The Treasure Chest That is an Old Book - You Might be Surprised at the Kinds of Keepsakes "of the Flat Kind" Stowed Away Safely in Books

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

     If I haven't made it clear, previous to now, in this biographical series, I must make it crystal clear, as a venerable antiquarian (or at least that is how I think of myself in my mid sixties), that the antique profession in most parts of the world, is often a cut-throat, viciously competitive profession. It is both "storied," and "historic" and the profession itself has made its way into many of the world's classic literature, by the pen of Charles Dickens, and "antiquity" generally by Washington Irving. Even on the regional scene, it is now full to overflowing the market place, with a new breed of what us oldtimers used to call "Attic Dealers." This means those who enter the profession gently, and who don't have shops to tend, or even booths to maintain at local antique co-operatives. Today these lower level dealers work online sales through auction sites such as eBay, plus many other market sites perfectly suited to the lighter volume collectors and sellers. Along with those folks who rent space in antique malls, are dealers like the Curries, who have to hustle in order to keep up their respective inventories. The increased competition these days, with all levels of antique buying and selling, has thinned out the market place, where we get our inventory. The high level of dealer competition back in the late 1980's and for most of the 1990's was huge and expanding, as more retirees seemed to be turning on to antiques as an interesting sideline, and it really juiced the creation of malls and co-operatives, indoors and outdoors. Point is, filling a shop with what customers wanted in antiques and collectables, had become wickedly difficult and amazingly expensive. Since then, there has been a noticeable shift to online auctions and other cyberspace marketing sights of which we also belong to several of these electronic venues.

    The reason I offer up this explanation, is to explain why, as small dealers back in the 1980's, we simply couldn't afford to play the game the way other dealers were dropping large amounts of money at the weekly summer auctions, where we previously had a reasonable opportunity to acquire interesting pieces, furniture and paintings, quilts and wool blankets, which was our specialty at one time, and huge job-lots of what dealers call "smalls" that are in essence, small and affordable collectables that appeal to those shoppers with lesser budgets. What Suzanne and I came up with, as a way of maintaining inventory, but opting out of the larger and more expensive antique furnishings, and opting instead, to pay more attention to the "smalls" and to increase our exposure in old books and ephemera. I can tell you with sincerity, that if we had not shifted back in the late 1980's, the Birch Hollow Antique component of our family business would now be a footnote of local business history. Here's why!

     Every generalist antique shopkeeper has to have a little bit of everything to keep customers interested. So much so, that they will keep on coming back. So even though we shifted gears, and put less emphasis on the larger pieces in the antique forum, we always insisted of ourselves, to keep a reasonable amount of old and nostalgic furniture in the shop, plus the typical bits and bobs you expect of such a shop dealing in generalities of the past. Yet most dealers of any consequence know the importance of having at least one specialty; one particular interest that has developed out of a deeper interest in collecting, that over time and experience, creates a realm of expertise. For us it became books of all ages, and the old paper that was often found stashed within. When a large quantity of old books would come for sale at auctions, or made available at flea markets, or charity sales, (even at private yard and estate sales), we could blow out our competitors fairly easy, simply because we knew how to grade them, make repairs to the bindings and damaged pages, and we understood clearly that books were part of our own antique culture; and we just hadn't known until push came to shove, that becoming known book dealers was also extremely cost efficient and full of fringe benefits. What do I mean by this?

     How many times have you, for safe keeping, folded some paper item other than a book mark, inside a text you happened to be either reading at the time, or found convenient nearby the phone for example. A lot of phone related messages are temporarily lodged in books. We've found thousands of notes folks have made during phone calls, who have then decided that for posterity, they were best stored in the safest place in the house. A book. What happened when we began buying old books by the cartons, and thousands of books at one time, is the windfall of what had been stored within for sometimes a full century.

