The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - My Chat with Tom Ayling - Bibliophile and Antiquarian Book Dealer (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_871)

00:00:00.000 One. Hi, everybody. This is Gatsad for The Sad Truth. I've had many, many, many illustrious

00:00:06.460 guests, but few have engendered as much excitement as this next gentleman, because I think we are

00:00:13.420 both geeks in our disposition. We both love books. Tom Ayling is an antiquarian bookseller.

00:00:21.540 Welcome to the show, Tom.

00:00:23.200 Thank you very much for having me, Dr. Sad. It's a pleasure to be here.

00:00:25.680 Thank you. And please feel free to call me Gatad if you'd like, although I appreciate the proper

00:00:30.560 etiquette, which we'd expect nothing less of a properly educated Brit. Okay, so I thought what

00:00:37.540 we'd do is start with just your journey, right? I mean, you look pretty young. How does a young chap

00:00:45.000 such as yourself become this glorious antiquarian bookseller?

00:00:48.680 Well, that's very generous of you to put it that way. The sort of big moment for me,

00:00:57.820 I was very fortunate, happened when I was quite young. I was 10 years old, and one of my favourite

00:01:04.280 authors came to visit our school to talk to us. And then afterwards in the school library,

00:01:10.820 she agreed to do a book signing. So I had very eagerly brought along a great pile of books

00:01:17.660 for her to sign. And for me, like for everyone growing up, books are just vessels for stories.

00:01:27.320 They are texts. And for the most part, what we get out of them are the stories that they tell us. And so

00:01:33.020 I hadn't noticed that in my pile of books, six of them were paperbacks, and one of them was a hardback,

00:01:39.800 for example. And she very patiently went through my pile of books, signing them for me. And she got to

00:01:47.080 the final one, the hardback on the bottom. And she said, Oh, this one's a first edition. And I'd never

00:01:53.960 heard that word before. How old were you?

00:01:56.220 Something about the cadence of it sounded very special to me.

00:01:59.080 How old were you at that point? Sorry to interrupt.

00:02:01.100 I was 10.

00:02:01.900 Okay, go on. Sorry to interrupt.

00:02:03.480 And then the next thing she said was incredible. She said, because it's a first edition,

00:02:09.220 there's a mistake in it that I need to correct for you. So she signed the book for me and

00:02:15.460 described it in Latin, of course. And then she turned towards the end of the book and with her

00:02:21.140 pen, corrected this typo and handed the book back to me. And that object I received back

00:02:30.300 was genuinely transformative. It was a different object to the one I gave her in the first place.

00:02:37.360 And perhaps as a competitive 10 year old, it also had the quality of making it feel much

00:02:43.420 more special than any of my classmates. And that was the real starter for me that books were

00:02:51.160 historical artifacts, they could be things greater than just the texts that they hold. And it's been a

00:02:59.280 long slippery slope into bibliomania ever since.

00:03:02.240 Yes. Well, as you can see here, and I think I mentioned this when I invited you on the show,

00:03:07.280 tsondoku, which I didn't know that term until a fan sent it to me, which refers to sort of the obsessive

00:03:14.940 collecting of books. Okay, so you're 10 years old, you have this transformative moment. But then there is a

00:03:22.200 big gap until you say, hey, 10 years ago, or however long ago it was, I'm going into this business. Did you

00:03:30.180 study? I mean, were you an English lit major or a history major, or, you know, a book scholar, or not

00:03:38.140 at all?

00:03:39.700 No, not at all. I didn't study it. It's not, I mean, this aspect of dealing with books, book history,

00:03:48.300 treating books as historical artifacts, and the trade of antiquarian book selling, there's not really a

00:03:52.760 direct university program for it. I was in the social sciences at university, I studied international

00:04:00.480 relations, and became incredibly frustrated with it. And I had initially wanted to go into academia.

00:04:08.460 But thankfully, while I was at university, I was working in a bookshop, and decided that ultimately,

00:04:17.500 I didn't want to leave a bookshop, and I wanted to work in one for the for the rest of my life. And so

00:04:23.020 after I graduated, I left the thoughts of academia behind and got a job as a as a trainee antiquarian

00:04:33.100 bookseller at a bookshop close to where my then girlfriend's now wife lived.

00:04:40.320 Wow. Well, of course, the antiquarian booksellers market gain is academia's lost.

