book supply and the book market

Book Supply and the Book MarketAuthor(s): Stanley PargellisSource: The Library Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Jul., 1953), pp. 199-204Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4304231 .

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BOOK SUPPLY AND THE BOOK MARKET

STANLEY PARGELLIS

M Y TOPIC, which I approach in all humility, should have been pre- sented by someone with a pro-

digious memory and full notebooks who had been intimate with the book business for at least thirty years; someone who had bought all sorts and conditions of books in all fields and who did not believe everything that a bookdealer told him. I qualify on none of these grounds.

In this paper I have stripped the vast subject of "Book Supply and the Book Market" down to a discussion of out-of- print books in the humanities which are available in Europe and America, and I base my speculative and timid conclu- sions upon a couple of book-buying trips in Europe and talks over ten years with perhaps two hundred dealers out of, shall we say, ten times that number. If I over- use the first-person pronoun, it is not from egotism but only from an earnest wish that you will regard these wander- ing remarks upon one of the most elusive of subjects as a personal, unauthoritative opimnon.

The book business is elusive, a puzzle to dealers, to collectors, and to librar- ians, and very much a mystery to all scholars save a few initiated bookmen who know what they want and take the trouble to follow the market.

Perhaps it is a puzzle because, of all businesses in the world, it seems to follow those simple laws of supply and demand laid down in the dismal theoretical economic treatises of the nineteenth century. Many other kinds of consumer goods are often more or less controlled,

by monopoly or near-monopoly if not by government. Yet in free countries books circulate freely, and even in totalitarian countries the compulsory sale of a book like Mein Kampf stands as an excep- tional example of rigging of the market. Monopoly or near-monopoly has some- times been tried, and one picks up occa- sional hints of pools and of international cartels; but there are three thousand bookdealers in Panrs alone, and any one of them, if he is willing to buckle down to hard work and find stock, can do very well for himself. Pools do not prevent a chap who was born with a liking for books from setting up a shop and making, not a fortune, but a comfortable livelihood. There are few rich men in the book business; those who are rich have, for the most part, married wealth-a phenomenon not confined to the book business. Neither dealers nor their em- ployees are unionized. For every large concern employing fifty or a hundred or more people, there can be found scores and scores of shops that are run by "Mr. and Mrs.," with son or daughter doing the legwork or keeping the accounts or making up packages and waiting in line at the post office to get clearances. A conference of scholars, booksellers, and li- brarians today is a conference of comparatively free men, such as Adam Smith would have approved.

The book business, I repeat, is a puzzle. "Rare books are getting scarce," says one midwestern bookseller on the cover of his catalog, quoting as author a mysterious and most obliging Flaxius,

199



200 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

who must have been a bookdealer himself. I happen to be one of those who believe Flaxius. Yet what does one make of a fact like this one? Some eighteen books sold last March in the Wilmerding sale were the very copies that had once be- longed to Robert Hoe, whose great collection was sold forty years ago. Of those eighteen, five were knocked down at lower prices than in 1911, three more at almost the same prices, and, if one takes the altered purchasing power of the dol- lar into consideration, all together four- teen brought less today than they did on the eve of the first World War. A first edition of Keats's poems-and it was a bound copy-brought $275 at the Hoe sale in 1911; $3,500, in original boards, at the Kern sale of 1929; $300, in boards, at the Newton sale in 1940; and $250, also in boards, at the Wilmerding sale. Such figures would support the contention of the honorable Flaxius only if he had, as I suspect he may well have had, his tongue in his cheek. Can Gilbert no longer be believed in his contention that, when cloth of gold is everywhere, meaning by cloth of gold, television, the radio, maga- zines and pocket-books, up goes the price of shoddy, meaning really rare and fine books?

