Chapter 59 Blocked

Now that I have gathered all of the pertinent books for my purpose and am ready to make the Dante catalogue a priority, I’m having a hard time writing it. I guess I could call it writer’s block. (Read: horrible, horrible bout of procrastination.)

This inability to focus is not for lack of reference books, lack of bibliographical information, or even lack of interest in the subject. I love these particular books, but I also love having a book business, so it’s time to offer them for sale. When I thought about why I was having trouble completing my catalogue, I discovered that having one’s workplace in one’s home can be a problem. For instance, I start typing and realize I have really important household chores to do, like re-organizing the kitchen cabinet that holds pots and pans or getting dust off the baseboards. I also started a major clean-out project in September, one area of the house each week, and to keep up with my cleaning list, I am sacrificing catalogue writing time. Everyone’s dresser drawers and closets look really clean, though. When I do sit down to write, my thoughts wander to what I’ll be cooking for dinner that night to wondering what I will buy my brothers for Christmas. Then my mother or my best friend call me. Well, then it’s just plain too late to spend the rest of my free hours focused on writing a major undertaking like a print catalogue. I write a blog post like this one instead.

I won’t give up. The catalogue will be written. Since this is the first time I’ve been home without children in almost ten years, I am still discerning the balance between household management and bookselling. I trust it will work itself out in the end. But, if you’re wondering why this darn catalogue of only 50 items is taking so long to produce, now you know.

I have a binder that I call my “Household Management” binder that I use to keep myself organized. It holds sections of To-Do Lists, Grocery Lists, Meal Plans, Cleaning Chore Lists, Phone Numbers, Kids’ Sports Team Information, Medical Information, Holiday Planning, Car Maintenance Records, etc. It keeps me organized and without it I would forget lots of tiny details (like the fact that I promised to drive on Tom’s field trip this week and that Huck has Show and Tell on Friday). It sounds silly, but it works for me. I am toying with the idea of creating a similar binder for bookselling. If I write down my tasks, I can see what I actually need to do (sell books, buy books, catalogue books, write, learn more about bookselling) and plan my time more efficiently. Except that making said binder and organizing it will take away even more time from the Dante catalogue.

I know what I really need to do: Take out all of the Dante books and just look at them together and think about them for a while. Then I need to sit down in my chair and not move until I am finished sharing them with the rest of the world through my catalogue. When that happens, you’ll be the first to know.

See you in the stacks!

P.S. I am still very interested in reading your stories of fingerspitzengefuhl. Email them to me at chris @ bookhuntersholiday . com.

Chapter 52 Compiling a Mailing List

When I was teaching high school English, I often advised my students, when they were writing, to “begin with the end in mind” and to “know your audience”. Surely, there is a special circle of Dante’s Hell reserved for us teachers, who dare to use such simple aphorisms to teach something as complex as good writing, and the punishment in that circle is that we teachers must heed our own advice. I now find myself in that place.

I’ve just about finished acquiring the items I want for my Dante catalogue, bringing the total to 50. Never mind the fact that only half of the catalogue has been written and only half of the items have been photographed or scanned. I’ll be working on that (feverishly) in the coming weeks. What I need to start thinking about now is a mailing list. I’m a novice antiquarian bookseller without an established customer base. Who should receive this catalogue? More importantly, who might buy items from it? Before I can write good descriptions, I need to think about those for whom I am writing them. I also need to look at my collection as a whole and figure out what’s so special about it anyway.

I have limited workspace in my house (a 3′X3′ corner of my dining room) and I store my books in various dark, dry, cool places throughout my house. I’ve been stockpiling those Dantes for a few years now. It’s time to get them out and look them over, not as individual pieces, but as a physical collection, next week. What started out to be a collection of Dante’s Divine Comedy morphed into a collection of illustrated editions of Divine Comedy. Then it morphed into illustrated editions of the works of Dante, and finally, it seems to be emerging from its bookshelf chrysalis as a beautiful collection of illustrated and unusual editions of the works of Dante. I’d like to say more about the unusual part, but think it best to let you see for yourself when I mail the catalogue.

Who on earth might want to buy these books? A Dante collector — sure, but I don’t know any myself (yet). Perhaps a university library with a special collection in Dante. Perhaps another bookseller higher up in the food chain who is assembling a larger collection of works by Dante. Perhaps a beginning collector who wants to start a collection with nice core of 50 items. Perhaps someone who just likes pretty old books. I have to write to each of these audiences in the catalogue’s introduction and in the descriptions of the books themselves.

For now, I plan to begin compiling a mailing list of the following:

University and private libraries that hold special collections in Dante. (There is a book called Subject Collections by Lee Ash where I can find information on which libraries have these — and other — holdings. I just have to check the book.)

Other booksellers I know, with a personalized note accompanying the catalogue.

ABAA booksellers I don’t know, but would like to, with a letter of introduction (Can get their mailing information from the latest ABAA directory).

My fellow seminarians from the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar. I didn’t meet any other Dante specialists there, but got feedback on an early draft of the catalogue and lots of requests to send it when it was printed.

I’ll send the catalogue to Firsts Magazine, Fine Books and Collections Magazine, and Americana Exchange, all of which review catalogues.

I’ll send the catalogue to my little list of previous customers.

