After all these years it’s hard to even remember all the employees I’ve had. A curious contradiction of the book trade is the fact that no matter how poor a dealer may be, he must have employees, almost from the first, if for no other reason than that he would otherwise have no life at all outside the store. So poor was I when I started that my infant son would mind the shop beside me, sitting in a sloped children’s holder, observing the eccentric habitués, while my wife worked a part-time job to help pay the bills. Then, at home after work, along with her usual home duties she also did the invoicing and typed the catalogues while I manned the shop until the last customer left, sometimes very late. It all seemed quite natural at the time, even fun, for we were working for ourselves; we felt we were creating our own future.
Many beginning dealers, having no money, only time, stay open long hours, often 9 am to midnight, seven days a week. Even living over the store it doesn’t take long to discover this kind of life is impossible to sustain, so a young dealer finds himself an employee, paying minimum wage or slightly above it. This person ends up earning a wage that the owner can’t count on earning himself.
These early poverty-induced lessons served me well in many areas as I was constantly trying to figure ways to increase sales with the only means I had at my disposal: new ideas. But there was no escape from time.
Recently I found my earliest ledger, which revealed that I was almost a year in business before my gross sales for the month reached $1,000.00. That’s gross sales, all of which had to pay the $300.00 rent, replace stock, and feed my family. Still, gross sales in those days were actually net sales, for no new business
at that level needs to contemplate such ordinary concerns as taxes. The normal advice from older dealers to newcomers then (and maybe now) was to not even submit a tax form until you had been in business for at least five years. This had nothing to do with honesty but was simple common sense. When you consider that it would be at least that long before any actual profit would be possible, it was thought that it was better to be under the radar with any government agency. Actually, that still holds. It’s no accident that all small businessmen distrust and avoid bureaucrats. One learns very early that these people live by their own rules; they don’t care, probably can’t even understand, that a new business which has a $25.00 or $50.00 fee or penalty imposed may result in a family poorly fed. One comes to avoid all contact with government, which I still do. I am responsible for everything I do. Why would I want to have to reason with someone who takes no responsibility for their actions, having a barrier of inflexible rules to protect them from needing to consider the consequences of their legalities? One comes to despise even the attitude of such people. But curiously, after a few years of always paying for your mistakes one comes to take an inordinate pride in doing so, even getting to the stage of not envying the affluence of such cosseted bureaucrats compared to your own financial straits, when you see what their security really costs them.
On the whole I’ve been pretty lucky in the employees I’ve had, or maybe it’s just that I’ve mercifully blanked out the unfortunate memories of the few failures.
Question the prominent booksellers of today and you will find an intricate web of associations leading back to the major dealers of the previous generation; that is how learning and tradition passes on in the book trade.
Of all the booksellers who worked for me before starting their own businesses, and there are now a few of them, my favourite is Yvonne Knight, the proprietor of St. Nicholas Books. St. Nicholas specialized only in children’s books. Yvonne retired and St. Nicholas is defunct so some of you may not know of it. I’d like to tell you how St. Nicholas came to be. Yvonne came to work for me around 1971 and was my first full-time employee. I encouraged her to specialize in children’s books, a part of my stock that I had been consciously building up for a long time.
My store then was in a converted house on Church St., and adjoining the entrance to the washroom was a small alcove which I had shelved, leaving only a narrow aisle for access to the washroom. When shelved this space was hardly larger than a closet, and that’s where we put the children’s books. Yvonne had started working for me in April or May. In January of the following year she came to me and told me she had to return all the money I had paid her for the entire previous year, some six or eight months. It turns out that her husband, who is a doctor, had been told by his accountant that her having a job was going to mess up his tax return so badly that it would cost him more than her total earnings. To avoid that mess he told her to return all her pay.