Or is it possible that both the supply of and the demand for books like these have decreased? There is evidence for it. Play some time that sorrowful game which all good coliectors play, and thumb through a catalog of forty or fifty years ago. In 1911, the year of the Hoe sale, Maggs Brothers offered 152 items in their catalog No. 268, not a particularly fancy catalog. In it were-believe it or not-a 1525 English almanac; a Matthew Ar- nold's Alaric at Rome, the Rugby prize poem that is the rarest of Arnold items; Bacon's Novum Organum; Henry VIII's own copy of Erasmus' Enchiridion Mili-

tis Christiani; Blake's Songs of Inno- cence (all these, of course, first edi- tions); the first English translation of Brandt's Ship of Fools; Donne's Po- ems; Dickens' Skekhes by Boz in parts; Gray's Odes; Higden's Polychronicon; a set of George Meredith's proof sheets; Paradise Lost, the 1669 edition; Sir Thomas More's Apology; Pope's Dunciad and his Essay on Man; a second and a fourth Shakespeare folio; Spenser's Com- plaints; a collection of Surtees; a Gulliver; and a Leaves of Grass. Maggs Brothers are now issuing, in parts, having begun it in 1946, a catalog of "English Literature Prior to 1800." Only five of the books I have just mentioned are in that catalog, which now numbers 2,543 items. The prices remain much the same as in 1911; the offerings do not begin to compare. A European dealer of my acquaintance told me that he had received a number of con- gratulatory letters upon his last catalog, because of the number of good and inter- esting items in it. "I know perfectly well," he went on to say, "that if I had put out that catalog twenty-five years ago, not only would I not have got any letters, but people would have thrown it aside as not even a run-of-the-mill antiquarian catalog." Dealers who once specialized in rare books are now having to add new lines, modern books, or books on science, if they want to remain in business. Their once well-filled shelves are growing empty. There was a time when every little dealer on the Continent had a few incunabula stowed away, and incunabula printed in those wildcat fifteenth- century days when everybody thought he could get rich by using the newfangled printing techniques, are certainly not, as a class, in the rare-book area today. Yet one can visit hundreds of shops and never see even an incunable. After I had asked several dealers if they could turn



BOOK SUPPLY AND THE BOOK MARKET 201

up for me a copy of Vincent of Beau- vais's Speculum Doctrinale, the Lichten- stein edition of 1486, and they had smiled sadly and even pityingly, I gave up asking the question. Twenty-five years ago they would have said, "I don't have it, but I can get it for you."

If these things be true, it must be a Providence that loves rare books which has so ordered events in this unbookish world of 1951 that the books and the collectors are disappearing together. "This is no longer a fit place to live in," said an English provincial bookdealer-and he was not referring to the meat ration; "gentlemen have given up collecting books." An exaggeration, no doubt, but one echoed everywhere in Europe by dealers who fondly imagine that in the great and rich United States the genus of collector thrives and blossoms. There are some, of course, and some young ones coming along, but they seem inadequate to support the antiquarian shops of half a century ago. Otherwise the prices of these surviving rare books would reflect a highly competitive demand, and the bids at the Kern sale twenty-two years ago would not still seem fantastic. With a few exceptions, libraries have not re- placed collectors as purchasers of such rare books. Even if they wanted such volumes, other kinds of demands upon their book budgets are too heavy to al- low them much leeway for what Mr. Stevens used to call "nuggets."

The books that I have been talking about thus far belong in the first of two great divisions of out-of-print books. They are the high spots, sought after by collectors, and of course it is an axiom of the book trade that the fashion in high spots changes. Every one of those Hoe books which sold for less in actual dollars at the Wilmerding sale was a beautifully, unusually bound copy by some great but

now half-forgotten binder-Padeloup, or Clovis Eve, or Trautz-Bauzonnet. Gro- lier, Derome, and Roger Payne bindings continue to be in fashion, but not those of Cuzin and the Monniers. A novel of the 1890's would suggest that its hero was a man of culture because he could display a bookcase full of Aldines and Elzevirs. The bottom has dropped out of the market for the latter and is rapidly dropping out in the case of the Aldines.

