass by?" (collectors are famous for regretting their losses more than they relish their acquisitions). It is the same with book catalogues. Part of their ephemeral nature derives from the urgency of their business. The books they list are normally in single copies. If you don't order in a book at once, you have little hope of getting it.

The first English booksellers' catalogues de appeared in the seventeenth century. Four hundred years later, despite the internet. they still flourish. Indeed, the internet has probably helped them. The web has made the world a smaller place: it has brought buyer and seller closer together and while the business of "book-search" has altered radically - everybody has discovered the magic of AbeBooks' search engines - the traditional relationship of book-seller and customer has only become more intense in the age of email. Yet the printed book catalogue will never be entirely replaced by its e-equivalents (attachments are uncomfortable, links seem ordinary) because none of them - so far - can reproduce that sense of traditional possibility offered by a (usually) manila catalogue envelope, stamped and franked. Catalogues come in all shapes and sizes (unlike web pages), they may be run off on a photocopier or printed hot-metal in Gloucestershire, they may be bland thin lists or plump, sumptuous art-works in their own right, illustrated in full colour and shipped in from Hong Kong, but they all generate the same now-or-never expectation. If, as psychologists suggest, the exhilaration of collecting lies in the acquisition rather than the possession, the printed catalogue, a near cousin of the prey, is the mount in the chase. Sassoon's two hobbies may not be so unrelated.

Soon after Sassoon's twentieth birthday, in December 1906, when he was still dreaming of buying his first hunter, the antiquarian book trade clubbed together to form a trade association. Frank Karslake, a businessman who had made his fortune in America and returned to found what would become the bookseller's ready reckoner, Book Auction Records, called a meeting at the Criterion restaurant, Piccadilly Circus, and the Second-Hand Booksellers' Association was formed. Two years later, it became the International Association of Antiquarian Booksellers and then, in 1928, the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association. The ABA now claims to be "the oldest professional body of its kind in the world". It celebrates its centenary with a memorial volume, resonantly entitled Out of Print & Into Profit: A history of the rare and secondhand book trade in Britain in the 20th century. As a history it is partial, perhaps inevitably with so many contributors involved, but it makes a ripe compendium of raw material, reminiscence, analysis and anecdote, politely marshalled, without too much repetition and only occasional contradictions, by Giles Mandelbrote.

The second-hand book trade is made up largely of sole traders, there being very few sizeable firms, and its story is bound to fall back on its characters. This is a people-driven narrative, albeit, being antiquarian booksellers, they are often driving in different directions. Of the 112 original members of the ABA in 1906, only nine remained in the 265 of 2006 (and they became eight as two of them amalgamated); B. H. Blackwell (now Blackwell’s), Thomas Chatto (Pickering & Chatto), H. M. Gilbert (despite a lapse in membership), Alfred Halewood (Halewood & Sons), Maggs Bros, Chas P. Porter (Galloway & Porter), Bernard Quaritch, Henry N Stevens (Henry Stevens, Son & Stiles) and R. E. Stiles (ditto). The stories of these individual characters have never been pulled together. There are no classic memoirs by twentieth-century antiquarian booksellers, partly because most of them were better at selling books than writing them, partly because booksellers have a tendency to be (publicly) decorous.

David Low, to whose bibliopolic memoir With All Faults (1973) his friend Graham Greene famously wrote an introduction averring that if he weren't a novelist he should have liked to have been a bookseller, had an accurate eye and an economical way with words, but was probably too good-natured. Percy Muir's Minding My Own Business (1956) is discursive but judicious. George Sims's The Rare Book Game (1985) and later volumes are disappointing for a man who would rather have been remembered as a writer (he wrote detective stories) than as a bookseller. His friend Anthony Rota, author of Books in My Blood (2002) and still one of the leading figures in the trade (a past President of the ABA), is a master of gentle anecdote but a thoroughgoing diplomat. All these four, incidentally, were responsible for remarkable catalogues, some of the best of the century on the "modem" side.

In Out of Print & Into Profit, Paul Minet, himself author of a memoir, Late Booking (1989), draws attention in his rapid conspectus of the century to some of those with the longest shadow - Ben Weinreb, the architecture king, a wily and sympathetic bookseller who produced grand, scholarly and genuinely innovative catalogues; Richard Booth, self-styled "king" of Hay, a consummate showman who likes best buying books in bulk; and Peter Eaton, a Michael Foot-like figure, an old socialist who developed a new genre of bookselling, operating from a vast ex-Rothschild country house in Buckinghamshire. Elsewhere, Michael Harris remembers George Jeffery whipping the tarpaulins off his Farringdon Road barrow, and Philippa Bernard waxes sentimental about the lost bookshops of Mayfair and Charing Cross Road. Arnold Hunt profiles "foreign dealers in the English trade" - Wilfrid Voynich, Maurice Ettinghausen and, "by common consent, the greatest scholar-bookseller of the twentieth century", E. P. Goldschmidt; and A. S. G. Edwards searches out other scholars in the trade such as John Carter and Anthony Hobson. Elizabeth Strong, one of the last remaining old-style Edinburgh booksellers, has conducted diligent research into three of that city's booksellers, William Brown, James Thin and John Grant. She quotes Jimmy Thin on old Ainslie Thin, who liked to think that he knew all his customers personally. He didn't, of course, but he did not do too badly. ''Who's that fellow who has bought Osbert Lancaster's Drayneflete Revealed?' 'I don't know,' I replied, 'he just paid for it and went out.' 'That's no good,' he said. 'Who is he? Where does he live? What does he do for a living? What are his interests? Bookselling is all about books and people -nothing else matters.'" Thin's produced splendid catalogues - books picked for their people – but they were very difficult to buy from.

