From the Wobbling Stack: David Mason on Bookselling

By Maurice Mierau

Every year books from publishers all over the country pile up on my third floor landing, while I try to assign as many as possible for review in a losing struggle to eliminate the stack. Part of me enjoys the bounty, another feels guilty. Sometimes when I pull a book from the pile that merits review, and send emails to potential reviewers, all of them say no. That’s what happened in the summer of 2013 with David Mason’s memoir The Pope’s Book Binder (Biblioasis).

That was also the last summer I worked full time in Canadian publishing; I toiled not only as editor of Winnipeg Review, but also as associate publisher of Great Plains Publications and editor for their fiction imprint. Great Plains, like many other publishers in Canada, had experienced slowing sales of its books for a number of years, and it was therefore clear to me that the company could no longer afford my services. The truth is I ignored the signs of trouble for at least six months: I loved my job, had great respect and affection for my boss, Gregg Shilliday, and would have liked nothing better than to continue making books at Great Plains indefinitely.

The day I proposed laying myself off in a weekly staff meeting, I walked home down Westminster Avenue depressed and scared for the future; my ability to make a living has always been hobbled by lack of practical skills and a devotion to poetry. Going up the stairs to my study, I saw The Pope’s Book Binder near the top of the wobbling stack of unassigned review copies. I opened it to its gorgeous end papers, and then started to flip through the crisply designed hard cover. Mason’s memoir of his life in the used and rare book trade became my escapism every night for the next few weeks, while during the day I applied for jobs, contacted old acquaintances from my former life as an IT industry hustler, and edited Shane Neilson’s book Will.

The Pope’s Book Binder brought me great comfort in that unhappy summer. Mason writes that he has over 200 variant editions and formats of his favourite children’s book, The Wind in the Willows, which assured me that he had good taste and a poet’s capacity for obsession. His father was a banker who never understood his son’s commitment to something that couldn’t really be called a career. Though my father was hardly a capitalist, I understood what it means to miss out on a career.

Mason dropped out of school at fifteen and when he walked home at night would stop at a cigar store to look at the paperbacks, and…

This night I chose a book on Roman orgies, the cover picturing all sorts of toga-clad men surrounded by voluptuous women whose breasts threatened to pop out at any moment. The cover blurbs reinforced their lurid promise: ‘Depraved Romans,’ ‘Pagan, Corrupt and Debauched,’ etc.

The teenaged Mason reads his apparent pornography at home, in a tub of hot water that he has to refill when the water gets cold:

I had never read anything like that book before, and given its effect on me I can say that I have never experienced that feeling from any other book I’ve read… The book about Roman orgies was I, Claudius, by Robert Graves.

…

Robert Graves showed me that Claudius, and all the Romans, were people. Real people with real passions, who had real lives and real probems. From my dry school texts I had believed that all those people from the past were boring. They married, they fought battles, but they didn’t seem to have sex like they did in my novels, and of the history they made, we, it seemed, only needed to learn the dates. As far as I could see, passion played no part in history; only who won, and when, counted. They were all cardboard cut-outs with names to me. I, Claudius demonstrated that life offered opportunities for the brave and the daring; and that there were consequences. That was the beginning of my real intellectual life.

This single anecdote convinced me to read more than 400 pages of a bookseller’s memoir, even though the prose can be a bit redundant (his grandfather was “a silent man who said little”), and the pages do not teem with incident. Why did I keep reading? Partly because, as a teenager, I too had purchased I, Claudius in a tacky paperback edition of the kind Mason describes. Also because I’ve spent many pleasurable hours in used bookstores that made me fascinated to read paragraphs like this one, about

… Mob-controlled book shops on Yonge Street in the late 60s that sold hard-core porn in the back, while in the front “much of the poetry and prose displayed… [was] by writers now considered among the  giants of Modern American literature, writers such as Williams, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Olson, Spicer, McClure, and Burroughs, who were then considered scum, perverts, communist perverts in fact.

The book distributor for these shops, says Mason, “considered it his moral obligation to expose Canadians to their [the perverts’] influences.”

That summer, as I scrambled to reinvent myself as a communications or marketing professional, instead of a writer and editor whose contributions to the economy made a dubious impact, I loved Mason’s moral judgements, for example: “his son was a perfect argument against leaving anything to one’s children,” or the anecdote about Mark Twain moving to Montreal for six months to best the Canadian pirates of their ability to steal Life on the Mississippi in the absence of any international copyright law before 1890, or the following paragraph on Library and Archives Canada abandoning their historic mission:

 …one huge bureaucratic morass called Library and Archives Canada buys nothing. They are collectively denying the moral imperative all sovereign nations have to preserve the written and oral record of their history. They are dissembling in the manner of all shadowy bureaucrats everywhere, and they are apparently engaged in sinister plots to ignore their mandate.

Mason doesn’t just make haughty moral judgements, he also empathizes with the people whose words fill the books he’s spent a lifetime selling:

…I have seen the financial records of many, many writers in my years of appraisal work, and the  financial return for all that talent and effort is often appalling. To see the six-month royalty statement of a serious writer for a book after its initial surge has run its course, where the cheque wouldn’t buy a meal in a decent restaurant, is not uncommon. I, at least, find this depressing.

Mason also keenly understands the circumstances that have made publishing books in Canada and all over the world such a fraught business, and yes, it has to do with that very Internet that brings you this column on whatever screen lights up your eyes as you read. His call for the “essential connection” between book buyer and dealer could equally be a call for such a connection between publisher and buyer, or indeed between writer and reader:

The Internet seems to have affected even people’s visits to stores… The intricate and I believe essential connection between the buyer and the dealer is thereby threatened, to me perhaps the worst aspect of the entire current situation.

And of course his stress on the need for actual customers applies to every aspect of the ink and glue-drenched trade that I’m still proud to be part of, off the side of my desk, late at night, however it fits:

 … what used bookstores need, even more than space and cheap rent, is customers; people who actually come in and browse and find books they weren’t looking for but can’t resist; or books they didn’t know existed by authors they never heard of; or simply a newly discovered book that appeals to their curiosity.