There is a second group of books in this first category of mine which have become rare and scarce because scholarly libraries have made it a fashion to collect them. Early economica, for instance, in an age which has discovered and developed the social sciences, have become desirable in every research library in this country. In the days of the Hoe sale you could have picked up a good copy of Adam Smith for ten or twelve dollars; today you may have to pay $250. Old medical books, for reasons less easy to under- stand, since not very much scholarly work is being done on the history of med- icine, have likewise become rarities. Har- vey's great tract on the circulation of the blood brought $150 half a century ago; the last copy offered at auction in this country fetched $1,900. The publication of check lists and catalogs in certain fields has aroused such a spirit of envy among libraries that books of no great merit grow alluring. What the Short Title Catalogue has tended to do since the first British Museum list of 1884, and has suc- cessfully done since Pollard and Red- grave's catalog of 1926, we may expect Donald Wing's Short Title Catalogue of seventeenth-century books to repeat, i.e., to drive all such imprints, good or bad, out of the shops and into the libraries. If and when Yale makes a list of its unriv- aled collection of eighteenth-century imprints, the same stampede will doubtless




occur. English booksellers will shake their heads and mutter about the folly of American libraries, but they will slowly put the prices up to meet the demand. For a long time few American libraries bought extensively in Western Ameri- cana; they left the field-a fascinating one it is-to private collectors. Within the past few years, and for no reason ex- cept that the fashion commences to pre- vail, they, too, to the delight no doubt of Mr. Wright Howes, are shooting from the hip and swinging their lariats with the best of us. Many other instances could be given of the way in which library buying policies follow a fashion, set often by the publication of a specialized list, with the result that the books grow scarce. The Newberry Library is by no means guiltless; since our publication of a list of so-called "courtesy books" some nine years ago, I have been told that various libraries use it as a buying guide, and any reader of catalogs will see how often something that is not a courtesy book at all, is not even remotely a courtesy book, will be so described, always with the addition of the notation, "Not in the Newberry list."

There is a third class of books in this first category of mine. They are a long way from either "nuggets" or fashions. They are the great substantial periodi- cals and serial publications, the Monu- menta, Zeitschriften, Societes, Revues, Proceedings, Gesellschaften, Colecciones, Beitrage, Archivs, Academies, Journals, and Jahrbucher. Perhaps there is undue emphasis upon the importance of some of them-I happen to belong to a group who much prefer a book to any number of articles on a subject-yet no one can possibly belittle this essential class of publications. Any investigation of the Union List of Serials will show how frag- mentary are the holdings of the great re-

search libraries of this country in many of these basic series. Throughout Europe are dealers willing to go through the drudgery of piecing together as complete sets as they can, often spending years on the completion of a single series, for they know the market in this country is so hungry that they can charge almost any figure they please. As a class, therefore, such publications are becoming so scarce as to belong in the category of rare books. Just as it would be impossible for any library, or any collector today, to build up a collection of Americana that would rival the four or five great collections in the country, such as the John Carter Brown, the Clements, the New York Public, the Huntington, and the Ayer collection in the Newberry, so is it impossible for any young library, or any library just starting, ever to get, in the originals, more than a small fraction of the thousands of volumes displayed in the Union List of Serials. Some of them, unless this country should suffer so severe a depres- sion that many of our libraries would be forced to put their holdings on the market or unless we should be invaded by a conquering arny, will never come up for sale again.

Here, then, in my first category, are three classes of books which in my opin- ion are getting scarce. What are the reasons?

In Europe there once were two reser- voirs of books that were considered in- exhaustible, Germany and England. In Germany were several dealers, the old Harrassowitz, best of friends to many American libraries; Joseph Baer in Frank- fort; and the Rosenthals, Jacques and Ludwig, in Munich, who always had stocks of a million volumes or more. Any one of them could pull down from his own shelves almost anything you wanted. All those stocks are gone, wiped out by



BOOK SUPPLY AND THE BOOK MARKET 203

bombs. And let me say parenthetically here that it is a false and self-appeasing notion which I have heard expressed in this country, that books are fairly inde- structible things. A dealer in Liverpool, whose entire shop was so utterly demol- ished by a blockbuster that the debris buried his stock under great heat and pressure, dug into the ruins when they had sufficiently cooled and found noth- ing at all that remotely resembled a book. Even the rare pieces in his fireproof safe, opened with great care after it had had ample chance to cool, were reduced to dust. Because many of the great booksellers of Germany were Jews, their stocks were confiscated and taken to Ber- lin, to perish with the city. A good many books once available rest now behind the Iron Curtain; they may sometime appear again on the market in larger quantities than at present.

