Hardly slept last night. Up until midnight rough sorting the most important collection in the shop's history, home in cab, then back at 7am to pick up right where I left off, worrying nonstop about how I'm actually going to pay for it.

One item heading home with me: legendary West Coast antiquarian bookman William Hoffer's privately printed pamphlet Cheap Sons of Bitches: Memoirs of the Book Trade.

Once, while a charmed undergraduate enrolled in a graduate course on Malcolm Lowry given by one of the more gruesome members of the UBC English department, I attempted to weasel a discount out of Hoffer on a F+/F+ first UK edition of Lowry's Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, priced then at around seventy dollars or so. My friend and part time boss Gavin took me down to Hoffer's shop on Water Street and made the neccessary introductions. I remember dark wooden shelves ascending all the way to heaven, low light, thousands of Brodarted spines, countless titles by major Canadian authors I'd never heard of before, let alone ever seen.

I don't remember what Hoffer looked like, but I do remember what he had to say on the subject of a discount, after considering my claim of poverty for about three and a half seconds.

"If you're not willing to pay what that book is worth, you obviously don't want it badly enough," said Hoffer, then proceeded to ignore me and engage Gavin in small talk.

From ABE:

LOWRY, MALCOLM.
Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place
London: Jonathan Cape, 1962. First English Edition. A fine copy in a very lightly rubbed dust jacket. Bookseller Inventory #7447
Price: US$ 100.00

Hoffer was right and I was wrong. I should have bought that book, which now probably lurks somewhere in Peter Howard's stacks in Berkeley, where I will never find it.

From Hoffer's pamphlet:

As I said, a beginning bookseller must find ways of buying books cheaply (or obtaining them with something easier to get than money), and selling them for more. Most rigorously, he must manage these two things within clear limits of propriety. This is to say that ignorance is almost a defense, but that creative ignorance is wicked. The limits of this notion are the pessimism one adopts when buying books, and the optimism one must show when selling. The gloomy buyer and enthusiastic salesman are not new characters to the stage, and bookselling is finally just another version of the human drama.


- posted by cjb @ 9:21 AM