00:04:46.880 It's always as an academic, I hate when I hear that someone decided not to go into academia,

00:04:52.240 but I can appreciate the romance of what you do now. So then how do you I mean,

00:04:58.420 I've often when I play the game with my family, if I had a billion dollars, what would I do? And it

00:05:04.320 invariably turns into I would basically become Tom Aylink. But although I wouldn't do it to sell them,

00:05:12.320 I would do them, I would do it to hoard them into my in my beautiful mansion. How did you go about

00:05:18.960 do I mean, is there so let's talk a bit about the the economics of it. And then we'll come back to the

00:05:23.400 romance of it. You know, how do you even enter such a market? Do you start with cheaper books,

00:05:30.960 so that you can build the collection and then move on to the Hobbit? Or how does that work?

00:05:36.500 Yeah, I mean, maybe it's maybe I'll talk initially about what to do if you're a if you're a collector,

00:05:41.780 and that's, you know, what you want to go about. And then then we can perhaps get into the kind of business

00:05:46.220 side, which is related, but but separate. The truth is, when you're collecting books, you can buy

00:05:54.280 really, really incredible material on any budget. So the first old book that I bought, knowing it was

00:06:03.320 old and special, didn't cost me very much. I think it cost me two or three pounds in a secondhand

00:06:09.300 bookshop. And it was a copy of Richard Kipling's poetry in a beautiful leather binding. And that

00:06:16.440 was an incredibly, you know, special object for me to have. And I sort of coveted it for a slightly

00:06:22.720 unexplicable reason. But, you know, people often look at the rare book market, and they'll see that

00:06:31.200 a copy of, you know, the Hobbit has just sold for 50,000 pounds, or a first edition of Frankenstein

00:06:37.720 sold for a million dollars, and think that book collecting isn't for them. But there are many,

00:06:43.760 many copies of be it the Hobbit or Frankenstein or any book of your choosing in the world that survive

00:06:50.580 in both interesting editions that are less expensive than that and more affordable. But also

00:06:57.600 at the level of the the individual copy can be incredibly interesting because of say, who owned

00:07:04.200 it or annotated it or what's happened to that book in the course of its life after its publication. So

00:07:11.420 sometimes having the kind of budgetary constraint of not having a billion dollars and just buying

00:07:17.680 whatever you want, makes it more fun, because you have to think more laterally, and think more

00:07:24.320 creatively. And perhaps look at books that you wouldn't give the time of day to. Otherwise, if you

00:07:30.940 were this sort of, you know, billionaire book collector who could just buy first editions of every book they

00:07:35.760 wanted.

00:07:36.700 Can I engage in what I consider to be a flex, but it may not impress the antiquarian bookseller? Because

00:07:43.020 to your point about operating within your means, although I don't know how much it costs, because it

00:07:48.340 was a gift given to me by my family last year for my birthday. Are you ready, Tom?

00:07:53.980 Hey, please.

00:07:56.200 First edition.

00:07:58.060 Hey, wonderful.

00:07:59.240 Yes.

00:07:59.500 You ready? Hold on. One more. I'll do one more.

00:08:01.600 One more. One more. The big one.

00:08:04.700 Yes. A marvellous.

00:08:07.760 Impressive or not much for an expert such as yourself?

00:08:12.580 No, no, no. They're absolutely wonderful, wonderful things. I mean, there's something

00:08:16.960 incredibly transporting in holding in your hands a first edition of a book, because you're

00:08:28.420 seeing that as sort of the unexploded tinderbox, especially with two books like the ones you've

00:08:34.780 just shown, 1984 and Animal Farm, when you think of the impacts that they had on the world,

00:08:40.060 to think of them existing before they had that impact, you know, before they'd even been read.

00:08:46.360 And you can hold in your hands when you're holding a first edition. In those cases, they're the first

00:08:52.700 American editions, but they're published at the same time as the books in the UK. You're getting

00:08:59.400 the very same experience of reading Animal Farm or 1984 as that book's first readers had, which is

00:09:08.900 that unique privilege of reading a book before it was famous. Animal Farm, I think, is, no,

00:09:17.220 and it's 1984, I think, is when the British public were polled at the book they lie most about having

00:09:23.160 read when they actually hadn't. 1984 came.

00:09:26.280 Is that right?

