The Pope's Bookbinder by David Mason

Author:David Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2013-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

This worked very well for about six months. One day, while scouting another shop, I found the hardcover edition of the same 1905 date with exactly the same design as the paper issue. It was common for Morang to do both hardcover and wrappered issues of most of their books.

So surprised was I that I could have never seen a copy in over fifteen years of careful scouting that I immediately began qualifying everything I said about Canadian editions by prefacing my comments with “To the best of my knowledge.” I still continue that wise practice.

But this is not the end of my London story.

After another five or ten years of stating that I knew for certain that the first Canadian edition of The Call of the Wild had been inexplicably published two years later than the first American edition, I found a Morang 1903 edition too. And in another few years I also came up with the 1903 wrappered issue. So, after some thirty-five years in all, logic again prevailed, and what should have been turned out to be exactly what had occurred.

Not only does this provide a cautionary note to making too-facile assumptions (thirty years is nothing in bibliography), but it also demonstrates the true rarity of many Canadian editions.

In the last two years I have found and quickly sold two Mark Twains, both so rare that neither BAL or Roper knew of them, one of which I had heard of in a manner that made me think it existed and the other which I had never seen or heard of. This happens enough to keep me looking and to keep me keen. Unfortunately the collector to whom I sold many of the Twain rarities, who very astutely agreed with my assessment of both their importance and increasing value, died a couple of years ago. The institution which gets his Canadian Twains will be very fortunate, for they will get the results, often in unique copies, of forty-five years of scouting.

Things went very well for several years and this project, like my earlier one for the University of Toronto, gave me enough certain profit scouting other stores that based on that sure profit from the Canadian editions I was able to indulge myself by buying other nice books from the dealers I visited, so they doubly benefitted by getting rid of their unsaleable Canadian editions and selling the visiting dealer other books as well.

But the real beauty of the project was my $50.00 limit, because Canadian editions, especially in small town stores, were often the books of obscure authors, popular in their time but unread and forgotten today. I often found them very cheaply. And while lots of them didn’t justify my charging $50.00 for them, many did. So I was in the nice position that often the most obscure books were the cheapest and hence finding them was much more profitable than finding ones that I had to pay real money for.

But whereas my scouting efforts for

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