The Pope's Bookbinder: A Memoir

by David Mason

Overview

"Entertaining, moving, informative, intelligently hopeful: I know of few other books like this one to warm the cockles of a booklover's heart." —Alberto Manguel

"For anyone who loves books too well—who lusts after them, lives in them, mainlines them—David Mason’s memoir will be a fix from heaven. Heartful, cantankerous, droll, his tales of honour and obsession in the trade gratify the very book-love they portray. An irresistible read." —Dennis Lee

"An atmospheric, informative memoir by a Canadian seller of used and rare books ... Gossipy, rambling and enchanting, alive with Mason’s love for books of every variety."—Kirkus Reviews

From his drug-hazy, book-happy years near the Beat Hotel in Paris and throughout his career as antiquarian book dealer, David Mason brings us a storied life. He discovers his love of literature in a bathtub at age eleven, thumbing through stacks of lurid Signet paperbacks. At fifteen he’s expelled from school. For the next decade and a half, he will work odd jobs, buck all authority, buy books more often than food, and float around Europe. He’ll help gild a volume in white morocco for Pope John XXIII. And then, at the age of 30, after returning home to Canada and apprenticing with Joseph Patrick Books, David Mason will find his calling.

Over the course of what is now a legendary international career, Mason shows unerring instincts for the logic of the trade. He makes good money from Canadian editions, both legitimate and pirated (turns out Canadian piracies so incensed Mark Twain that he moved to Montreal for six months to gain copyright protection). He outfoxes the cousins of L.M. Montgomery at auction and blackmails the head of the Royal Ontario Museum. He excoriates the bureaucratic pettiness that obstructs public acquisitions, he trumpets the ingenuity of collectors and scouts, and in archives around the world he appraises history in its unsifted and most moving forms. Above all, however, David Mason boldly campaigns for what he feels is the moral duty of the antiquarian trade: to preserve the history and traditions of all nations, and to assert without compromise that such histories have value.

Sly, sparkling, and endearingly gruff, The Pope's Bookbinder is an engrossing memoir by a giant in the book trade—whose infectious enthusiasm, human insight, commercial shrewdness, and deadpan humour will delight bibliophiles for decades to come.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781927428160
Publisher:	Biblioasis
Publication date:	05/17/2013
Series:	NONE
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
File size:	550 KB

About the Author

David Mason was born in Toronto and has been an antiquarian bookseller in that city since 1967, after serving an apprenticeship with Joseph Patrick Books. He has, during that period, had five different locations and continues to insist on having an open shop in downtown Toronto in spite of the huge costs, general indifference, and the disappearance of most of his colleagues. His present shop is called David Mason Books.

Table of Contents

Family Album 11

My Earliest Heroines and Heroes 13

Respectability Abandoned 33

The Pope's Bookbinder 49

Marty Ahvenus-Out of the Wilderness 57

My Second Mentor: Jerry Sherlock and Joseph Patrick Books 73

My First Real Shop 93

Los Angeles 101

Reflections on Scouting 109

Britnell's 133

The Pleasures of Blackmail 147

Learning My Trade 1: How to Scout 167

On the Buying of Books 183

Canadian Editions 211

Learning My Trade 2: Auctions 231

Learning My Trade 3: The Art of Appraising 263

Private Collectors 291

Employees 319

Crooks and Cranks 335

William Hoffer and the ABAC Wars 371

Selling Civilization 397

What Does it all Mean? 417

Editorial Reviews

Raised in a bookless home, Mason discovered the pleasures of reading in Toronto's public libraries. A rebellious adolescent, he dropped out of high school to bum around Europe, residing briefly at the Beat Hotel in Paris, where he met American novelist William S. Burroughs. In Spain, Mason apprenticed to a bookbinder and worked on a volume the Spanish government had commissioned as a gift for Pope John XXIII. Returning to Toronto in the late 1960s, Mason began his career in used and rare books. Designed to "impart some sense of the sheer richness of the bookseller's life," his memoir is full of anecdotes on buying, selling, and collecting books, offering a lively account of his adventures in the trade. In his experiences with fellow booksellers, rare book librarians, private collectors, auction houses, and eccentric customers, Mason provides a window into what he considers to be the "Golden Age of Bookselling in Canada," as well as a portrait of the changing scene for the book trade in Toronto over the last half century. Although evidence in the digital age points to booksellers becoming as "obsolete as blacksmiths," Mason clings stubbornly to his faith in the book. VERDICT For booksellers, librarians, and other bibliophiles, particularly those interested in the Canadian book trade.—William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY

Library Journal

"David Mason's absorbing memoir might be summed up by a button I recently acquired: 'Life? Of course I have a life. It's a life filled with books' ... Early on in this rambling, easygoing account of his career, Mason mentions three outstanding classics of that tiny subgenre: Charles Everitt’s The Adventures of a Treasure Hunter, David Randall’s Dukedom Large Enough and David Magee’s Infinite Riches. The Pope’s Bookbinder belongs on the same shelf."—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