00:09:27.180 Yes. So, so perhaps in that case, it's especially, you know, significant, but also it gets you,

00:09:34.180 it doesn't just get you closer to that book's earliest readers. You're getting closer to the

00:09:39.020 author themselves. I mean, writing 1984, which was published in 1949, killed Orwell. He shouldn't

00:09:47.300 have been up in Jura with poor heating, writing the book. He should have been resting and recovering

00:09:53.400 and the process of actually finishing the manuscript of that, scholars now think is, you know, led

00:09:59.660 directly to his, to his untimely death. So you are right there in the same universe as, as a great

00:10:07.180 book's creator when you're holding a first edition. You know, you, again, not to overly

00:10:13.060 compliment you, but in all the years that I've had wonderful conversations, you might be the first

00:10:18.440 one to actually given me goosebumps as I heard your passion about these books. And actually, frankly,

00:10:24.160 that's, that's how I decided to reach out to you because I had seen you. I love the fact that you do

00:10:30.100 all this outreach to get people to love books through your YouTube channel, through your Instagram,

00:10:34.340 and I was watching you. And, you know, usually when you go to your Instagram, if, if, if the

00:10:39.820 algorithm picks up that you're interested in something, so now you're constantly in my feed,

00:10:44.100 and I'm just sitting there consuming Tom Ayling. And so I love that because one of the things that

00:10:49.240 I hear when let's say I'm lecturing or something is that, you know, my passion for whatever subject

00:10:55.180 I'm teaching comes out, and it certainly comes out of each of your pores. I wanted to show you another

00:11:00.800 one, which is the Holy Grail for me. And then I'll ask you to tell me what is the Holy Grail for you.

00:11:06.400 Regrettably, it is not a first edition, Tom. Can you, without me showing you what it is,

00:11:11.680 it looks as though it could be a first edition. You have no idea what this is, of course, not enough

00:11:17.120 information. Not yet. Not yet. You ready? Can you read this?

00:11:22.860 Oh, yes. Marvellous.

00:11:25.340 So this is a 1975 Franklin edition. Now, I went to Raptus Rare Books. I don't know if you know them.

00:11:34.440 I mean, do you do?

00:11:35.220 Yeah. You do? Okay.

00:11:36.340 Yeah, in Palm Beach. Yeah.

00:11:37.320 In Palm Beach. Exactly. On Worth Street. And I actually got the incredible honour of holding

00:11:45.440 a first edition of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. Not wishing to put you on the spot,

00:11:54.000 but do you know what it was priced at?

00:11:56.540 I know what I would price it at. I mean, if you have it in, it depends on the copy and the

00:12:03.600 condition of it, but a sort of a decent copy in the original cloth binding in nice condition,

00:12:09.460 maybe quarter of a million pounds, $350,000.

00:12:12.060 Wow. That's almost exactly right. It was priced at $400,000. You're exactly, I mean, literally

00:12:18.660 almost exactly right. Now, maybe we could talk about this and we can oscillate from the romance

00:12:24.500 of book collecting to the business of book collecting, but what are the key factors that

00:12:31.040 go into pricing a rare book?

00:12:33.980 I mean, what lots of people are looking for when they're buying a first edition of a book

00:12:41.780 is getting as close to the point of origin as possible. After all, that's why we want

00:12:48.000 the first edition and not the 18th or 130th. So if that book was published in, say, the 20th

00:12:57.760 century, then you'd be looking for a copy that is, you know, in nice condition. It's still

00:13:04.300 got its dust jacket. It looks the same as it did the day it was published. And in that

00:13:09.600 circumstance, you've got almost a kind of time capsule piece that is, you know, as it

00:13:15.380 was when it first entered the world. With a book like Darwin's Origin of Species, of course,

00:13:20.040 published in the 19th century, you don't have books published in dust jackets at the time

00:13:26.780 of Origin of Species. You do get them later in the 19th century. But there you're looking

00:13:30.740 for, you know, the sort of summer would be a, you know, a copy in the original cloth still

00:13:37.120 gleaming in that green and gold in lovely condition. So originality is really, really

00:13:44.720 important. But it is only one factor. And there are a multitude of things that can happen

00:13:51.440 to a book in the decades or centuries after it was published, that can make it more valuable

00:13:57.120 and interesting. It might have been owned by somebody important or owned by several people

00:14:04.860 who were important. You know, Alfred Russell Wallace's copy of The Origin of Species would

00:14:10.360 be interesting, as would David Attenborough's for that, you know, for that matter. And he does

00:14:17.980 collect The Origin of Species, so that would make sense. But, you know, a copy that, you

00:14:22.760 know, Darwin gave to somebody close to him, or even inscribed, would be kind of the pinnacle

00:14:30.260 for a book like that. Sometimes it's fun to play a little game and, you know, you think

00:14:34.920 of a book from history, and you think, well, what is the best conceivable copy in the world

00:14:41.540 of that book? You know, whether that's Great Gatsby inscribed by Scott for Zelda, or, you

00:14:48.580 know, I guess, Origin inscribed for Alfred Russell Wallace, or, you know, any of those

00:14:54.280 things, you know, The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit inscribed for C.S. Lewis, you know.