I’ll send the catalogue to friends and family, so they can see what I am doing with all of my “free time” now that my kids are in school all day.

I’ll review the rules about doing so, and if I can, I will anounce the catalogue on any of the bookselling mailing lists that allow a bookseller to do so: Ex-Libris, Bibliophile Group, and Bookfinder Insider.

I’ll offer books for sale on Rare Books email list. This is an internet list which lists antiquarian books for sale free of charge.

And, of course, I will announce the catalogue on my blog and on my website.

Would you like to receive a copy of the Dante catalogue? Send an email with your mailing address and email address to me at: info @ bookhuntersholiday . com.

Over time, I hope to build a customer list, but I think the list above gives me a good list with which to start.

Chapter 29 Book Shopping in San Francisco

I had a great day Thursday, driving up to San Francisco to the shop of a respected bookseller to purchase something that is just perfect for my Dante catalogue. Sorry. You’ll have to wait for the catalogue to see it. He had a lovely shop with floor to ceiling shelves, a beautiful desk, a library table — the kind of antiquarian bookseller haven I can only fantasize about right now.

After a satisfying late morning making my purchase and visiting two other booksellers, I walked to Union Square. The Blue Angels, in town for Fleet Week, soared overhead performing aerobatic maneuvers. I stopped for lunch by myself (this is a real treat for someone who’s eaten every meal with small children for the past nine years) at a cafe where I had a (ridiculously self-indulgent) chocolate and banana crepe and a cup of tea capped off by (this is really over the top) a dark chocolate truffle. It’s definitely autumn now, as there was none of the usual summer fog to be seen. It was a sunny, crisp day, beautiful in all respects. A gift from the book gods.

Friday, it’s back to the homefront. I am driving Huck and a group of first graders to Half Moon Bay for their class field trip to the pumpkin farm. Half Moon Bay, a semi-rural community on the coast, is beautiful this time of year — fields filled with pumpkins, a light fog from the Pacific Ocean, and a few trees that actually look autumnal (trees whose leaves turn colors are not often seen in my part of California — one of the few negatives about West Coast living). The Book Mobile will be operating as the Mom Mobile, toting five 6 and 7 year olds along for the ride and supervising them as they run rampant through a field of gourds. It’ll be a lot of fun, but I’ll wish I could take a nap when it’s over. These type of days are a gift, a different kind of gift than finding and selling books, but a wonderful gift all the same. (Sorry for the sappy sentiment, but the older my kids get, the more I realize that soon they won’t want to visit pumpkin farms with their parents.)

Happy Friday to you!

Chapter 16 What’s Next?

Now that I’ve sold books at my first book fair, I’m trying to prioritize what’s next. First, I need to unpack all of those boxes of books I brought home from the book fair. I should finish describing uncatalogued books (of which there are many) and put them up for sale on my website. I should scan images of said books for my website, a time-consuming but worthwhile task, because I like for people to actually see the books they’re going to purchase. I’d like to become a member of some regional book clubs, like the Book Club of California and the Roxburghe Club. I need to sign up to exhibit at another book fair. I need to sell some more books. I need to buy some more books.

But perhaps the most important project on which I’m working is this:

My first catalogue will be completed sometime between November and January. It features illustrated and unusual editions of the works of Dante Alighieri. These books are among the first I ever collected. When I was teaching high school, my senior Advanced Placement English class had to read The Divine Comedy.

Upon being told they’d be reading this classic, many of the students moaned and groaned, complaining that the language and the poetic form were too complex for their seventeen year old minds to understand. If you haven’t spent much time around teenagers, you need to understand that the typical high school student often equates age of text with the phrase “too boring to read”. They often begin reading works by authors such as Dante saying, “I can’t . . .” or “I don’t get it . . .” If a good teacher can get the students to focus and to stick with it, they often see that indeed they can read and even appreciate such a work.

After teaching this work for a few years, I got a good idea. I began to track down and share different illustrated editions with the class, hoping that my students would feel a deeper connection to the text after seeing how different artists over time interpreted this great work. I also tried to emphasize that, from the beginning, Dante was marketed towards the common man. The Divine Comedy was published in the Italian vernacular rather than the traditional Latin, for starters. The 1502 edition, printed by Aldus Manutius, was published as an octavo, much more portable and easy to read than the cumbersome incunabula by which it was preceded. From then on, countless editions of this rather complex work have been published for the reading pleasure of the common person.

I only had two or three books to share with my students when I stopped teaching in 2000, after the birth of Huck. I continued to build a collection in this area, thinking that eventually I’d return to teaching. Along the way, I discovered the antiquarian book world, and here I am, seven years later, selling books to people who already appreciate them.

I plan to acquire a few more books to add to this catalogue, and finding the right books in the best condition takes time. I ‘ve written most of the descriptions for the books I already own, and I’ve scanned all of the images of those books that will appear in the catalogue. Next, I’ve got to work with the layout, develop a mailing list, and catalogue new books as they arrive.

I recently wrote a post about feeling like a “real” bookseller after selling books at my first book fair. Publising print catalogues, is, in my opinion, another hallmark of the “real” bookseller, and I look forward to completing my first one.

If you’d like to receive a copy of Catalogue #1 once it is complete, please send your address via email to chris @ bookhuntersholiday . com.