I didn’t know how to respond to that, except I knew I couldn’t allow her to work for nothing—even though she said she’d be happy to do so. I finally thought of a solution. Which was, that I gave her all my children’s books and the space they were in. She had an instant business. We thereafter referred to her first shop, beside my washroom, as the world’s smallest bookstore, contrasting it deliberately to the World’s Biggest Bookstore in downtown Toronto. I continued to buy children’s books and paid her with them, which suited us both. She ran her little shop while still working for me for a few years, until its size became impossible, about the same time she felt ready to become entirely independent. She moved her business into the third floor of her home where it went from being the smallest bookstore in the world to certainly the loveliest children’s bookshop in Canada.
Yvonne and I remained close friends—we shared booths at international book fairs several times and some of my best kid’s books came from her. Yvonne sold her books too cheaply and she also over-described—to over-describe means that a dealer notes all defects with such detail that it often results in a book’s condition sounding way worse than it is. Which means that if you ordered a book from her that she had described as good you would be delighted because it would invariably be in fine condition. Obviously her customers loved her and she sold a very high percentage from her catalogues.
After she left my store I would only see her stock when I visited, when she issued a catalogue, or at book fairs. This often resulted in my buying some of my best children’s books from her without even needing to leave my booth at a fair. Once, at a Los Angeles fair, she had mounted a lovely display in our shared glass display case. As soon as I saw it I wanted to buy over half the books in it, but especially a very ornate set of tiny nineteenth-century
children’s books in a special wooden bookcase. It was beautiful and, as usual, too cheap. I wanted the set badly but Yvonne asked me not to buy anything until the fair had opened, because she didn’t want to ruin her display. Out of deference I agreed, but later, still before opening, a dealer I quite disliked, a guy who had a reputation as a vulgar bully with his colleagues, came up and tried to buy the books. It looked like being accommodating to Yvonne meant I would lose my treasure. But he wanted 20% off, which luckily gave me an out. In those days the standard discount was just 10%, which means he was being pushy again. Yvonne wasn’t in the booth and I told him he’d have to come back and ask her. When he left I promptly took the set out of the case and hid it. When I told Yvonne why, she wasn’t angry because she didn’t like this man either. I paid her the full price and then had the pleasure of telling the pushy bully, when he came back, that it had sold. I didn’t tell him it had been sold to me. I just told him it had been sold to a dealer who didn’t try to beat her down. But, sure enough, this guy was so dumb that he didn’t even get the point of my insult. I still have this set and it’s still beautiful.
Another anecdote is more painful. Visiting some recent friends and clients once in their home I saw one of the great rarities in Canadian literature, a first edition of Anne of Green Gables. After expressing surprise that they had such a rare book, I asked if they could tell me where they got it and how much they had paid. They told me that they had bought it from Yvonne Knight for $400.00. $400.00! I almost cried. Even then that was grossly underpriced; Yvonne simply hadn’t thought to mention it to me, so I had missed it. Which is as good as an example as you’ll ever hear as to why it’s a good idea to visit used bookstores regularly. Some years later, I bought it off my friends—for a bit more than $400.00; in fact I paid them $9,000.00 for it, and sold it for $10,000.00 the same day. If you’d like to have a more detailed account about that you will find the whole story in an essay on my website entitled “Anne’s Adventures on Her Way Home.”
Aside from Steve Temple’s periodic stretches working for me when he was in financial trouble, two of the best booksellers now active in Canada worked for me in their early years: Robert Wright, and Debra Dearlove, who still does.
Some time after Wright left to go on his own I also hired Janet Fetherling (previously Inksetter, and now Inksetter again).
After a couple of years Janet Fetherling came to me one day and told me she had bought a bookstore, Annex Books, and would be leaving. The old syndrome again—if they’re any good they will want to go out on their own. I could only be gracious and wish her well but I was pretty sick of hiring people, spending an intensive couple of years teaching and training them, only to lose them.
Of course much worse were the ones who, after all that effort, didn’t work out.
This time I resolved to try and be a real businessman and conduct proper interviews and consider carefully all applicants before I hired one. I began to question friends and clients who had done extensive hiring on how to do this. One librarian friend, David Kotin, in the upper levels of the Toronto Public Library, depressed me by saying it was all a crapshoot.