00:15:01.120 But aside from those kind of famous examples, you can just have a copy that perhaps of a book

00:15:06.520 that has been annotated very vigorously by an early reader. And then, as we look through that

00:15:13.180 copy, we are getting the sense of how people were responding to that book at the time, and how that's

00:15:21.040 changed. If you look at books that are 500 or 600 years old, some of which, you know, I have behind

00:15:25.660 me, these books have passed through many, many hands in the, you know, half a millennium that they've

00:15:33.460 taken to get to the present day. And so, you can not just see the book at the time it was published,

00:15:40.620 but all the different things that have happened to it since in those intervening centuries.

00:15:46.600 You were mentioning sort of signed copies as being, of course, one of the markers of how

00:15:52.200 expensive a book will be. On average, do we have a sense of how much added value a signature on a first

00:16:01.780 edition brings? It, again, it all comes back down to rarity. So, there's no hard and fast rule.

00:16:09.380 If it's an author who you literally can't stop them signing a book, you know, it might add little

00:16:14.760 or no value to it. But if it's a reclusive author, for example, then, you know, it can add untold value.

00:16:22.700 A book like 1984, for example, is published right near the end of George Orwell's life. And only one

00:16:31.700 inscribed copy has been offered for sale. It's the copy he inscribed to Malcolm Muggerich, who is a

00:16:38.880 British man of letters, who was very close to Orwell in his final days, attended his deathbed wedding

00:16:48.100 to Sonia and visited him regularly in hospital. So, in an instance like that, where very, very few

00:16:56.400 inscribed copies of that great work of literature are known, it can turn a, you know, five, ten thousand

00:17:04.600 pound book to a, you know, quarter million pound book quite easily.

00:17:07.920 Wow. Is there a difference? I mean, both in your personal preference, but more generally

00:17:15.020 economically, between fiction, you know, fictional works versus non-fictional works in terms of

00:17:23.140 how excited the antiquarian book collector or the bookseller will be?

00:17:28.980 I mean, the wonderful thing about our world is that it's not kind of one homogenous market

00:17:35.160 of rare books, but it's made up of all these wonderful little microclimates that can be

00:17:41.840 incredibly small, you know, single author markets. So, you know, the market for a Tolkien book and the

00:17:49.240 Tolkien market is very different to the Orwell market, just like the market for, you know, 19th

00:17:54.700 century science books is different to 20th century psychology. So, all these different things have,

00:18:01.980 I suppose, they're in different places on the sliding scale as to what's important. Condition,

00:18:09.780 for example, plays a far bigger role in value when it comes to particularly modern books, but certainly

00:18:17.080 works of literature than in general non-fiction. And that's in part because I think when you think

00:18:24.460 of something like a dust jacket on a book in the 20th century, they can become so creatively central

00:18:32.560 to our memory of the book that they're kind of really part of the book itself in a way that the dust

00:18:45.160 jacket to a work of, say, science or mathematics or whatever, they're usually plainer, they might not even

00:18:50.360 be decorated in any way. Certainly the early jackets for those books are simply, you know, printed titles

00:18:56.280 on the covers and no pictorial element at all. So, simply in terms of kind of attractiveness and

00:19:03.840 appeal, as well as sort of the sense that they're forming part of it as a historical object, they can

00:19:11.060 have different impacts on value.

00:19:13.020 In your pursuit of rare books, do you have a preference in terms of which of the ecosystems you'd like to

00:19:21.060 navigate?

00:19:22.660 I mean, for me, what I'm interested in is books that have the most to tell us. And by that, I mean, individual

00:19:32.280 copies of individual books that reveal quite a lot to us about their time. So, these are often not books that are,

00:19:43.020 you know, totemic or famous. A book like the Shakespeare First Failure, the first collected

00:19:50.200 edition of Shakespeare's plays, it's a rare book that most people interested in books have heard of.