Other writers in this centenary volume come in sideways. David Chambers, joint editor of The Private library, talks about collectors - J. R. Abbey, amasser of illustrated books and fine bindings, George Lazarus, the stockbroker who collected D. H. Lawrence, Sir Geoffrey Keynes, the surgeon who collected Blake and almost everybody else, Simon Nowell-Smith, whose English poetry collection was the subject of an eye-opening exhibition at the Bodleian

Library. Anthony Hobson, sometime of Sotheby's, reports incisively on the Robinson brothers' astonishing Phillipps sales, Chris Kohler explains the lucrative business of making and selling collections. David Pearson and Angus O'Neill, more cerebrally, offer observations on "patterns of trading", while Frank Herrmann, late of Bloomsbury Book Auctions, discusses buying at auction, and Richard Ford, a dealer, buying privately. Paul Minet, founder of what is now Rare Book Review, and Barry Shaw, Editor of the late lamented weekly Bookdealer, ponder on the trade's journals. Much of this might seem, to the layman, private business.

What was the ABA for? Its object, declared Frank Karslake as far back as 1902, should be "the safeguarding of the interests of the trade on vital issues. Union is strength". In the twenty

first century, rather, it is the trade organization that upholds "standards": membership of it implies adherence to a code of practice that provides customers with guarantees of "authenticity", "fair and informed pricing", "honest, impartial and expert" valuations. This assumption of the high ground has caused problems over the years. After the forming in 1974 of the Provincial Book Fairs Association, an inclusive body for the specific purpose of organizing book fairs round the country, it became so popular that it rivalled the (exclusive) ABA as a voice for the trade. Friction grew between them. Again, the middle years of the twentieth century were bedevilled for the ABA by controversy over the Ring - the practice of booksellers' conniving to secure items in auction at a low price and then re-auctioning the lots among themselves afterwards. Basil Blackwell led a campaign against the Ring from 1925, when he was elected ABA President, to 1969, when legislation was enacted that he thought would finish it. A section in the ABA Code of Practice solemnly outlaws it. Yet in 1989 Charles Traylen, an unstoppable Guildford bookseller who carried on in business until his death at the age of ninety-six, asserted emphatically in print, "I don't see how the Ring will ever die out. It's too woven into the trade". According to him, twenty-one out of thirty-six past presidents of the ABA had been personally involved in it - and he retained his records of the "knock-outs". Does the Ring still continue? Even as recently as two years ago, the ABA appeared to run up against its own Code of Practice on the question of sophistication or "enhancement" of dustwrappers. In 2004-6 a controversy raged in the columns of Bookdealer and The Book Collector over an ABA bookseller's having offered for sale in a catalogue books to which dustwrappers from other copies bad been supplied, so raising considerably their notional value. To make things worse, the books had been inscribed by their authors, so changing their state amounted to tampering with the "association" that had made the books valuable in the first place. The ABA’s slowness to respond in this case did it no favours.

It falls to Anthony Rota, that honourable man, to fly the flag for the ABA in a chairman-like summing-up to Out of Print and Into Profit, ''Defending and Regulating the Trade". It is perhaps unkind, therefore (not to say, in such a book, surprising), that he is sent up so in the immediately preceding chapter, "Booksellers' Memoirs: the truth about the trade?" Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly, in a cheerfully unconstrained contribution, says that Rota has "more than a touch of the head prefect about him". He comes across as high-minded to the point of (

quixotism". Vaulbert de Chantilly evidently prefers the "brash" Rare Books and Rarer People (1982) by O. F. ("Fred") Snelling, a Sotheby's clerk who moonlighted as a boxing writer, to Rota's Books in the Blood, let alone the writings of Oxford's "Gaffer", Sir Basil Blackwell ("regarded by his rivals as something of a prig"). As for Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road (1970), "it is hard to find anyone in the trade with a good word to say about it". Marks & Co was not the ideal bookshop of the 1987 film, but, on the contrary, faintly disreputable. The story is told by Ben Marks's son Leo, the screenwriter and SOE cryptographer, in his 1998 memoir Between Silk and Cyanide, of the surgeon and book collector Evan Bedford's having given Hanff's favourite correspondent Frank Doel an auction commission for up to £300. His book sold for £200 to another bidder - and then for £650 in the knock-out. Bedford was furious: questions were raised in Parliament - the Editor of the TLS was even dragged into the affair. Other ABA writers to receive Vaulbert de Chantilly's thumbs-down are Rick Gekoski ("glib") and Paul Minet ("his self-published autobiography founders for lack of an editor").

