LorneBair

Lorne and I both met Zhenya at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar where she quickly became a great friend to both of us.  We have kept in contact since the seminar; I have greatly enjoyed all of our fun and crazy conversations.  Since Lorne and I decided I would not be joining him for the San Francisco fair, Zhenya who lives right outside San Francisco kindly offered her assistance.  Zhenya wrote a fabulous blog  for us about her experience  working with Lorne at the Book Fair, check it out below!

“It all began less than a year ago. I met Lorne and the rest of the faculty members at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar which I attended on an ABAA scholarship. Lorne has always had a way of graciously answering rookie questions while restraining himself from rolling his eyes and heaving exasperated sighs. Thus, late last Fall, when I heard that his assistant (and my friend) Ashley Loga was not coming to the San Francisco Fair, I decided to risk it and offer my help in exchange for firsthand experience in the world of antiquarian book fairs while remaining on my home turf and avoiding most of the stress associated with arranging, lugging, packing, shipping, and tracking precious books across the country. I am still mystified a bit as to why he so readily agreed.

Friday setup started out smoothly. I was happily pulling books out of bubble wrap and arranging glass cases while Lorne and our side-by-side neighbor Jim Arsenault roamed the concourse in search of that one incredible find that would make the fair more than worth it for them. Faculty members from the seminar came to say “Hello” and dealers stopped by to introduce themselves. It was just the beginning of the first day and I had already started feeling like one of the inner circle. I knew I was going to be OK.

The fair opened its doors to a very large and enthusiastic crowd. It was an awesome rush to see the people surging and spreading through the booths. Lorne unfailingly introduced me with my name and specialty to every customer and colleague. I was not merely the assistant but an individual young new dealer. One of the best memories I will always keep was that great big smile on his face every time I engaged a buyer, made a deal, and sold one of his books on my own. I was given ample time to make the rounds. I saw quiet booths and meticulously arranged ones. Others were dignified and somber. Ours was a fun one – colorful, beautiful, and full of constant friendly banter and frequent raucous laughter.

And then there were the nightly after-fair shindigs in the City. The troublemakers group consisted of Lorne, Kevin Johnson, Jim Arsenault, Ian Brabner, my very close friend Kara McLaughlin – a young dealer from Florida who also worked at the fair, and I. Dinners were followed by bar rounds. The guys stoically endured the constant chatter, the “Oh, come on, you really don’t need to go to sleep right now,” and the loud and sometimes slightly obnoxious atmosphere.

Time flew by. The caravan of books and dealers moved on to Pasadena. I was very handsomely compensated for my work. Though, the truth was and will always be, as cliché and sickly sweet as that sounds, that the money will be spent and forgotten while the experience and the lessons I have learned will remain forever. Hats off to you Lorne – this is how it is done and I am looking forward to the next one!”

Check out Zhenya’s lovely selection of books for sale on ABE.com.  She specializes in Antiquarian Eastern European Literature and Slavic Languages Materials.

Yesterday, Lorne took me to my first country auction. It was great! I have a feeling auctions are going to be one of my new favorite things to do. When I was young, I was frequently taken to antique malls and consignment shops by my mom; we would spend hours slowly sifting through the items and hunting for something unique. I remember my mom leaning over to me whispering tips and good bargaining techniques; “At antique malls the cheaper items are always in the back” “You must try to bargain. Never accept the stated price” (This one I’m stilling trying to get the hang of) and lastly “when shops mix new collectibles with antiques… don’t bother going in. Only go to true antique stores.” Whenever I am out shopping for new treasures today, I still follow her advice and when I’m shopping with friends, I lean over and share my mom’s advice to them. While shopping with mom, I was constantly learning new things such as the names for antique nautical bits and kitchen gadgets, soaking it all up like a sponge.

This is perhaps partly where my love of antiquarian books comes from; the hunt for a good book amongst a dozen bad and the desire to learn new tidbits of information.

Lorne and I arrived a half an hour before the auction to register. Already the place was full of people mingling about, scouting for items to bid on. Lorne and I made one final sweep of the selections, finalizing what items we were going to bid on and what our price limits were. As I walked around the room, I noticed one determined woman camped out with a cooler filled with food and a cushion for her chair; she was ready to stake out the whole day. I also happened to notice that I was the youngest one in the room by far…this seems to be happening to me a lot lately.

I chose to bid on a set of copper canisters, needing them for my new apartment; and a particularly enchanting item for my mother whose true nature will not be disclosed in this blog since she might read it. Lorne decided to bid on two pieces of artwork; a beautiful etching entitled “Le montage du Dragon sur le Beffroi de Gand” by De Bruycker and a wood print by Jean MacKay.