00:19:56.700 It's a very valuable book worth, you know, 10 to 15 million dollars, depending on the sort of condition

00:20:02.120 it's in. It is also sometimes an incredibly boring book, because many copies of it are just copies.

00:20:12.000 You can read through it, but no one's annotated it. They haven't necessarily been owned by people

00:20:17.340 throughout history. They don't always have a great sense of, or a great amount of things to tell us

00:20:23.940 about Shakespeare's day and 17th century theatre, beyond the plays that they're reprinting for us.

00:20:31.400 Whereas there are certain copies of less interesting or less famous books that have an outsized impact

00:20:42.620 in terms of historical importance, if not monetary value. I'll give you a couple of examples. In the

00:20:51.060 University of Rochester, there is a copy of Robert Burns's poems. It's an American edition printed in

00:20:58.560 Philadelphia in the mid-19th century. And this is a book that you can buy copies of this edition

00:21:07.820 of Burns's poems for 15, 20 pounds. It's not a valuable book. But the copy owned by the University

00:21:16.460 of Rochester has an inscription in it. And the inscription, when you open it up, says,

00:21:21.580 This is the first book bought by me after my escape from slavery. And now I give it to my son,

00:21:30.840 Frederick Douglass.

00:21:32.340 Wow! Hold on a second. Hold on a second. I want to show you something. You see, Frederick Douglass?

00:21:39.980 Hold on. Boom! 1.00

00:21:43.000 There we are.

00:21:43.680 Wow! It's funny that you said University of Rochester, because when I was finishing off my PhD

00:21:50.360 and looking for, you know, professorship, assistant professorships, one of the places that I was about

00:21:57.520 to accept an offer was at the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester. Okay,

00:22:02.440 let's go back. You said, I'm going to give you a couple of examples. That was an amazing one.

00:22:05.800 Continue with some other ones if you have those.

00:22:09.120 Well, one of my favorites is, do you know Procopius' secret history?

00:22:15.720 I don't.

00:22:16.680 So Procopius' secret history is his history of the court of the Emperor Justinian. So Byzantine

00:22:24.140 Emperor, some people consider Justinian the final Roman Emperor. And Procopius was the court historian.

00:22:31.200 He was a man of court. And he wrote the official history of Justinian's reign. But he also wrote

00:22:39.180 this other book that in the earliest records is called his Anecdota, and is later called his

00:22:44.540 secret history, which is kind of the truth about Justinian's reign that wasn't published in

00:22:52.140 Procopius' own lifetime. And there was a good reason for that. It's incredibly,

00:22:56.860 to say it's rude about the emperor is to understate it. He spreads all sorts of rumors about the

00:23:04.600 emperor's wife being a child prostitute and them all engaging in group sex in the palace and the 1.00

00:23:10.560 emperor himself being the devil incarnate. So it's an incredibly incendiary work. And this is written in 1.00

00:23:19.340 the mid-sixth century and remains lost and unpublished for over a thousand years until a Vatican

00:23:31.880 librarian around the year 1620 called Niccolò Alemani rediscovers the manuscript of it in the Vatican

00:23:41.240 Library. And I went to the Vatican Library to see that manuscript and the first edition of the book

00:23:51.800 that was published in 1623 last summer. And it's incredibly interesting because as you're going

00:23:59.180 through the printed edition of the book that's published in 1623, you discover that Alemani took

00:24:07.380 out all the juicy bits. So any reference to the Empress Theodora and what they were up to,

00:24:13.980 or the incredibly scathing bits about Justinian, were not published when the book first came out

00:24:21.080 in the 1620s. In part because Alemani was a man of the Vatican. He didn't want to embroil himself or

00:24:28.720 his position in the church in scandal. But the copy of the book in the Vatican Library is very,

00:24:35.700 very interesting because somebody has added extra pages at each of these sections where Alemani skips a

00:24:46.640 bit. And they've handwritten in, in the 17th century, all those sex scandals and gossip and

00:24:55.340 accusations that are left out of the published version. And that is one of the things that makes

00:25:05.200 me so interested about this because printed books, by their nature, are objects that exist in

00:25:11.540 multiples. They're naturally duplicated. But after 100, 200, 300, 400 years, no two copies of a book

00:25:20.240 from the same print run are still the same object because people own them, people annotate them,

00:25:26.360 they read them, they give them away, they lose them. All sorts of things can happen to them.