“The best employee I ever hired, Dave, had the worst qualifications and the worst mistake I ever made had two or three degrees.”
This made me even more depressed. To make matters worse, I was living in my store then, having had an abrupt parting with the woman I’d been living with, so I had no home, no lady, now no employee and worse, I couldn’t even type.
One Saturday I started chatting with an occasional customer, Debra Dearlove, and on telling her my problems she responded, “Why don’t you hire me?”
Turns out she had worked in insurance, hadn’t liked it and returned to York to do postgraduate work, but discovered that she didn’t care for the upper levels of university life and was dropping out.
In spite of all my newly mustered intentions, I trusted my instincts and offered her the job. I doubt that those proper methods would have worked anyway. Every dealer I’ve ever spoken to hires in the same manner I did, just as most of them entered the trade by happenstance as well. Whenever you read a bookseller’s biographical note or question him, almost everyone in the trade seemed to enter it by accident. I’ve heard variations of the same story countless times since I read it in David Randall’s Dukedom Large Enough (New York, 1969) and the similarities are a bit eerie. A university student, usually an English major (although there have been engineers, pre-meds, etc.) finds himself spending more time in the library or in bookstores than at lectures, finding the attraction
to books irresistible till he finally finds himself both hoarding and scouting. At first thinking it was merely a sort of new hobby, then becoming increasingly involved, until his preoccupation with books becomes an addiction and the fascination transfers itself into an all-consuming compulsion, and another bookseller is born. There are many variations of this theme, my own case being one, starting at fifteen, but not realizing my vocation till I was thirty. But all those years of travelling, reading, talking, I now see, were preparation for what was my certain destiny from the age of four or five or whenever it was that I first learned to see order in the hieroglyphics of our language. The clues can always be found if one looks.
How could someone who believes in his heart that he was born knowing how to read have become anything else but a lifelong lover of books?
I hired her on the spot and she is still here twenty-five years later—in fact, pretty much running things now. It was later before I realized that working in my bookstore was dangerous in an entirely new way for both of us. By that time it was too late. I was truly seduced, and I still am.
For, within a few months, life took over and I broke the first rule of business, which is, of course, never mess with your employees. We began seeing each other on a personal level as well. Her father, who himself had owned and run a company, put it succinctly when he was told of the complication: “Well it’s not like she’ll lose a job that’s paying her any money.” He’d already learned a few things about the book business.
Debbie was a natural. Already a collector of the work of George Gissing, she understood the essence of the collecting instinct, which quickly translated into her becoming first a natural bookseller, then a very good one. Friends enjoy kidding me over this. “So, David, you finally got a perfect employee and you think marrying her will keep her from leaving. This time if she leaves you’ll lose everything.” (Actually, it’s most often Debbie herself who points this out to me, and the most chilling part is that it’s true.)
Merging our personal and professional lives wasn’t easy in the beginning for obvious reasons. It wasn’t just that I was the boss, it was that I knew things she didn’t (I still do, although she might not admit this). In other words, I had the obvious advantage of always being right, inevitable and proper in a teaching and boss/employee situation, but neither desirable nor even possible in a personal one.
That we pulled it off and are still doing so twenty-five years later says something about us, I think. These days I make up for my early vulgar crassness of always being right by now always being clearly wrong. I’m still not sure if we need another twenty-five years to even the slate so that we’ll simply be equals.
But in spite of joking and the pointed comments of our friends, it has worked—so much so that I must admit I couldn’t run things without her. It is a demonstrable truism in the book trade that partnerships don’t work and invariably fail, often disastrously. But it seems that those forged in marriage or personal bonds can and do.
I have often been thankful for whatever instinct caused me to refuse Jerry Sherlock’s offer of a partnership before I went on my own, for I now realize that our friendship might not have survived. It’s one thing to find a person’s eccentricities amusing when they cost you nothing, but when ludicrous business practices take the food from one’s family’s mouth, so to speak, they are less so.