Headley, the auctioneer, had a melodious voice and rhythm. Lorne and I took pleasure in guessing how much an item would go for before it was bid on.

With this post I conclude the first day of a new era at Lorne Bair Rare Books. Having said good-bye over the weekend to my treasured colleague of two years, Jordan de Butts, I now give welcome to Ashley Loga, a young person who in addition to having already demonstrated a great capacity for charm, wit, and good humor, appears to be truly possessed of a trait I find to be almost universal among great booksellers: the desire to know everything. She and I talked about that today, and about much else, too – about how one should talk to good customers (politely) versus bad customers (too politely) versus telemarketers (one obscenity or two?). We talked about D.T. Suzuki’s concept of “Beginner’s Mind,” and how it is best to approach every new task with no expectation of success or failure – but with our minds open to the possibilities of the task and to the delights inherent in discovering the path to its mastery. We talked about why some booksellers charge arbitrarily high prices for books they haven’t even bothered to describe, while others lavish hours on cataloguing a forty-dollar pamphlet. And we talked about why what we do is important, even though the rewards are modest and most people have no understanding of our work. Despite all this talk a remarkable amount of work got done. I’m sure I droned on a bit — it’s my nature. But if I bored her, Ashley was a good sport about it. Her last words, as she was packing to leave, were (if I heard her right) “I’m going to love this job.” I agree. She is going to love this job, and I have a feeling it’s going to love her back.

But all this talk put me in a ruminative mood. I spent most of the evening nursing a tumbler (well, okay, two tumblers) of bourbon, wondering a little about the wisdom of tempting a bright, ambitious twenty-something into the rare book business at a time when so many seasoned booksellers wonder whether the trade will even sustain us through our lifetimes. Wondering whether, confronted twenty years ago with what I know now about the book business, I would have taken the same headlong leap. And wondering, frankly, having just turned fifty — the point of no return, I think, in my mind if not most people’s — whether I could have done better for myself by sticking to the rules and doing what was expected of me: a PhD, a teaching career, the books I never wrote…

Yeah, well, you know. Maybe. Maybe not. There’s the tumbler half-empty answer: the jig is up, run away and don’t look back; you should’ve listened to your father – too late now, dumbass! – and how’d you get to be fifty, for chrissake? And there’s the tumbler half-full answer (which, come to think of it, sounds like a good idea…but just a half…): follow your dreams, and the rest will follow; the book trade might be in trouble, but without an infusion of young, talented and energetic booksellers it will surely fail; you love what you do and you would hate that other life–haven’t you learned anything in fifty years? And so goes the conversation, ad infinitum, with the two sides trading places every other day or so. I suspect it’s the same for many of my colleagues. We’re not so much contrarians as we are conflictarians, our better and worser instincts in constant war with one another while we look on, trying to figure which is which before choosing sides.

In the end, everyone I know who does this job well does it because they would be less happy doing anything else. Those for whom this isn’t true usually turn out to be no more than casual visitors to the shores of Bibliopoly – there are an infinite number of better, more predictable and more efficient ways to make a living than selling rare books, and those whose heart isn’t really in it soon find this out and move on. Perhaps not coincidentally, most of the booksellers I know share a somewhat melancholic disposition, so that the notion of a “less happy” bookseller is a melancholy notion indeed, and it might perhaps be fair to say that the trade is the only thing keeping some folks from suicide. You may not take comfort in such a notion, but I do: I like booksellers, almost all of them, and anything that keeps them around awhile seems good to me.

If I have any regret about my choice of profession, it’s that I waited so long to begin: I didn’t start selling books in earnest until I was almost forty years old. In the interim I’ve become a pretty good bookman, albeit in a very small way, in an artificially-delimited universe of my own devising (I was unable, as it turns out, to know everything; so I settled for knowing anything.). But just think if I’d gotten started when I was twenty-two! I’d be among the grand old men of the book business by now – hard to imagine that I wouldn’t be at least a little bit better at it, with an eighteen-year head start. But alas: when I was twenty-two I would have had nothing but a contemptuous lip-curl for anyone who said he “collected” books. I suppose I’d heard of something called a “first edition,” but I would no sooner have been caught dead looking for one than I would attending a Hall & Oates concert. Oh, I was a wild young thing, all right. It was all about the text, dude. Never mind the paper. And yet…