00:25:32.060 That means that when these objects arrive to us here in the 21st century, they're totally different.

00:25:38.080 And in this case, with the first edition of the Secret History in the Vatican Library, you're getting

00:25:44.580 a full sense of what someone in the 17th century had to do to pursue knowledge.

00:25:50.900 Wow, that's amazing. Have you met any authors that in 100 or 200 years, some other instantiations of

00:26:03.180 Gadsad and Tom Ayling will be talking about? I mean, JK Rowling or something? Do you have these kinds of

00:26:09.060 stories to share?

00:26:09.760 It's impossible to say. I mean, when you look at the authors that are most famous or most collected

00:26:18.160 today, they aren't the authors that people predicted 100 years ago. There was a very famous poll in the

00:26:25.760 Guardian newspaper a little over 100 years ago, I think just after the First World War, where they asked

00:26:33.040 their readers to predict which author writing today would be most read in 100 years' time. And you had rich pickings

00:26:44.040 at the start of the 20th century. You could have had, you know, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway,

00:26:51.820 Evelyn Wall, all these wonderful novelists. But the author that won by a landslide in that poll was John

00:26:59.580 Galsworthy, who nobody reads now.

00:27:03.000 I don't even know what that is.

00:27:04.400 No, exactly. And he wrote a novel called The Foresight Saga, which is his most famous book. But, you know, if I

00:27:11.840 owned a copy of The Foresight Saga in first edition and had it on my shelf here, it would take me years or decades

00:27:17.400 to sell it. So, you know, it's really, really difficult to predict which authors are going to sort of, you know,

00:27:28.120 rise above, you know, rise and separate themselves from the pack, and which authors will be considered,

00:27:34.120 you know, simply period pieces. Going back, you know, in history, there are countless examples of

00:27:41.300 this, people who were incredibly popular in their own day that don't have longevity.

00:27:48.080 When you look at the playwrights of Shakespeare's day, you know, Shakespeare occupies, you know,

00:27:56.160 the vast, vast majority of all theatres still performed today. But in the 17th century, he was

00:28:01.640 split among, you know, it was Shakespeare, it was Johnson, it was Beaumont, it was Fletcher. And

00:28:05.780 it's very, very difficult to predict anyone alive today that will be read in 150 years' time.

00:28:13.740 It might be that nobody publishing novels right now is going to be considered, you know, a great

00:28:20.140 writer after all of their contemporaries and perhaps the two generations that follow them are gone.

00:28:27.780 I mean, someone like J.K. Rowling is an interesting example because her books are very, very valuable

00:28:33.020 as first editions. A first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Day, the first Harry Potter book,

00:28:40.640 only 500 hardbacks of that first edition were printed. So it's printed in very, very small

00:28:46.220 numbers. And that could set you back £100,000, £150,000 if the book's in nice condition.

00:28:54.860 And it's really too early to say what that book's going to be worth in, you know, 50 or 100 years'

00:29:00.460 time. It might be that the kind of cultural phenomenon of, you know, remaking films and TV

00:29:07.120 shows and reprinting the books and then passing from generation to generation will keep them

00:29:11.740 alive. But equally, there aren't many children's books of the 19th century that we still read today

00:29:19.940 beyond great classics like Alice in Wonderland. So it's really, really difficult to make those

00:29:28.160 sort of predictions. Do you ever experience the tension between your business decision? I have a

00:29:38.200 seller here for this book that's been sitting on my shelf for three years, but it's one of my absolute

00:29:44.320 favourites in my collection, and I will not get rid of it. Do you ever feel that? Or ultimately,

00:29:51.500 there is a price for any book, and no amount of romance is going to stop you from selling

00:29:57.220 whatever you have in your collection?

00:30:01.500 I do find myself lying awake at night thinking of books I've sold and desperately wanting to see

00:30:09.860 them again. But I mean, I do have to confess, and this is absolutely true, I derive a huge amount of

00:30:18.300 pleasure from seeing someone get as excited about a book or more than I have. So when you see someone

00:30:26.520 light up when you present a book to them, that's incredibly gratifying to share that experience

00:30:33.620 with people, because these objects that I deal in are complex objects, and many people's eyes glaze

00:30:41.300 over when you talk to them about it, or they don't understand exactly the complexity and intricacies of

00:30:49.060 some of these items, whether from a sort of structural perspective or bibliographic perspective

00:30:56.160 or a historical perspective or an associative perspective. So when you find someone who really

00:31:02.580 gets it, I'm very happy to let them share in that pleasure. And it's also the case that books do have

00:31:10.720 a funny way of coming back to you one day. So, you know, when just when you just because you sell a

00:31:17.760 book to someone, it doesn't mean you're not going to see it again.