Debbie and I compliment each other well in the business—almost like good cop, bad cop (naturally, I am the good cop, although she would contend I’m really a fool and a sucker)—and with the great gift that we both share in everything, our near constant verbal bickering seems to evaporate almost instantly, leaving the air clean of resentment and anger.
This is no small thing, for as every person who has grappled with the obsessions of addiction knows, resentment is one of the most insidious and destructive of all human traits.
All this means that I have also solved the great dilemma facing all older booksellers—what will happen to the business when the founder dies. I have now seen many, many cases where book businesses simply evaporated after the owner died. Warren Howell took over after the death of his father and it is said he was a much better bookseller than his father had been, but on his death John Howell Books was liquidated. Jake Zeitlin tried elaborate schemes for many years where he would hire the sons of his wealthy clients, the idea being that Jake would teach the young man the business then sell it to the father, establishing the continuance of his business. Jonathan Hill was supposed to do this, I believe, but instead set up in his own business, perhaps motivated in the same way I was when I turned down Jerry Sherlock’s offer of a partnership. When Jake died, Zeitlin and Ver Brugge disappeared as well. This saddens me but it affords yet another example of what I have come to believe is a necessary consequence of being a bookseller. It offers fuel for the philosophic position which I believe is an inevitable consequence of being a bookseller: seeing in everyday mundane occurrences philosophical implications far more profound than those afforded in normal occupations. And why would that surprise? How can one, after a lifetime immersed in records of human history, the noble and the foolish, think otherwise?
A bookseller comes to see how important tradition and continuity really are. And all small businessmen come to know that all actions cause reactions and that there are consequences to everything one does. Trite, no doubt, but true for all that, and inescapable. It’s a good lesson to learn.
Bookselling is a vocation, not a job, and the numerous cases we see of dynasties are almost all in Britain, where up till recently a young man, having to choose between his father’s bookshop or the factory, would sensibly become a bookseller. Some of those people became very good booksellers too. I don’t know what that means.
The other exception would be the old Jewish dynastic booksellers, where such people as Barney Rosenthal can point to four or five generations of booksellers in both branches of his family and relations all over the world in the trade, scattered by marriages within the tribe, and later by the Nazis.
So, usually, the business dies with the bookseller. Debbie being twenty years younger than me will carry on. My son, like most of his generation, is more interested in movies than in books.
She will inherit a large and wonderful stock, the best in Canada I believe. I like to tell her that that was a small price to pay for relinquishing her virtue, but seemingly she doesn’t agree, having taken in the last few months to dramatically proclaiming that I have ruined her life, she having sacrificed her best years to a world so corrupt that only a diminishing few treasure books any longer. She seems certain that the book itself will die about the same time I do, leaving her with massive overheads to house books that no one wants.
I hope that’s not true.
If Yvonne Knight was my favourite employee, Reg Innell has been beyond any doubt the most singular. Like me a lifelong reader and amasser of books, I knew Reg as a collector and customer for twenty-five years before he came to work with me.
Reg Innell is an Englishman in the mold of Edwin Harris—both were opinionated free-thinkers (for this type of Englishman that means an aggressive atheist), lifelong socialists and ever ready to take offense at any perceived challenge to any of their assertions. These were the sort of Englishmen who refused to bow to Hitler when most of the rest of the world had counted them out. This moral certainty in the rightness of their opinions may have saved western civilization, but it also tends to make them difficult to deal with on the personal level.
Reg worked his whole career for the Toronto Star, where he was a bit of a legend.
Debbie and I attended the party at the Star when Reg retired and were not surprised when every single speaker recounted stories of scenes Reg had caused, usually in the parking lot, when some hapless innocent made the error of parking in restricted spaces. The favourite at the retirement party seemed to be the time he called the police on some man only to find that the man was parked in Reg’s spot because he was catering a party in Beland Honderich’s office and had hot food. Prestige and position meant nothing to an aroused Reg.
His greatest public fame came when he accompanied Pierre Trudeau on his trip to China.
