Out of Print and Into Profit: A History of the Rare and Secondhand Book Trade in Britain in the Twentieth Century

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2007), "Out of Print and Into Profit: A History of the Rare and Secondhand Book Trade in Britain in the Twentieth Century", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 5, pp. 428-431. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710750671

This work was commissioned by and published for the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association (ABA) to celebrate its centenary (1906‐2006). Donations from members have ensured that the price is relatively low. Nine of the original members of the ABA (as eight businesses) survive to this day: Blackwell, Pickering and Chatto, Gilbert, Halewood, Maggs, Galloway and Porter, Quaritch, and Henry N. Stevens and R.E. Stiles (now trading as Henry Stevens, Sons and Stiles). Many more famous names, like Deighton Bell and Heffer, Tregaskis and Voynich are now memories. Any centenary is a time for looking back and taking stock, and this highly readable work does this.

It will appeal to various readerships, from those wanting to reminisce about pre‐internet days in British bookselling, those exciting and unexpected finds, the subterfuge of the ring at book auctions, and long‐dead personalities, to those looking for substantial bookselling history. Many of the contributions address both needs, many of the writers recognize the exhilaration and the scholarship, the trading prices and the cultural value of the works (temporarily or permanently) in their care. Booksellers, dealers, collectors (personal and institutional), local and foreign all play their part in this idiosyncratic and valuable journey through 20th‐century British bookselling (casting an eye earlier and later where necessary). Giles Mandelbrote is Curator, British Collections 1501‐1800, at the British Library and is well‐known as an editor of the BL/Oak Knoll conference series called “Publishing Pathways”.

The book fills gaps currently left as we await later volumes of The Cambridge History of the Book (so far only volume 3, from the death of Chaucer to the incorporation of the Stationers’ Company in 1557, and volume 4, from 1557 to the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695). It also draws on a wide range of histories and memoirs and other works, some reliable and others less so, which has built up over the years about British bookselling – typically Percy Muir, John Carter, Paul Minet, George Sims, Anthony Rota, Gordon Ray, and Leona Rostenberg. In addition, the archives not only of the ABA itself but many others have been used, notably Weedon and Bott and others in libraries and elsewhere (Richard Ford provides a helpful appendix just about book trade archives, with annotated entries on sources like Elkin Matthews, Maggs Bros Ltd., H.M. Fletcher, Foyle, and Peter Murray Hill). Addresses of booksellers currently trading in rare and antiquarian books can be found in Sheppard.

The book follows themes – buying and how the trade acquired its stock (auctions and buying), selling and how the trade sold its stock (history, street traders, town and country bookshops, catalogues and sales, and collecting and buying), changing tastes and fashions (antiquarian and modern books, the First Folio), and finally personalities (like Goldschmidt and Voynich and Ettinghausen, booksellers’ memoirs, the ABA's regulatory role). Appendices offer a wealth of extra information, above all on sources and a helpful note on translating prices from then to now). The thematic structure does need to be deconstructed to draw out items likely to interest different types of reader (except the omnivorous). Paul Minet's survey of the “century of innovation in selling books” sets the scene – decline of retail shops, growth of institutional collectors (many in the USA) and decline of personal ones, decline of large book sales (though book fairs continue), and the growing reliance for information (and transactions) on the internet.

Perhaps over‐arching the entire book is the question “why buy old books?” raised by David Pearson in an essay on patterns of collecting and trading in antiquarian books. The aesthetic and commercial amalgam of pleasures and incentives defy rational definition, and, arguably, may disappear when such items are digitized. Pearson's chapter reminds us of the trends in the sale and collecting of antiquarian books over the period, and his comments on catalogues and specialisms, condition and prices, binding and provenance, and bibliographical scholarship suggest that, though times pass, some things do remain the same. Angus O’Neill's perceptive essay on collecting and trading “modern” literature is equally shrewd, assessing the impact of guides, sceptical about the growth of the modern first edition trade, and pointing up bibliographical vexations and cruces likely to interest any bibliophile. Cross‐fertilization between the antiquarian book trade and the world of scholarship (in an essay by Edwards) alerts us to the continuing (at times uneasy) relationship between trade and academe.

Chris and Michèle Kohler's two chapters on making collections (Chris) and the British trade and institutional libraries (Michèle) are likely to interest booksellers who dealt (and deal) in collections, and librarians looking for collections. In the first, Quaritch and Maggs may have pioneered this approach, some going to libraries like the Huntingdon Library in California, or some 800 books of Isaac Newton going to the Pilgrim Trust in 1943 (the dealer was Sotheran). Key dealers past and present are discussed. In the second, we see the rise of institutional library collecting, often international, often based on close relationships like that between Rota and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre. Auction and valuation services were (and are still) provided. Where collectors knew both the library and trade value of rare and antiquarian books (and prints, maps and other things too), they played a key part in building up the collections (like that at Cornell University) we know today. Book collecting in this field is never merely buying what is there – on the shelf or in the catalogue. David Chambers's essay on dealers and the specialist collector makes this clear in what he says about Keynes and Nowell‐Smith and Getty.

We get an insight into the book trade itself here – from Frank Hermann on book auctions (his own books about collecting are worth reading), taking a dispassionate retrospective look at the rings at auction (where booksellers “conspired” to set prices and then sold them at higher prices to each other afterwards), from Anthony Rota (past president of the ABA) on the regulatory role of the ABA (not just on rings but on representing booksellers’ interests, on training and book fairs), and Anthony Hobson's (formerly of Sotheby's Book Department) commentary on the Phillips sales (requisitioned in 1939, housed in church crypts, then raising astonishing amounts of money from nine sales or more).

But probably it is memoirs of booksellers past and present, and particularly the personalities, that spring out most clearly. Many of the best known are cited in a most helpful listing by Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly (Appendix 5), and includes usual culprits like Richard Booth's My Kingdom of Books (1999), A.S.G. Edwards's The Pleasures of Bibliophily (2003), Rick Gekoski's Tolkien's Gown and Other Stories of Great Authors and Rare Books (2004), Paul Minet's Late Booking (1989), Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road (1971), David Low's With All Faults (1973), and George Sims's The Rare Book Game (1985). Full bibliographical information is provided there. De Chantilly also provides an essay on booksellers’ memoirs, evaluating them for “the truth” – it is as much lore as history of the trade – telling tales of the secrecy of Leo Marks, how Dobell resisted the London council over where to trade, and how Andrew Block could find anything in the piles of paper in his shop. The book also contains essays on the street traders, and bookshops in London, the West Country, Scotland, and Northern Ireland (respectively, by Michael Harris, Philippa Bernard, Paul Minet, and Elizabeth Strong).

Finally there are further essays on the book trade weeklies and the Antiquarian Book Monthly Review. Readers in this field will already know The Book Collector and The Private Library, though it is not often (except through the occasional editorial or interview) that we get private thoughts of some of the people who did the deed in the past. Yet, looking across the piece, Out of Print and Into Profit is a book which, in parallel streams of trade and scholarship, pragmatism and bibliographical subtlety, reveals the inside story, with all that mixture of fact and fiction, critique and nostalgia, one would expect to find. A book worth buying for the practical information it provides for anyone studying bookselling (and so for the academic library), but also a book likely to prove a “must‐have” for any bibliophile and collector of rare and antiquarian books. It may be getting smaller and smaller, but this is a world still full of life and no small determination to survive. David Pearson is right to say: “Their [antiquarian books] status as desirable objects that people will continue to buy and sell looks fairly secure”. The editor and the ABA might have more confidently argued how this will be achieved in the 21st century, but that is probably an argument for another book.