00:31:20.020 It's actually a nice segue, you saying that, you know, you get great pleasure in seeing someone's eyes

00:31:24.940 light up a book collector. Let's talk very briefly about the psychology of book collectors,

00:31:32.060 to the extent, I mean, I think you, you've not done the academic study of it, but you can certainly

00:31:36.200 anecdotally talk about it. So in some of my work, so I apply evolutionary psychology to study human

00:31:44.820 behavior in general, and consumer behavior in particular. And so many forms of collecting might

00:31:52.200 end up being forms of sexual signaling, right? So I collect cars, because that's the way that I peacock,

00:31:59.800 right? And therefore, I want to show to the world, Tom might be able to afford a Mustang, but he can't

00:32:05.220 afford my very rare Maserati. That's how we differentiate ourselves. But it seems to me,

00:32:10.820 and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, the book collector is seldom going to have as the driving

00:32:17.560 motive, the desire to be signaling to the world that I own a first edition of Origin of Species.

00:32:24.480 There are many other forms of collecting, where that motive might be operative. But there is something

00:32:30.560 unique and somewhat sacred about book collecting. Is that true? Or am I romanticizing it too much?

00:32:37.720 Well, I might be romanticizing it too, but I do agree with you. And, you know, sometimes if I'm

00:32:44.540 accused of being overly romantic, I do say, well, if you can't be romantic about old books, what can you

00:32:48.800 be romantic about? But no, I agree. Book collecting is a very private passion. And that's in part to do

00:32:59.320 with the uniqueness and singularity of every single object in that collection. But also the nature of

00:33:06.520 a library. A library is a very, very personal thing. And you might walk into a, you know, a grand

00:33:13.300 manor house and see leather-bound books on the wall and think that's impressive. But actually, for the

00:33:19.020 most part, those libraries aren't terribly impressive. They're just, you know, leather-bound sets of an

00:33:23.380 author's work. So they're not like fine art or sculpture or cars, these things that you can

00:33:30.600 put on your wall and are immediate status signals. Something else drives it. And it's different for

00:33:39.280 different people. Some people collect, you know, collect their favourite children's books

00:33:47.620 from childhood as a way of holding on to that, you know, that feeling of, feeling of wonder. And then

00:33:54.360 there, you know, these, these transistive objects for them. Some people collect in an incredibly kind

00:34:01.360 of practical and scholarly way. Sometimes we're collecting first editions of books because they're

00:34:07.660 the only edition you can get. So if you want that information, then you need to get the,

00:34:13.440 the first edition or an early edition of it or a special edition of it because of, you know,

00:34:19.820 some, some informational factors that it shows. And some people just collect for that slightly

00:34:28.180 indescribable love of the thing itself. And for me, I find that it can be quite hard to explain.

00:34:38.380 And if I have to explain it too much to someone, it's just quite clear that they're probably not going

00:34:43.120 to get it. But, but, but, you know, between bibliophiles, you know, when we share this,

00:34:49.920 this love of books, both for their texts, but also for them as, as historical artifacts,

00:34:55.420 there is this kind of unspoken understanding and fellowship, you know, between us. And that's a

00:35:04.460 really big factor for me, certainly.

00:35:06.020 How do you go about building your collection? Are you going largely to estate sales? Are people

00:35:14.040 just contacting you? Hey, my uncle Joe, who was a big bibliophile has regrettably passed away. And

00:35:21.620 are you, how does that work? Tell us.

00:35:23.960 Yeah. I mean, I suppose there's, there's two main things. I mean, sometimes it's very lucky and things

00:35:28.880 come to you and fall on your lap, but more often than not, we're going out, seeking these things

00:35:35.480 out. And that's where you have that wonderful opportunity for, for discovery. I mean, I was on

00:35:43.360 holiday last week in Norfolk on the East coast of England. I go every year with my wife's family

00:35:49.520 and there's this incredible little bookshop that is basically the downstairs rooms of somebody's

00:35:56.520 terraced house. And there are probably 25, 30,000 books crammed into probably a floor space smaller

00:36:05.340 than the one here, which houses about 500 books in this office. And I've been going to this shop for

