I Was Taught to Like and Covet Books From the Collector's Perspective but Unfortunately Not From the Authors' Passion to Write

At Birch Hollow, photo by Suzanne Currie

     The problem that faces a lot of antique dealers and collectors is knowing when a profession or recreation is getting out of hand. I was keeping inside the line in this area, simply because we were shallow-pocket dealers, who simply couldn't spend what we may have wanted to, in order to impress our customers and, yes, out play our competitors. So everything we did from 1986 until the mid 1990's was quite sensible and proportional to the small retail locations we had at the time, and what we could gamble with, and keep up on our monthly car and mortgage payments. Then came the mid 1990's and it all changed after I met a fellow by the name of Dave Brown, an outdoor education guru from Hamilton, and a wildly eccentric book collector. Dave became a great friend of our family and spent quite a bit of time with us here at Birch Hollow, when he was out on some of his famous book hunts throughout this part of Ontario and northward.

     I've written a great deal about my book collecting relationship with the good and scholarly Mr. Brown, including writing his biography in 2000, a few years after he passed away. Dave had requested that I do this only a few months before he died, and never really gave me a chance to turn down the offer. But what writing the biography did for me, was shake me back to reality, that as a formerly average, contented book buyer and seller, I had, you see, succumbed to his gravitational pull. I was writing a biography most truthfully about an eccentric fellow, who was a full throttle bibliomaniac. A book hoarder. An otherwise brilliant teacher and an historian of considerable accomplishment, who even gave up his marriage because he couldn't stop filling their residence with newly found "old" books. Before I finished writing Dave's biography, Suzanne, my own long suffering editor, reminded me casually but seriously, that ironically, I had also become a book hoarder. I was stunned by this assessment, but when she asked me to look around our house, and think about what it had looked like before we had met Mr. Brown. I may have been in denial for the first ten minutes of the house tour, but by the time I returned to my office chair, all I could say over and over was, "My God, what have I become." Well, a rookie bibliomaniac. I believe we jointly counted around 40,000 books, which was moderate if comparing Dave's 100,000 books jammed into a small Hamilton bungalow. But it was like standing on a bathroom scale, after five years of excessive consumption, and being surprised about the hundred pound weight gain. It is what it is, after all, and instead of a weight gain, I had single handedly infilled the empty spaces in our house, with the exception of two rooms; the kitchen and the bathroom. Dave's marriage broke down allegedly when his boxes of books were found in the kitchen one afternoon, and he was asked to make a choice. He kept the books in the kitchen, and from early in his adult life, he became a single man with an unattractive recreation.

     The point I'm trying to make here, is that I was so grateful for a mentor, back in the early years of our antique business, that I believed most of what Dave was feeding me. Yup, like the making of a junkie, because I couldn't believe Dave was leading me into the jaws of an addiction, that would rule my life for the better part of a decade. We went from a modest collection of old books in our shop, because they were good sellers, to having the capability of filling every shelf in the shop with our newly acquired book inventory. It would have meant displacing and getting rid of all the other bric-a-brac we were selling, to accommodate books. But I wasn't a book seller as such, and I was buying thousands of old texts without really appreciating what our customers wanted. The first big mistake. I was spending like the proverbial drunken sailor, and a lot of the ancient books I was finding at estate sales and auctions, were simply not suited for the local market place even in the summer months. These were wonderful scholarly books mostly on history, but they weren't the kind of casual, summer season reading that the bulk of our audience desired, and was willing to pay for at that time. Some of these great oldtimers were valued at over a hundred dollars each, and they were the kind of investment you kind of had to think about for a tad, thus eliminating impulse purchasing. A second fault I had committed was to opt out of fiction, which we had always kept on our shelves, to be replaced by non-fiction only. Dave convinced me that if I wanted to do well as a old book dealer, the fastest way to make my mark, was to only offer non-fiction. He was right to a degree, but it was his confession that he hated fiction, which he exposed much later in our relationship, that puzzled me in terms of valuations. It is pretty close when it comes to valuations, and in many cases, important first edition titles of notable fiction, as stated first editions, can sell for massive amounts, over even the most scholarly, limited printing histories, and books on early explorations with companion maps. I did come to appreciate the contradiction here, when at the end of the clean out of Dave's estate, executors discovered his childhood collection of Thornton Burgess animal stores, which I remember him telling me about shortly after we first met him in the mid 1990's. He had received them as a Christmas present as a child, and he coveted those wonderful works of children's fiction right up to the end of his life. So there were a few contradiction with Dave's philosophy, and it was enough to make me re-evaluate my own rather narrow focused approach to stocking our antique shop, and filling up our modest house, as a sort of print graveyard. These were rather oppressive looking books in black and brown with very little in the way of cover art to make our interior living space a little more pleasant. Most of the old books aren't elaborately decorated except on the spines.

     So where is the budding bibliomaniac now? Well, thanks to the early detection of a personality disorder, of the old book kind, Suzanne and son Robert, my eBay buddy, we pared down our collection of the oldest books, and for close to ten years, we marketed these antiquarian, limited edition, first edition histories literally around the world. We couldn't have sold them in the shop, or even at special sales, so it was clear to all of us at Birch Hollow, that we needed a global market place to unload many thousands of somewhat valuable texts. It was a fascinating period and I couldn't have done it without massive cooperation from Rob, who did all my images and listings, and Suzanne who handled all our shipping needs. I provided the books and the accompanying write-ups, and it was my task to take the wrapped packages to the post office each morning, sometimes requiring a large box to handled the ten to twenty books heading south of the border and overseas. Once of course we started to make a dint here in the surplus inventory of old books, inspired by the teachings of my mentor friend, Dave Brown, we began looking at our book commitment much more economically, especially regarding the human, emotional cost of consuming all our open space at home, and in our shop facility, and concentrating instead on, imagine this, what our customers actually wanted to purchase on impulse; versus running an full fledged antiquarian book shop which really wasn't what any of us wanted. We just wanted to have a smattering of good books, new and old, fiction and non-fiction, and especially our new and exciting interest and involvement in vintage cookbooks. But we have learned a valuable lesson about excesses, and obsessions that grown on the fertile ground of the naive psyche. We have changed so much in the past twenty years, and I do have to credit Mr. Brown for showing us an extreme side of every otherwise innocent recreation, that sometimes turns pro, but often generates misery.

     Dave once complained to me that he was in a terrible crisis. His fridge had quit and it was going to be almost impossible to replace it with a new one. When I asked why, he explained rather tersely, that it would take two weeks to unload the piles and shelves of books that were blocking it into the seriously compromised kitchen. Yes, it was easy to understand why Dave's lovely wife, said "enough is enough," and chose freedom of movement versus suffocation by books.