Sargasso Saturday

Saturdays are weirdly enough, fairly quiet at the moment. Two or three browsers will make an appearance. (they wander in, we smile brightly through our yellow teeth, they tell us what a marvellous collection we have, because we're clearly a museum and not a shop, and then they ask about Harry Potter. Not that we mind; bookdealers need human contact on a regular basis to remind them how to imitate humans in their daily lives, otherwise we forget and stumble around looking unsvoury and smelling of rubbing alchohol).

Passing trade is a big issue in London at the moment. You're okay if you happen to be on Charing Cross Road (Visit Any Amount of Books Now...subliminal advertising break over...) or Museum Street (Ulysses Bookshop must be regarded not as a shop but as a house of worship), but if you happen to be anywhere else the likelihood is that you are suffering from severe congestion charge issues which can lead to drowsiness, a sore throat from praying for a customer and ultimately...bankruptcy, divorce, alchoholism, alienation and generally being forced to get a proper grown up job where people bicker about each other from their cubicles and the high point of the year is someone getting drunk and photocopying their backside.

It isn't just the congestion charge obviously. There are other considerations; fewer people leave school knowing how to read, and if somehow they have learned, then they have had all the inclination ground out of them in order to turn them into better candidates for reality TV shows. The internet has had a massive effect on rare bookdealing; for centuries your skill and success depended in no small measure upon knowing what was rare and valuable and scouring the known world for it.

The internet has reduced the necessary level of scouring but it has put us in the weird position of having to redefine rare. There are titles which we would search for, obtain and then price routinely at a certain level tailored to our customers, the rarity of the book and how piratical we were feeling that day (or at least that's what people think). The internet not only makes it clear that this particular title isn't rare (if there are ten on abebooks then it isn't rare), but also that our 'traditional' price for the book is either a) looking remarkably high or b) the same as everyone else's because they're using us as a price guide. Everything becomes comparison shopping; seeing as no two books are ever the same this introduces a problem.

For example; I have a copy of The Hound of The Baskervilles in First Edition, it is gorgeous, all deep red and shiny black and it looks like it was printed yesterday...it's £6,500. Now, there's a nice man who bought a copy in a charity shop for £3, it's frayed, faded, foxed and generally looks like the Hound it question has been using it as a chew toy...now this nice man isn't a bookdealer and through no fault of his own he decides that his copy is about half as good as mine (because all the available copies are there on the net) and prices it at £3000 when it's worth about a tenner. Thus the answer to the question "Why is your copy so expensive?" is likely to be "Because it's fabulous, and we're professionals." rather than "Because we're really, really greedy and we think you're an idiot."

The Quandary.

Right, you get a book handed to you for cataloguing. One of your insanely knowledgeable work mates has managed to secure a book not seen for a goodly number of years. In this case it's a first edition of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's bone meltingly good "In a Glass Darkly". It's three volumes in a rather nice not terribly old brown leather binding and it contains ground breaking supernatural tales like "Carmilla" and "Green Tea". You know the whole Hammer House of Horror thing with lesbian vampires and heaving cleavage and more brooding shadowy figures than you can shake a stake at? Well it started here, Mr.Stoker came puffing in third after Dr. Polly-Dolly and JSLF and a bunch of other sideliners (including Conan Doyle, who wrote so much more than the adventures of everybody's favourite coked-up consulting crime fighter). I live for this stuff; the sweeping vistas of escapism gifted to us by the grand masters of the weird make me go all tingly and unprofessional. I do things frowned upon by the traditionalists of book dealing and become actually enthusiastic (Imagine Jeeves whooping "Hell Yeah!" and leaping in the air at the fruition of one of his cunning plans and you have the image I'm going for, or possibly a catholic school geography teacher on a crystal meth binge. Either way, you know what I mean). So I sit there with this item in my shaky grasp and wonder how I can do it justice. I mean you do the whole professional biblio-jargon bit about half titles not being called for and recent half calf with twin title labels and gilt inner dentelles so that everyone interested knows that this particular copy escaped the tree shredder that apparently got most of the others...and then you sit there thinking there must be something more you can say about how marvellous this object actually is. It's a bit like trying to describe someone you're in love with, no matter how hard you try you always feel as if you aren't quite getting the point across about how wonderful they actually are. Of course you can't, which is kind of the point. In cases like this I always want to end my catalogue descriptions with: "You should buy this book, if you are the right kind of person I'll really work on the price, but you'll probably never see another one of these and that's a lot like being told you're about to go blind or you'll never see anther sunset. This copy of [insert title] is so much more important than that Blackberry you were going to buy, or that car or indeed anything other than spiriting sick children away to somewhere they can be safe and happy that if you aren't doing that sick children thing you should buy this book because in the grand mural that is the passage of time it pretty much works out to the same thing because; in all likelihood you will be saving the people of the future from the possibility that they might never get to read [insert title here]." But of course I can't, so sometimes I have to just apologise to the book in private later. No, I don't go mushy about kittens and babies and as far as I am concerned, if ghosts exist then it doesn't actually make the world any more interesting than it is already. Go about your business, nothing to see here except the really lovely copy of In a Glass Darkly.

Booksellers do it in fine bindings

Welcome to Adrian Harrington Books. Well not exactly; welcome to the underside of Adrian Harrington Books, the engine room of an antiquarian bookshop. In common with all engine rooms we have sweaty, grubby people, loud distracting noise and a deplorable lack of social polish, but we also have books of such eye-searing wondrousness that it makes the fact that we're all penniless social misfits rather more bearable. Nobody gets into this business to make a quick buck and then laugh all the way to the bank. Any resemblnce to piracy on the high seas is purely coincidental and no bookdealers were hurt in the making of this journal. If they were then you can take it from me they deserved it.