     After one of these large purchases, at an estate auction at the former Ewing Farm near Bracebridge, Suzanne and I sat for several hours just emptying the old books of their stashed paper treasures. It was an ephemera collector's dream, as we filled one fairly large box with this paper harvest, which included hundreds of beautifully inscribed, handwritten recipes kept in the antiquated family cookbooks; hundreds of old letters and for the collectors, some well conserved postal covers dating back to before the turn of the century. There were equal numbers of in-memoriam and death notices also going back to before the turn of the 1900's, and a huge volume of old dog-eared photographs of the farm and its inmates. There was a small amount of pressed dollar bills, and a variety of interesting cancelled cheques, invoices from area businesses, and similarly significant receipts, plus cancelled steamboat and bus tickets, and event stubs, that had been kept for nostalgia's sake in these wonderful old treasure chests, that were, for all intents and purposes, meant to read. Over about thirty years now, we have amassed a nice collection of handwritten recipes, some of which we have framed and mounted in the shop for visitors to see. We could put together a significant book of these found recipes, which by the way, were written on just about anything, including doctor's appointment cards, on invoices, cut-out portions of cereal and pudding boxes, and on so many other open surfaces that would afford the writer a little bit of space for a hastily dictated recipe given by someone in casual passing.  Some of the older recipes are quite literally works of cultural art, with the quality penmanship and of course, the grease and icing stains that add provenance to the respective recipes.

     After being in this business since the 1970's, a lot of the so called "locals" know our collecting specialties, and will make a point of offering us book purchasing opportunities before they host charity sales and private events to unload some of their possessions. There was a local situation that perfectly illustrates what a tutored dealer can do, when confronted by a persistent seller at such a Saturday morning yard sale. A fellow we knew in the buy and sell business, of mostly old stuff, was having an outdoor sale of general odds and sods, mostly as a clear-out of a storage space, more so than an actual business event. The chap would not leave me alone, as he tried every horse-trading trick to convince me that I should by the twenty or so boxes of books he was trying to get rid of that morning. I knew every book in his collection and there wasn't any reason for me to buy the lot, seeing as I couldn't justify being fifty cents for even one. All the time I was wandering around the sale, he kept coming up with incentives, and a better price if I took all the books, and by time I was getting ready to leave, Suzanne tugged my arm and said, "Buy the damn books or I will, just to shut him up." By that point I think the full boxes were two dollars each, and seeing as Suzanne had pointed out a few that would sell for more at our own book sales, I decided to end on a positive note and make the deal. The boys loaded the boxes in the van, and when I turned back to see how the vendor viewed the bulk purchase, he was killing himself laughing at, I suppose, our expense. Oh well. But it's true that what goes around comes around. Suzanne had been right, you see, about making the purchase. When we started going through the mountain of books, we began finding a substantial number of "Tall Boy" hockey cards from the 1960's that at the time, were worth at least twenty dollars each. We sold them off to one collector for a nice profit, and a third of the books were easy to sell in our discount bin for two dollars each.

     In one other case, I was attending a large yard sale of another dealer in town, who would use these extra events in the summer, at his house, to bolster proceeds from his shop. It's what a lot of dealers choose to do in order to keep funds rolling in at peak times, expecting the winter could be not only cold but business deficient. I was looking through the piles of old books and happened to find one late 1800's biography that was loaded with ephemera that was a hundred times more valuable than the book; and seeing as most of the books in the boxes were a buck each, I felt it incumbent as an experienced dealer of ephemera and books, to take the materials out and present them to the dealer for reconsideration. He looked at me as if I had offered him the greatest insult one dealer could offer another. He thought I was making fun of him for mistakenly leaving the good stuff in the book when it should have been removed and sold separately. He told me that he meant to leave these paper heirlooms in the book, and would I please put them back inside. I did so, and then I asked him, thusly, if the book was still priced at one dollar as the sign on the box indicated. He said no, it was now fifty dollars. I asked why and he explained that there was at least a hundred dollars worth of ephemera inside the text. I put the book down and never visited the vendor's shop or sales ever after.

     But, that's business and, for some, pleasure. Just not mine.