"[David] Mason catalogs for posterity a time when books were sold by hand, sought on foot, and priced accordingly … in what may be one of the last great booksellers’ accounts."—The San Francisco Book Review

"Plain-spoken, sometimes gruff, but always unafraid ... the book stands as a monument to what are, or perhaps were, the last great days of traditional shop-based bookselling, a world in which booksellers still educated each other, a world in which the expertise and traditions were handed on, a world in which bookshops brought new collectors into being with beguiling talk and modest initial purchases. It's a way of life already disappearing: the parting question is, 'And what will happen to the education of new collectors when there are no used bookstores? Who will teach them what they need to know?'—it's a question we have to answer."—Laurence Worms, Antiquarian Booksellers' Association

"A witty raconteur and compulsive gossip, Mason has written a book that will delight anyone who loves literary scuttlebutt."—The Globe & Mail

"Mason is a confessed 'inveterate gossip,' unafraid to name names or pass stern judgment on various bitter controversies that have rocked the Canadian trade. But his portraits, rarely black and white, are typically affectionate, with page after page displaying his plentiful stock of unusual characters … The Pope’s Bookbinder strikes a fine balance between impressing with insider lore and welcoming the outsider ... The chatty digressions and omissions — sometimes hinting at truly salacious tales sealed up for the principals’ lifetimes — invite you to learn more."—The National Post

"A sweeping tour of the bookselling industry through the eyes of a man who has been at the heart of it for decades."—The Toronto Star

“Riveting and valuable. No less than a life seen through the lens of a love of books and literature, Toronto antiquarian Mason’s memoir provides eloquent proof that Gutenberg’s descendants are not ready to give up the good fight. Bibliophiles — you know who you are, folks — will find bottomless solace in these pages.”—Montreal Gazette

"Completely charming ... His sly humor and passion about the idea of collecting made me see my library as the personal achievement that it is."—Paper Over Board

"Buy it. Buy it. Buy it."—The Dusty Bookcase

"Atmospheric, informative memoir by a Canadian seller of used and rare books. Born in 1938, Mason as a kid was more comfortable in pool halls than the Toronto school system and got “permanently suspended” at 15. He wound up bumming around Europe, taking odd jobs and drugs, talking passionately about books with fellow free souls. A brief stint as a bookbinder in Spain ... gave him a marketable skill when he returned to Toronto in the late 1960s, but a part-time bookstore job showed him his real talents: talking to people and finding books for them. After a few years’ apprenticeship with Jerry Sherlock, one of the many rare booksellers to whom Mason pays affectionate tribute, he went out on his own. One of his first areas of expertise was Canadian editions of books by foreign authors, a bibliographic area he pioneered in a project for the National Library of Canada, until he broke bitterly with the library and a colleague over what he considered a breach of faith. His memoirs reveal Mason as a good grudge-holder, and his feelings about librarians are mixed; affection for those at local branches who initiate youth into the wonders of books balances disdain for the bureaucrats at major institutions. He wholeheartedly loves anyone who loves books—no matter how eccentric—as we see in a hilarious chapter about private collectors. Mason is a shrewd commercial operator when he needs to be, but his main focus is on the vital role non-chain booksellers play as preservers of our cultural heritage. His burning sense of mission ... gives a vivid sense of its author’s idiosyncratic personality. Gossipy, rambling and enchanting, alive with Mason’s love for books of every variety."—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

Atmospheric, informative memoir by a Canadian seller of used and rare books. Born in 1938, Mason as a kid was more comfortable in pool halls than the Toronto school system and got "permanently suspended" at 15. He wound up bumming around Europe, taking odd jobs and drugs, talking passionately about books with fellow free souls. A brief stint as a bookbinder in Spain (source of the unnecessarily mystifying and misleading title) gave him a marketable skill when he returned to Toronto in the late 1960s, but a part-time bookstore job showed him his real talents: talking to people and finding books for them. After a few years' apprenticeship with Jerry Sherlock, one of the many rare booksellers to whom Mason pays affectionate tribute, he went out on his own. One of his first areas of expertise was Canadian editions of books by foreign authors, a bibliographic area he pioneered in a project for the National Library of Canada, until he broke bitterly with the library and a colleague over what he considered a breach of faith. His memoirs reveal Mason as a good grudge holder, and his feelings about librarians are mixed; affection for those at local branches who initiate youth into the wonders of books balances disdain for the bureaucrats at major institutions. He wholeheartedly loves anyone who loves books--no matter how eccentric--we see in a hilarious chapter about private collectors. Another great chapter about bidding at auction, and numerous passages on pricing rare books, demonstrates that Mason is a shrewd commercial operator when he needs to be, but his main focus is on the vital role nonchain booksellers play as preservers of our cultural heritage. His burning sense of mission more than compensates for some repetitious passages and a few too many instances of score settling in a narrative that gives a vivid sense of its author's idiosyncratic personality. Gossipy, rambling and enchanting, alive with Mason's love for books of every variety.

Kirkus Reviews