The other great reservoir of books was the country houses of England. Occa- sionally, before the first World War, country-house libraries came on the market, libraries which might have been cen- turies in the assembling, every other gen- eration producing some booklover or some dutiful heir who bought the best things as they appeared. After the first World War there began a revolution in property-holding in England that is matched in the whole of English history only by the transfer of lands following the dissolution of the monasteries. The country-house libraries are almost gone; there are only a few great ducal libraries still in existence, and at least one of those will probably go to the state. Those country-house books have been bought most- ly by American libraries. After the last war, it is true, individuals who had never before bought a book in their lives walked into bookshops and asked for a hundred-pound book, any book, they

didn't care, and those comparatively few volumes will doubtless some day return to the trade.

One of the reasons, then, for the growing scarcity of books in this first category of mine is the destruction of the war; the other reason is the buying power of American libraries. Five hundred years ago, as men saw the vast acreage of lands that kept coming into the possession of the medieval church, they talked of the church's "dead hand," for it was property that disappeared from circulation and never came on the market. A foreign dealer who sells a book to an American library knows something about a "dead hand" himself; he knows that neither he nor any other dealer will ever get a chance at that book again. The delightful experience which all old booksellers have enjoyed, of recognizing a volume in a recently purchased lot as one they sold twenty years ago-an old friend returned home again-is becoming only a memory. Some dealers will admit what many of them privately believe-that if they can choose between selling a book to an individual and selling it to a library, they sell to the individual. They do not often have that choice today. American research libraries spent at least eight million dollars on books in 1950. What proportion of that sum went into the pur- chase of out-of-print books I have no means of knowing, but it was a sizable proportion.

So much for the first category, of the "nuggets," the "fashionable" books, and the great basic serials. In my second category I lump together all the other sec- ondhand books in that part of the world I know something about. These are the ordinary run of fifteenth-, sixteenth-, seventeenth-, eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century books. They are the incunabula that can be bought for $25 or




$50, the vast quantity of early French, Italian, German, Scandinavian, and Spanish books which, having never been put into a list of some sort, have escaped the attention of acquisition heads. They are the scholarly books of the nineteenth century, the minor literature, the mem- oirs, the biographies, the local history, the once-popular books. They are the books which make up the stock of most of the dealers of Europe and America, and some of those stocks run into scores and occasionally hundreds of thousands of volumes. They are the books which crowd the pages of the catalogs that pour across a librarian's desk, and, if their cost today is much higher than it was fifty or twenty-five years ago, much of that increase is due to the high cost of getting out a catalog. It takes ?4 a page to print a catalog in England today; it costs half a crown merely to list an item in small print and lOs. to list it in a read- able type, with a line or two about it. These are the books which cost usually less than $10 and at most $20. They are coming to America in shiploads of small packages; but the sources are still so far from drying up that, unless American libraries should suddenly start pouring in more dollars, there are enough of them to meet the demand for years to come. I do not want to give the impression that these are unimportant books-far from it. Many of them are of the greatest value to scholars; I prefer to put that cliche in a sounder form: some of them are of the greatest value to one or two scholars.

By and large, this is not a gloomy pic- ture that I have painted for you. Some books cannot be bought at all today. Some are far scarcer than they were. This category includes the traditional great and splendid books which, because of the part they have played in our civilization, collectors have long regarded as desirable. It includes also books of far less importance, which, either because a few collectors have vied with one another in gathenrng them, or because a few scholars have thought them of value, or because someone has published a check list of them, have become fashionable. If the fashion changes before American libraries have snapped up all the copies there are, it may be possible some day to buy them at a price nearer their real worth, as one can buy an American Revolution- ary War pamphlet today for a third the asking pnrce of thirty years ago. And here too are the long series of great scholarly publications, the demand for which wvill probably not cease until all the copies there are find their permanent home in Denver or Iowa City or Chicago.

And, on the other hand, move still the shoals and shoals of books, from private library to shop, from bookdealer to bookdealer, from the shop to the pulping- mills or to the quais or to libraries, some- what abated in number, of course, like the cod which once thronged the banks off the New England coast and must now be searched for in more northerly waters, but still plentiful for years to come unless new up-to-the-minute devices for exter- minating them are discovered and em- ployed.



book supply and the book market

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