And yet, here I am. Fifty years old, irredeemably a bookseller, and more happy than if I’d…if I’d what? Well, than if I’d just about anything, I suppose. I’ll put it this way – if I were to win the lottery tomorrow, the only thing that would change would be the quality of my inventory. I just can’t imagine doing anything else. Even in those moments of blankest regret, when all the bills come due at once and my stock looks like it could have been chosen at random by a blind, crack-addicted three-year-old; when the office hasn’t been cleaned in a month and the coffee jitters set in because I forgot to eat my breakfast which is still sitting cold on the kitchen counter six hours later; when the phone rings and it’s some flea-market guy asking to “pick my brain” about a “real old book” he found buried in cowshit in his granddaddy’s barn; even when I get home after a house buy and realize that every book I just overpaid for smells irretrievably of cat piss…even then, I can only imagine one way forward: more books. And then, more books after that and, for dessert, more books. More books. More books. More books.

All of which is to say: welcome to the book biz, Ashley Loga. You will love this job.

Introducing the newest member (and perhaps one of the youngest at 22) to the Antiquarian Book World…Me, Ashley Loga or as my better half likes to be called, Daphne.

I’m replacing the infamous Jordan as Lorne’s assistant.  Some of you may know me already from the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar but I’m sure most of you don’t.  I met Lorne at the seminar where he was one of the faculty members.   I have known I wanted a career in the book business since I was sixteen and have been slowly working my way towards this goal for the past few years or in the case of the past few weeks, skyrocketing towards it.

In August, I attended the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar.  I went to the seminar thinking I would learn how to run a used bookstore and sell online.  You see up until the seminar I had only ever wanted to own a bookstore and café; the antiquarian book trade was a complete mystery to me.  Learning about the antiquarian book trade, tossed my world upside down.  Everything about it sounded amazing and exciting to me.  I like to imagine one of those comic strip moments with a little light bulb clicking on above my head.  My dreams of owning a used bookstore and café were quickly replaced by the antiquarian book trade.  After being wrapped up in a whirlwind of an auction for a dinner with the faculty of the seminar, an auction I wasn’t even planning on bidding in, Lorne offered me a job.  I jumped at the chance.

Move from Jackson, MS to Winchester, VA over 14 hours away… no problem.  Move for the 3^rd time in less than 6 months…I got this.  So here I am in Winchester, VA.  For the past two weeks, the wonderful Jordan has been training me in all the many things she does and I know I have some big shoes to fill.   I still have much to learn but I’m definitely excited.  I know this is the right job for me.  And since it is close to Thanksgiving, it is pretty obvious to me that I have much to be thankful for, particularly Lorne for seeing something in me that would cause him to hire me after only knowing me for a few days.  So many thanks  to him and everyone else that has helped me.

Let’s shift this minivan into gear and head out ?

- Ashley (Daphne)

So, as always, I’m having trouble pulling words from the depths of my brain to write…my last blog post. Today is November 18, 2011. The day that will live in infamy as my final day at Lorne Bair Rare Books.  I can’t really sum up the last two years here in a paragraph or so that I find on par with my own standards, so I won’t even try.

In a week and a half I’ll be driving myself and my faithful Chihuahua companion up to the bowels of New York City to start my new life in librarianship.  And of course, I’m not going to leave here without unabashedly self-promoting my new blog. Please follow it at thedandyroll.com (sound familiar?).

Well, six readers, it’s time for me to say goodbye.  It’s been really really really real here.  But don’t worry. I’ll probably be back.

Forever yours,

Me (like, you know, Jordan!)

I can’t let today pass without noting that my assistant and best friend for the past two years, Jordan de Butts, will clock out for the final time this afternoon. She’s going on to great things.  Because they’re things she barely even knew existed when she came to work here, I will selfishly take a portion of the credit (and blame) for whatever comes next. Grad school – that’s a fait accompli. After that, who knows? Real careers in rare books are hard to come by and even harder to sustain these days. If anyone can do it, she can.

What I know for sure is that our loss is the rest of the world’s gain. We – I – will miss her far more than words, especially words on a public blog, can ever say. But I take comfort in knowing that she’ll be out there, somewhere, doing important things in her own wonderful way. And that no matter what she’s doing, the world will be a better place because of it.

Goodbye, Jordan de Butts. Visit when you can, and keep us in your life.