Reg, who has a bushy beard, had taken to wearing a tiny peaked Mao cap, which indeed gave him a startling resemblance to Karl Marx. At the welcoming ceremony for the Canadian Prime Minister, Zhou Enlai, Mao’s second in command, noticed Reg in the front rank of photographers, and exclaiming, “That man looks just like Karl Marx!” He came over to Reg and chatted, and then posed for pictures with him, which appeared in newspapers all over the world. A smug, smiling Reg Innell and a delighted Zhou Enlai upstaged Trudeau and adorned the front page of the Star. Reg, never overburdened with modesty, considered it only his due.
As a bachelor, Reg lived in a basement apartment in Yorkville, the only window completely covered by a blow-up of one of his photos of the Beatles from their first Toronto concert. Reg claimed this was a very effective attraction for the young women who frequented Yorkville in those days. He also boasts of providing free publicity photos for one of the young female singers who started in the Yorkville coffee houses in the sixties—Joni Mitchell.
As the assignment photo editor at the Star, he invariably assigned himself to meet whichever visiting celebrity interested him. He invariably met the literary ones, and I have been slowly acquiring some of those photos by a combination of flattery, whining, and even payment over the years. Reg usually refuses to sell his work in spite of the endless queries I receive regularly from people who see the portraits I have hanging in the shop of Auden, Leonard Cohen, Aldous Huxley, and John Fowles. Once, when Jake Zeitlin was visiting Toronto, he came in with Stillman Drake and seeing the one of Huxley (whom he knew well) acknowledged that it was the finest photographic portrait of Huxley he’d ever seen. When Jake turned eighty I managed to wheedle a copy of that photo from Reg and presented it to Jake. Jake loved it. I never told him of the humiliation and shameless begging I had to stoop to to get Reg to part with it.
Reg often made life difficult for booksellers too. He would become quite angry with booksellers who were as much as five minutes late in opening their stores, especially the hapless Norm Hart, who was habitually late opening, as was Joyce Blair at Abelard.
The rest of us became quite sick of Reg’s impassioned lectures on the iniquities of people who posted shop hours but didn’t keep them precisely. Reg’s wife and daughter refused to even enter public stores with Reg because any lapse in decorum would arouse his acute sense of propriety and he would demand to see the manager, whom he would then berate about proper business practices, grossly embarrassing Reg’s womenfolk.
In spite of Reg’s difficult personality he and I became close friends, and when he retired from the Star he came to work with me, running the store himself on Sundays and with me on Saturdays. We continued also, until his recent health problems, to go on scouting trips together. Reg has a wonderful library which he refers to as a “workingman’s” library, by which he means not that it reflects the working classes but that it was built by a
workingman on a workingman’s salary. A good loyal socialist workingman, too, and no one was ever allowed to forget it.
Reg’s original great love was Shelley, more for his personality, I have always believed, than his poetry—by which I mean it was Shelley’s defiant atheism which Reg loved most. Whenever some hapless young man, enamored of Reg’s lovely daughter, would come courting he would be greeted at the door by a scowling Reg who would first demand to know if the young man was a believer.
But Reg’s interests were much deeper than that. His obsession with Shelley was gradually transferred to Hazlitt, the essayist. It has never been necessary for me to seriously immerse myself in Hazlitt because Reg has bombarded me with countless quotations (these days mailed in letters, for, like me, he disdains that ubiquitous upstart, the computer). But several shared passions—Clarence Darrow, T.E. Lawrence, George Orwell and Mark Twain amongst others—indicates some shared heroes and probably hints at why we became such close friends. His passion for William Morris is also deep, although it is more attuned to the philosophy—he never had the money to indulge himself by buying the Kelmscott Press editions. No doubt he could have in the early years, but he probably felt his other passions would suffer if he did.
But Reg’s greatest passion is arguably for one book, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. If Reg has a favourite book it would have to be that one. It became a great joke in our shop that no matter what book some innocent seeker might inquire after, within five minutes Reg would be passionately selling them one of the many editions of Burton’s Melancholy. We found it almost impossible to keep it in stock due to Reg’s belief that his mandate in life is to save the world by introducing the young to Burton’s genius. Burton and good old-fashioned English socialism would be our salvation, if only we could see it.
