Today I received twelve—count
‘em, twelve—catalogues in the mail. On average, I
receive four or five a day, perhaps a few more than most. I
have subscriptions to eight auction catalogues, and because I
am a member of the Manuscript Society, I receive plenty of
catalogues from autograph dealers as well. Occasionally I
receive a numismatist’s or philatelist’s or an
antique dealer’s catalogue, too. There is no want for
the reading of catalogues here, and I assume it’s the
same with most ABAA members.
As much of my business is generated from
the catalogues I publish, I take a particular interest in the
catalogues of others. I try to read as many as I can, not
just to look for books to buy, but to see how other
booksellers are cataloguing their books. I am interested in
how their descriptions look on the printed page. I am
interested in margins, type styles and size, and overall
readability. I am interested in the sequence of information
offered, where the price is located, and how citations for
reference books are handled. Does the bookseller, for
example, put titles of books all in caps, as Bill Reese and
Mike Ginsberg do; or in bold, as Maggs and Ravenstree do; or
in italics, as Jonathan Hill and I do? Are authors’
names printed all in caps or are they bolded, or both? How
much abbreviation is used? Each of us has our own particular
style. No doubt each of us receives comments from our
customers on our catalogues, and we tailor them accordingly,
or not, as we wish. The diversity is inevitable and good.
Inevitable, too, is the diversity in the
descriptions of books—the words and phrases we use to
merchandise our inventories. But where type styles, spacing,
formatting, and even, I suppose, our prices are confined by
what Joyce called the ineluctable modality of the visible,
our prose, such as it is, or paucity of it, has the capacity
to urge and sway those who are reading the descriptions in
subtle ways. How many of us have had to return a book for it
not being as we pictured it from the bookseller’s
description? Or for its not being described at all? I’m
not talking now about mistakes in cataloguing. All of us have
erred in counting plates or have confused a pagination.
Rather, I’m talking about the integrity of our
descriptions.
Sidney E. Berger’s article, "Else
Fine and Other Features of the Dealer’s Catalog: Part
One" in Biblio (Volume I, no. 2) addresses a
number of concerns I have long harbored about
booksellers’ catalogues. In short, Berger argues for
forthrightness in booksellers’ descriptions and offers
general advice on how to read—or read into—them. As
a reader of booksellers’ catalogues for more than thirty
years he has a number of useful observations, and his article
should be required reading for all booksellers who sell by
catalogue.
Berger rightfully argues for clarity of
description. Most of us have no trouble stating the facts:
author, title, place of publication, and so forth. But, when
it comes to the physical description of the book or our
statements of edition or why the book is important (and hence
worth the price we are asking) or—my personal pet
peeve—rarity, a number of dealers’ forthrightness
may easily be called into question. A local ABAA dealer once
told me he would describe a book as "rare" if he
could not get on the phone and find a copy in a week or so.
Another dealer told me he wouldn’t use the word rare
unless there were five or fewer locations cited in NUC. I
read not so long ago, much to my surprise, in an ABAA
member’s catalogue, that the first edition of
Kipling’s Captain Courageous was "rare in
original cloth!" Countless are the times I’ve been
offered "rare" or "uncommon" titles of
which I have four copies in the warehouse. Myself, I’ve
just about given up using the word altogether in order to
distance myself from the misconceptions that the word
"rare" has come to convey. In my opinion, it is the
most overstated, misused word in the booksellers’ canon.
So, too, its adjuncts, though I suppose to a lesser degree:
words such as "scarce" and "uncommon."
Why do we use these words at all? The
simple, basic explanation is that it helps us sell books. If
touting a book as "rare" or "uncommon"
did absolutely nothing to help us sell books we certainly
would not venture to use the words as willy-nilly as we do,
except in cases where we could demonstrably show that a book
was truly rare, or in cases where we could point to hard
evidence, such as a census. So the bottom line on the words
"rare," "scarce," "uncommon,"
and the like, is money, pure and simple. We all have bills to
pay. You tell me why we use these words. And at whose expense
do we use them?