I’ve been contemplating a publishing enterprise here for a number of years — after all, what better way for a lapsed poet and one-time editor to compensate for his creative deficiencies than to start publishing books of his own? But despite the obvious attractiveness of the idea,  I was never able to quite work up the energy or enthusiasm to make it happen.  It finally took my great and talented friend Winslow McCagg, who’s been producing amazing paintings out here in the wilderness for the past twenty years, to point me in the right direction. When Winslow told me he’d been offered a one-man show at the presitigious Burwell-Morgan Mill in Millwood, Virginia, my first question was: “who’s going to produce your exhibition catalog?” When Winslow allowed as how he hadn’t really given it much thought, the question turned into a statement: “I will produce your exhibition catalog.” And so Two Streams Press was born (don’t try to find the link – we haven’t finished the website yet).

The result, after months of photographing and editing more than fifty of Winslow McCagg’s paintings, securing essays from a number of eminent scholars and authors, another month of pre-press, layout, editing and proofreading, is Winslow McCagg: Recent Paintings, an ambitious, 52-page full-color catalog that includes text by Howard Means (most recently the author of Johnny Appleseed: The Man, The Myth, The American Story, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2011); Raul Zamudio (independent curator & art critic, author of more than 200 published critical works); and Martha Gehman (prolific stage & screen actress and a noted collector). We’re exceptionally (and justifiably, I think) proud of this first effort, which we hope will bring some much-deserved recognition to Winslow’s work, which Raúl Zamudio calls “…a unique and masterful aesthetic métier that culls disparate forms with deftness and verve.”

And for those of you who would like to see McCagg’s paintings in person, please accept this invitation to join us at the Burwell-Morgan Mill on October 28th from 5 o’clock to 8 for what promises to be a spectacular and well-attended opening reception. More than 50 of Winslow’s works will be exhibited for sale, in one of the best art spaces in Virginia.  And so will copies of the exhibition catalog which, in all selfishness, I encourage you to snap up in quantity. And a free copy of the book to anyone who can guess the origin of the name of our press!

POSTSCRIPT: another great and talented friend, the videographer and film editor George Patterson of The Downstream Project, has produced a short-short documentary on Winslow’s work. It’s a great preview of the upcoming show, and a nice way to spend five minutes (though you’re welcome to fast-forward past a certain talking head!). While you’re at it have a look at the Downstream Project’s website - they’re doing valuable work and if you have any interestt in the conservation of the Shenandoah River basin I strongly encourage you to support them.

For the past two months I have been marinating, then percolating, then stewing over writing this blog entry. I knew this day was going to come (at least, I was hoping this day was going to come), but now that it has come, I’m at a loss for words.  I have what they call the block of the writer. It reminds me of that scene in Almost Famous (aka the second best movie of all time) where poor little Opie tries to write the article that will not only start his career but push this struggling pathetic rock band of which he writes into stardom. He pencils, “Russell’s fingers fly like airplanes of music” on a sheet of paper only to crumple it up and throw it on the floor of the bathroom to join the steadily growing pile of failed first lines.  Since July I’ve been thinking of that perfect first line. You know, the one that will capture my audience of 10 and force them to keep reading until the bitter end? It’s pointless, this is all I have to say:

I got into graduate school. In New York [CITY]. Starting in January. To pursue my MLS, of course.  Hey-zeus Christo!

I’ve known this exodus to New York was going to happen for some time now, but I have been reluctant to tell the world exactly what my plans were, mostly because I had no solidified plans. Though I kept telling myself, “don’t worry you’ll get into library school,” and even when my parents, family, friends, even my dog, reassured me of the same thing, I couldn’t be sure until I actually got in. Well! Check that one off the bucket list.  Now everything else will fall into place, like a job [hint, hint, readers. I'm actively seeking employment in the New York City area!], a place to live [check that off too, hello tiny closet space in the East Village!], and all of those other stresses that come about when one has to relocate to another city.  Add a “what the hell am I going to do with my HORSE?!,” and well, you’ve got my situation.

Now, to follow up from above, I don’t believe this blog post will launch my career.  Nor will it launch the already launched career of Lorne Bair Rare Books, proprietor of this blog.  However, the bildungsroman novel that could be written of the two years I’ve been here of my life and the life of the shop may quite possibly be a candidate for runner up on the New York Times Bestseller list. Fantastic things have happened, not only to the business, but also to me, since that fateful day in December of 2009 when I stepped into the terribly messy space [nah, it wasn't that bad...] that neither Lorne nor I would even consider calling a proper bookseller’s office now. So many fantastic things that I can’t put them into words, or even a bullet list. It would be much, much too long.

I’d love to end with some very heartfelt textbook paragraph about how much I have grown, how far the shop has come, and that my spirit will live on in the office for years to come.  But we all know that doesn’t need to be said.