His colleagues at the Star had many stories of his outrageous behaviour, but I have thousands; like the very famous Hollywood star who, posing for Reg, said, “I think I’ll take this pose,” only to be curtly ordered by Reg to shut up. “You may be some big deal in those movies,” he said, “but here I’m the professional. You’ll do what I tell you and you’ll pose as I tell you to, or there’ll be no bloody picture for you.” She obeyed (I think it was Jane Fonda, but it might have been Audrey Hepburn). Reg did, and does, swell with pleasure whenever someone describes him as an outrageous curmudgeon.
I have literally hundreds of anecdotes about my old friend—my favourite scouting one having nothing to do about books.
One day some years ago Reg and I headed down to Hamilton to do the bookstores. Half-way there Reg exclaimed, “Bloody hell, we’re almost out of gas,” turning into the first gas station.
“It’s some sort of bleeding self-serve place,” he said, outraged. “I never use those, I need someone to do it. Do you know how to load it up?” he said apprehensively.
I didn’t drive then, and I was equally ignorant. “No, I don’t, Reg. But we’re grown men, surely we can figure it out. I see women doing it all the time,” I said confidently.
We formed a plan. Reg would put the nozzle in (surely all that experience, what with the Beatle’s photo in his Yorkville window, would have taught him that), and I would monitor the panel so we would know when to stop. It seemed to be sensible.
Reg opened all the little caps, inserted the nozzle, then said, “Okay, it’s a go.”
I pressed the lever, my back to the car while I watched the dials.
The panel numbers began to rotate when Reg bellowed, “Bloody hell! Outrageous!”
I turned. Gasoline was spraying out all over Reg. He was wearing a good camel hair topcoat and by the time I turned he was already completely soaked in gasoline: his coat, face, hair, beard. He had not pushed the nozzle past the small protective cover of the tank, instead placing it up against the plate and almost half a gallon of gas sprayed him before he had the sense to yell so I would release my grip on the pump. He was deeply affronted and even more so when I couldn’t control my laughter.
But he calmed down and the gas, which had looked like it had destroyed his expensive coat (“Serves you right,” I couldn’t help saying. “Who ever heard of a socialist in a camel-hair coat?”) finally evaporated, leaving only the odor.
We continued to Hamilton. In the first bookstore we entered the stench of gasoline first frightened, then confused the owner. When we explained, he promptly ordered all his other customers to put out their cigarettes (this anecdote occurred in more civil times). “There’s important books and stuff here,” he stated. “We don’t want to be burning down the bookstore, do we?” As a good bookseller he was more concerned about his books than he was about Reg and me.
In another store we were almost kicked out. The proprietor thought we were rummies who must be sniffing something. We explained, but only my business card saved us from expulsion. We were looking at shelves in the rear of the store when a man entered, sniffed and started yelling, “I smell gas. Fire! Fire! It’s going to explode. Call 9-1-1! Get out!”
The proprietor calmed him.
“It’s okay. It’s only those two guys over there.” The man ran out anyway.
So, what you have here are two modern men, their homes bulging with books, the records of man’s triumph over nature and ignorance and stupidity, who can’t even manage between them to fill the gas tank of an automobile.
Just as with the regular customers, bookstore employees tend to become friends, and when they go out on their own, equals, valued colleagues.
Reading Sheila Markham’s wonderful A Book of Booksellers one sees clearly the incredible network of apprenticeships, a clear indication of how intertwined the history and the workings of the book trade are and always have been.
It also demonstrates the serendipitous manner in which so many booksellers found their vocation.
One of Markham’s interviews, which missed the cut for the book, contains perhaps my favourite description of how so many dealers have entered the trade.
It is with a bookseller I don’t know named Fern Poel, and begins: “I’m just like any other misfit in the trade. At some point you become unemployable and end up going into your hobby.”
Amen.