Except in the most extreme instances, such
as early Caxtons or Shakespeare quartos, where censuses have
been carefully compiled, aren’t we really only guessing
for the most part (albeit educated guessing in some
instances) as to the scarcity or commonness of a title? How
often have we found just a copy or two listed in NUC only to
find a dozen and a half in the RLIN or OCLC databases? How
often has a copy of a particular book surfaced at auction,
where it has brought an unexpectedly high price because
"no copy has appeared at auction in twenty years;"
and no sooner are there three or four other copies that have
come out of the woodwork, drawn like magnets into the
marketplace by the price realized. How many
"unrecorded" copies lurk in small public libraries
and historical societies? Why, then, do we continue to
advertise so many books as "rare" to our customers?
In a catalogue that arrived last week there were 236 items
offered for sale. By my count 172 were either
"rare,""very rare," "quite
rare," "exceedingly rare," and even
"becoming rare!" Even the most thin-skinned among
us has to find this preposterous!
And what about the poor, unsuspecting
customer who decided to purchase Captains Courageous based on its being "rare in original cloth." In a
word, this customer was duped. Now I know the dealer who made
this claim of rarity. I know he knows just as well as I that
this popular Kipling title is no more rare in original cloth
than Minnesota is temperate in January. This claim of rarity
borders on fraud in my opinion, and I am troubled by this and
similar instances of hucksterism in some of my
colleagues’ catalogues.
In his article, Mr. Berger also calls to
question the numerous phrases booksellers use to describe
condition—everything from "fair++" to
"overall, less than very good," to "a very
near fine copy." Berger argues for
standardization—an unattainable ideal, in my
opinion—but his point is well taken. The inventiveness
of booksellers in describing the condition of books knows no
bounds and can be infuriating (I too have been guilty of it).
Berger suggests simplicity and straightforwardness, something
approaching the guidelines for describing books published
weekly in AB Bookman—a simple nine-step scale
ranging from "poor" to "as new." All
books, of course, do not fit precisely into one of nine
categories, and each description will have its modifiers. All
Berger asks for, God bless him, is blatant, unabashed honesty
in our descriptions—a service we should all strive to
provide to our customers.
As a librarian (he is head of Special
Collections at the University of California, Riverside),
Berger’s view is from the other side of the street. For
his purposes, he wants as much information about a book as
can be possibly crammed into our catalogues. He suggests the
use of indexes of subjects, authors, and titles, detailed
collations, and illustrations. Even the most well heeled
among us cannot justify the inclusion of everything that is
to be said about a book, of every convenience a catalogue
might potentially offer our customers. Somewhere there is a
happy union of description and economics, which, depending on
the size of our business, will naturally vary from bookseller
to bookseller. But by and large, Berger finds
booksellers’ cataloguing efforts commendable. Among his
suggestions for the overall improvement of the literature we
publish is 1) the dating of catalogues; 2) doing away with
the typographical enhancement in our catalogues—the
bolding and italicizing of "amazing and important"
things about our offerings which may seem to "enhance
the worth" of an item; 3) doing away with the
implications of rarity suggested by phrases such as "not
in NUC," or, "a color not noted by BAL "; 4)
doing away with the phrase "first and only
edition"—it’s a redundancy; 5) doing away with
uncommon abbreviations—or, if such abbreviations are
used, provide a key, then use these abbreviations with
consistency.
The jargon of our trade can be abstruse,
especially to to the novice, but even to the intermediate
collector. The vagaries of the books we sell are themselves
often arcane, thereby making it exponentially possible to
couch or obfuscate facts that should be made obvious to the
customer. In an appeal for more honesty in our cataloguing I
remind all ABAA booksellers of the first two sections of our
Code of Ethics:
1. An Association member shall be
responsible for the understanding and use of the specific
terminology of the trade;
2. An Association member shall be
responsible for the accurate description of all materials
offered for sale. All significant defects, restorations, and
sophistications should be clearly noted and made known to
those to whom the material is offered or sold. Unless both
parties agree otherwise, a full cash refund shall be made
available to the purchaser of any misrepresented material.