Instead, I’ll end with this.  Dear occupiers of Wall Street: I’m moving to New York December 1. Though I will be unemployed and seeking work, I will never, ever join you.  If you get in my way, and put as much as one unwashed finger on my Bergdorf Goodman jacket, that I purchased with money I earned, I will cut it off. You’ve been warned.

With all the love in the world,

Jordan deButts

p.s. don’t worry, this isn’t my last post, even if it sounds like it is.

It’s been a great couple of weeks here at Lorne Bair Rare Books – Catalog 13 is more than 60% sold in just over a week; Ashley Loga (about whom more soon) came, saw, and conquered our hearts; Jordan found herself an apartment in Manhattan; and Ernesto Mango Smoothie, who’s been looking a little undernourished lately, ate a cricket. Or most of a cricket, anyway.

But there’s an old adage in the book biz that you’re only as good as your next book, and truth be told it’s been a little while since we’ve been able to spin a Tale of Splendid Acquisition that made our hearts go pitter-patter. But lo and behold, in an unsolicited box of pamphlets received this morning from one of our long-term suppliers, we found this:

Now, for those of you unfamiliar with David A. Noebel’s theories of Commie Rock-n-Roll Mind Control, here’s a sample:  “…The destructive music of the Beatles merely reinforces the excitatory reflex of the youth to the point where it crosses the built-in inhibitory reflex. This in turn weakens the nervous system to a state where the youth actually suffers a case of artificial neurosis. And the frightening, even fatal, aspect of this mental breakdown process is the fact that these teenagers, in this excitatory, hypnotic state, can be told to do anything – and they will…  Since our teenagers under Beatlemania will actually riot, it is imperative to understand the basic underlying philosophy of the Beatles. Are they susceptible to the enemies of our republic? Are they religiously capable of wreaking havoc for ‘social’ reasons?…the beatnik crowd, represented by the Beatles, is the communist crowd. The truth of the matter is that many of the beatniks on our college campuses are communists firmly entrenched in atheistic literature and moral degeneration working for ‘social revolution.”

I swear to whichever god you worship, we’re not making this shit up. Noebel goes on to describe the “lewd, disgusting, revolting” antics at several different Beatles concerts, and also to expose the hidden communist messages contained in the children’s records produced by the Children’s Record Guild — aimed at 2 to 5 year olds, with titles such as “The Little Puppet” and “Tom’s Hiccups” — all of which apparently contained “a certain power of suggestion and musical arrangements designed to be frustrating and hypnotic [as well as] such things in the background as a ticking clock, a metronome and properly placed wind sounds – all elements used in the process of hypnotism.”

I would point out that at the time he wrote these words, the author was only 27 years old, giving the decided lie to the hippie dictum “Never trust anyone under thirty.” And I’m hapy to say that, having gotten such an early start in reactionary religio-political discourse,  Mr. Noebel is still among us and still plying his trade! He’s now the director of Summit Ministries, an anti-secularist training school (don’t we call those Madrassas?) in Manitou Springs, Colorado, where he’s presumably happily engaged in churning out fresh crops of right-wing nut job conspiracists. Lest you fear that Mr. Noebel’s theories are insufficiently grounded on a sound intellectual foundation, let us set your minds at rest — he does hold anHonorary Doctorate from American Christian College in Tulsa.

So, are we making this shit up? Well, gentle reader, there’s just one way to find out – buy your copy today!

It is a rare occasion when I pick a book up off the shelves here and laugh out loud upon reading the first paragraph.  And on an occasion such as the aforementioned, like, say, when I find a copy of Eli Jacobson’s English for Workers tucked among a large group of pamphlets, it would be cruel not to catalog it and share it with our readers (I think we’re up to five now?).

Here is that delightful first paragraph:

I cannot speak English. I cannot read English well. The workers in the shop speak English. I cannot talk to them. I do not understand them. I have to go to school to learn English.

A few paragraphs later, and the chapter lesson ends with the sentence, “I must know English to do good work in the union.”  The entire text is laced with political propaganda, with a whole chapter devoted to the “traitors of the working class,” scabs. My favorite part thus far (because I haven’t read the entire text yet), however, is the beginning of Exercise B of Lesson X, “Classes and the Constitution, uses of the numerical adjective, possessive of nouns.”

What color are these workers? One is black and the other is white.

Is one of the workers black? Yes, he is black, but both are workers.

… Have you a prejudice against a black worker and not against a white worker? No, I have no prejudice against any worker.

Who has prejudices? The capitalists and the middle-class have prejudices.

I don’t want to give away any secrets, but I have a feeling that some of the people featured in our next catalog (look out for it in November!) should have read this book as a child.

Until next time!
J