The longest single contribution in Out of Print &: Into Profit is, however, H. R. Woudhuysen's essay on catalogues. "To receive one at breakfast," he quotes the librarian A. N. L. Munby, "to skim through it with one's porridge, possibly leaving the table to dictate a telegram if circumstances demand it, to note complacently how the books one bought for modest sums in the past have risen in price - these are among the highest pleasures in life." "When I die," he quotes the great collector of children's literature Peter Opie, "my heart will be found pressed between the pages of a book catalogue." Woudhuysen is careful and broad-ranging, noting general custom, presentation, printing, "pioneering catalogues", questions of provenance (Blackwell's deleted all marks of ownership from A. E. Housman's books, at his request) and the use of bibliographies as well as terms and conditions, economies, dispatch, telegraphic addresses, photographic illustrations and the use and purpose of bibliographic references. He argues, too, for the importance of book catalogues, despite their obvious ephemerality. They are not only primary sources for the history of the trade and collecting. The .best also show original scholarship, or creative accumulation, or, in the rewarding cases of single libraries, make a snapshot of a collection, perhaps built up over a lifetime, in the moment before it is suddenly dispersed.

Among the thousands of items offered in book catalogues by members of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association in the past six months may here be noted just a few that tantalize by their possibilities or provenance. David Brass, great-grandson of one of the founder members, Emmanuel Joseph (and nephew of Joseph's Charing Cross Road neighbour Ben Marks of Marks & Co), but now of Calabasas, California, offers The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics (1969), signed by all four Beatles and with an autograph note from Paul McCartney to Leslie Bricusse including the lyrics of ''The Bricusse Marching Song", $37,500. It is apparently unpublished - ."YOU ARE BRICUSSE I WHAT MORE DO I WE NEED?" The founder-member firm Bernard Quaritch (London) has Sir Joshua Reynolds's copy of John Donne's 1633 Poems, "the first edition of what may plausibly be called the greatest poetical collection of the seventeenth century", £25,000. Maggs Bros (London), also a founder member, is impressively prolific with its catalogues, its prettiest recently being a homage to Eric Gill and s David Jones and their followers (Ditchling & Beyond), including such promising topics for research as a "small archive" of the Society of Calligraphers (born at the same time as the ABA but not destined for longevity), with correspondence between Eric Gill, Edward Johnston and others, 1904-36, £5,250. And Blackwell's (Oxford) offers Agatha Christie's novel Sad Cypress (1940) with the author's inscription to the archaeologist R. Campbell Thompson, "Wars may come & / Wars may go I but MURDER goes / on for ever!", £1,500.

One catalogue from Nigel Williams (London) includes a "lovely" first English edition of 84, Charing Cross Road (1971), £195 - "It's a trendy wine bar now". In another from the same bookseller, Dennis Wheatley inscribes his first book, The Forbidden Territory (1933), "To my old friend Percy Muir who has put me on to many good books", £1,950. According to Muir

(Minding My Own Business), Wheatley was one of his first customers; before that he was his wine merchant. Jarndyce (London), hyperactive in catalogues of the nineteenth century, promises the original logbook of the frigate Salsette, 1809-10, featuring a report of Byron's swimming the Hellespont, £18,500, while Christopher Edwards (Hurst) attributes a drawing of three profiles, c1831, to the teenage Charlotte Bronte, £2,950. R. F. G. Hollett and Son (Sedbergh) produces catalogues of high gloss and variety on all sorts of subjects, featuring for example, fully illustrated, a collection of the work (glass slides as well as books) of the A. & C. Black artist Edna Walter, 1910-48, £1,800. Claude Cox (Ipswich), issuing elegant catalogues specializing in "Printing & the Arts of the Book", has an archive relating to the pederastic mystic Ralph Chubb, 1924-2001, £1,200. Waterfield's (Oxford), singled out by Woudhuysen for its academic library catalogues, has been disposing of the books of the historian Jenifer Hart.

Paul Rassam (London) is one of the most intelligent of modem first edition dealers. His catalogues are short and few and far between, but always crisply designed, handsomely executed and, the greatest compliment, so readable (notes well written on books well chosen) that they are worth keeping. The latest runs to 178 items, among which are D. H. Lawrence's Look, We Have Come Through! (1917) inscribed by him to his friend "Kot", S. S. Koteliansky, £3,000; Edward Upward's copy of his Repton contemporary Christopher Isherwood's Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), £3,750; and, an oddity, Beryl Bainbridge's The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), inscribed by Salman Rushdie to his first wife Clarissa, £95.

Siegfried Sassoon doesn't go without notice, either. The catalogue collector is himself collected by Rassam in the covetable shape of The War Poems (1919), inscribed to the poet's lover Stephen Tennant on Valentine's Day 1928. Bearing the bookplate of Simon Nowell-Smith, it might have been anybody's for £4,500.