Martin Stone and the Forgotten Shelf

Found--Martin Stone's Forgotten Shelf book catalogue no. 5: Modern Literature Fantasy and Detective Fiction - November 1982. The macabre cover was hand-coloured by impecunious students and the image from the cover taken from a Marcel Schwob novel Coeur Double (Paris, 1891.) Martin, now an expat in Paris, is still going strong but has not done a catalogue since the 1980s. The dedication reads..

Thanks should go to Mr. D. Attoe of Wapping and Mr. Robin Summers  for sterling excavation work in the compiling of this catalogue. A tip of the hat also to Iain Sinclair of Albion Village Books for light shed in some obscure bibliographic corners and to Skoob Books for the use of congenial office facilities beyond the boundaries of the East End. 

There follows a poem by David Attoe, now a US expat and at that time poet, book collector and Ford Madox Ford expert. He later published a novel Lion at the Door (Little, Brown, 1989) which had a great succes d'estime, even carrying a blurb from Thomas Pynchon.

New Edition

Little change from the turkeys
take a sift look at Priapus bones
splinter rinse with ferocious light
against old walls

Solomon Pottesman—book dealer as metaphysician

Solomon Pottesman ( 1904 – 78) was one of the best known ‘ characters’ in London’s  post-war world of antiquarian book dealing. Socially awkward, often exasperating in the eyes of auction staff, such as O.F.Snelling, who paints a rather uncharitable picture of him in his Rare Books and Rare People, he was more appreciated by fellow bibliophiles like Alan Thomas, who not only enjoyed his company, but like so many other dealers and collectors, thoroughly respected his encyclopaedic knowledge of incunabula. Indeed, so expert in his field, was Solomon, that he was almost universally known as ‘Inky’.

So, in 1960, when Pottesman announced that he had just published a book, everyone assumed that this would be a wonderfully scholarly work on pre-1500 printing and publishing. Imagine the disappointment when those few friends and colleagues who Pottesman  honoured with a complimentary copy of the book in question received a slim unpaginated pamphlet in blue card covers, and printed at his own expense,  entitled Time and the Playground Phenomenon.

Catalogue chat / Time Slip

Poster for Tom's Midnight Garden
 (Leeds Children's Theatre)

Found in the Peter Haining hoard a rare book catalogue from about 1990 with an introduction ('Chat Dept.') by the cataloguer. This was J. J. Rigden (Books) of Kent, dealing mostly in fantasy-- if still around he would be pushing 90. These 'chats' by dealers are much prized. A dealer once told me that when he omitted them sales went down and there were protests…this one is a classic of its kind:

The onset of autumn.. the approach of Christmas.. the inevitable rise in postal costs.. This leads us nicely on to a point we must make clear. We always despatch your parcels by the cheapest possible rate. Since we live in a mad world, this sometimes means first class letter rate, rather than a parcel rate.

Over a wet Bank Holiday weekend, we watched a children's fantasy on T.V. Time Slip always a popular subject, now incorporated with sci-fi. Many famous authors have written around this theme, both adult and children's.

I once met…Eric Korn

Eric Korn (1933-2014) seems to have been a much admired man, if all the many recent tributes in the Letters pages of the TLS to the polymath, ex-marine biologist, bookseller and brain-box star of Round Britain Quiz, are any indication.  All these encomia remind me of a visit I paid to his home over fourteen years ago.

Eric in Red Square (from ABA Newsletter )

Having been impressed for years by his performances on Round Britain Quiz on which the current less demanding TV show  Only Connect  is loosely based, and having some notion of his special areas as a book dealer, I was curious to discover how he had become so well read in so many disparate subjects. Locating him was easy enough. Like so many dealers nowadays, his home was also his shop, and this turned out to be a rather conventional looking Edwardian terraced house in Muswell Hill. I’ve interviewed a few booksellers in my time but not one of them  answered the door wearing scruffy jeans and a T shirt. I took to him immediately.

The voice, of course, was immediately recognisable

Tales from the Second Hand Book trade 1

In the dog days of summer we present a post from our former site Bookride. It was billed there as one of several 'Tall Tales from the Trade' but as I recall it is pretty much true except that Pecksniff's may have been called Greasby's. There are other racy tales from this exciting (and vanished) world to follow...

It's 1977, in the year of the Jubilee, punk rock is in the air, Big Jim Callaghan is in Downing Street and a bookseller in King's Cross London is involved in a long - running dispute over rent with a corrupt and greedy landlord. The landlord, call him Rachman, wants him out so that he can develop the building into flats and keeps raising the rent and hassling the young bookseller at every opportunity.

The guy supposedly owes £5000 in back rent and 'reparations' and on a Thursday evening a bailiff in a bowler hat arrives with a couple of thuggish sidekicks to seize the guy's entire stock in lieu of this amount. It is a very smart and well chosen stock worth £50K minimum but if seized it will be sold at Pecksniffs - a seedy auction house specialising in bankrupt stock. It will probably make a tenth of its true value and our bookseller will be destitute -sans money and sans books. He manages to persuade the bowler hatted one to accept £100 and says that he will have the rest on Monday after he has been down to the country to borrow the money from his father. This is quite plausible because the guy, like a lot of booksellers of the time, appears to be a public school type with a vague air of privilege, albeit slightly shabby, and likely to have moneyed parents. In fact his dad was a teacher with nothing more than a flat in Roehampton and a bicycle.

The bailiff disappears into the gathering gloom and the dealer immediately gets on the blower to his network of dealer friends. The call goes out to the London trade that he will buy any book for 5 pence (10 cents.) Battered Volvos, trucks, vans arrive laden with London's lousiest, most unsaleable books.