Last week I attended the annual Colorado Springs Antiquarian Book Seminar. The days were long, the lectures were dense with material, the faculty (big-deal booksellers) were generous beyond belief, they all put in 12-hour days on our, the students’, behalf. On my way home, the one thing I didn’t put in my checked-luggage was my notebook. Not going to risk losing that. Sometimes I was listening so hard I was sorta writing on auto-pilot, and will need to go through those notes several times before it all sinks into my brain and stays there.
Here are a very, very few of the things I learned.
- Catch-22 was originally called Catch-18. But it was released (1961) at the same time as Mila-18, by the more established writer Leon Uris. So Heller, a first-time novelist, was told ‘find another number, kid,’ even though there’d already been periodical publication of a short-form of the book under the Catch-18 title.
- Those brown stains on old books: some are mildew, some are foxing. Mildew is mould (mold, for you U.S.ers) a living organism, in spore form. It spreads from book to book and cannot be eradicated, but there are labs working on it. Foxing, another type of brown stain, usually in spots, is actually oxidation of impurities in the paper, whether part of the fibres used to make the paper, the water used to make it, or the various chemicals used to bind it all.
- Most paper that you buy at Staples these days can be considered archivally correct. It turns out that a lot of the old paper-making processes that resulted in foxing have been abandoned as the paper-making process got modernized.
- Never store a book in a plastic bag. Too much danger of trapping moisture in with it.
- Doesn’t matter what caliber paper they’re made of, you still have to store books at 70% humidity and 60-70°F. Out of sunlight. With reasonable air circulation. Sit them on a shelf, on their bottoms, as they were manufactured to sit. The books on the shelf should be snug but not tight, you should be able to get your fingers in, one on either side, to pull it out. Never, ever pull a book off the shelf by pulling on the top of the spine.
- A surprising amount of time was spent demonstrating how to pack and ship a book without it arriving destroyed. I guess I’ve been lucky that way, the valuable books I’ve bought that were shipped to me have always arrived in good shape, but a lot of people had stories like the $200 book that arrived in a brown envelope, not even a padded one. Jeeze.
- It’s nice to be with a group of people who also stop breathing in the presence of a really, really special book, whether rare, ancient, beautiful, signed by someone incredible, whatever. Just when you thought you were the only one (not really the only one, but they often seem pretty scarce on the ground).
- It’s a total buzz when the profs have a demo book auction, to show you how it works. The whole room was electrified. They were auctioning off actual books, really good ones, donated by the long-experienced booksellers who were teaching us. I lost two auctions, but won one. $500 book (retail) for $175. Happy happy. It’s my first modern hand-made book, too, so it’s really interesting to handle it, see the handmade paper, the custom slipcase, get it signed by the bookdealer who supervised its creation. Yum. But I still grieve over the one that got away, a collection of short detective stories, signed by every author in it. Big-name authors. It went for $600, out of my range, but still, sniffle.
- We got to take home some of the catalogues these bookdealers assemble and produce. Their rule is that the catalogue can’t cost more to print and ship than the total value of the books being sold in it. People from Royal Books and Between the Covers were two of the teachers, and they had some glorious catalogues.
- One of the faculty was this tall, elegant woman who has sold very, very high-end books in France, Italy, New York. Totally intimidating, to from-the-sticks me, anyhow. But she was the funniest lecturer you ever met. “Then there was the time I screwed up [the story]. And from it I learned [boatload of knowledge].”
- We learned that things change, even in the antiquarian book field. Used to be people burst a blood-vessel to carefully remove stickers from library discards, to make them cleaner and nicer and prettier, for sale. No more. Partly, it’s considered that the stickers are part of the book’s life, its history. Also, there have been some big legal cases where people have stolen from libraries and made a bundle selling the books (some of them very rare) online. One guy was charged with stealing 9,000 books from various libraries. 9,000 that they could track down, anyhow. Made a huge amount of money selling them on eBay. And he was a librarian, yet. Ugh.