00:36:14.060 years. And I was turning the corner and I saw on the bottom shelf, this book in a gray cloth binding,

00:36:21.080 and it had the titles of four novels on the spine. Three of them I'd never heard of, but one of them

00:36:28.840 I had, and it was Jane Eyre. And I opened it up and turned to Jane Eyre. And it transpired that this was

00:36:35.760 the first American edition of Jane Eyre from, from 1848, just sat there in this little bookshop in,

00:36:43.560 in, in, in rural Norfolk. So you have experiences like that, which are wonderful. And, you know,

00:36:53.300 you, you just find things in, in the most, you know, unexpected places. Um, that's a book that

00:37:01.080 you'd expect to find in the sort of wood paneled rooms of a New York city, rare book dealer. And,

00:37:07.240 you know, there it is tucked on the end of a shelf in, um, in somebody's house. Um,

00:37:13.140 but there's also cases where the, the discovery happens after you've bought the book and it starts

00:37:25.040 to reveal its story to you as you research it. And they're certainly the most sort of gratifying and

00:37:30.900 rewarding moments in this, in, in this business. I'll share one quick example with you, which was,

00:37:38.560 I bought at auction site unseen last summer, two books that were in cloth boxes and they were,

00:37:46.960 they were book bindings of about 1910, 1912, 1913. Um, and they were housed in these very plain cloth

00:37:56.040 boxes that had been made at the time to protect them. And when I bought them, I didn't know what

00:38:00.820 books were inside the boxes. I didn't know who the book binder was. Um, I was just taking a punt and,

00:38:07.520 you know, um, the books arrived and I opened them up and inside these boxes were immaculately

00:38:14.300 preserved. They'd probably not left the boxes for about a hundred years, fine leather book bindings.

00:38:21.360 And when I see a fine book binding, the first thing I want to do is work out who made it. Um,

00:38:27.480 so I opened the book up and one of them is inscribed in ink on the title page to Nell from Arthur,

00:38:36.400 1913. And the other one is inscribed in the binding, Nellie Fison, her book, X Dono, A-J-G.

00:38:47.140 So that's Nellie Fison, her book, a gift from this person called A-J-G. And as I dug into these 1.00

00:38:56.520 initials and the name Nellie Fison and Arthur and now from the other book, I managed to find who they

00:39:03.140 were. Eleanor Fison grew up just outside of Cambridge and became a nurse around 1910. And that was

00:39:13.000 appropriate because one of the books that was given to her and in this fine binding was the life of

00:39:18.160 Florence Nightingale. Wow. And, um, the identity of the person who inscribed the book for her and the

00:39:27.720 A-J-G who was mentioned in the inscription, the binding was someone called Arthur Gray, who was a

00:39:35.040 bookbinder. And I discovered that they became engaged in 1913. And he worked for the family

00:39:43.900 firm of bookbinders, J.P. Gray and Son in Cambridge, who continued to make books, to bind books for the

00:39:50.280 university well into the 20th century. And suddenly we've gone from having these two beautiful books to

00:39:58.640 something really quite intimate, um, books made by a bookbinder for his fiance. And I then made a

00:40:10.340 further discovery that rather changed the whole taste of the entire thing because in 1914, war breaks

00:40:19.580 out and Eleanor goes to Great Ormond Street Hospital, the children's hospital in London,

00:40:24.740 and works as a nurse there during the war. And Arthur Gray joins the army and goes to the Western

00:40:31.060 Front. And on the first day of fighting at the Battle of Passchendaele, 31st of July, he's killed in

00:40:39.340 action. Wow. And suddenly, I mean, I remember just when I read that, just sitting there in silence for

00:40:52.140 a matter of minutes, because these are, were for her, really the last relics of, of him and, and his

00:41:03.720 love for her. And the fact that you can uncover these layers of, of meaning, the objects are still

00:41:13.920 the same as when I opened them up, as when I left a bid on them at auction. They've not changed. But

00:41:21.260 as you research the people involved in, in these books, the objects do genuinely transform both in

00:41:29.920 their meaning and our understanding of them as, as historical objects, and they can become these

00:41:35.340 extraordinarily emotive things. Um, you know, days like that, where you can turn a book from just a

00:41:46.160 fine binding and be able to share this extraordinary story of two people who, who loved each other and

00:41:52.940 the, um, both the beauty and the loss. Uh, those are days that feel like a reasonable day's work

00:41:58.520 to me. Wow. Uh, I mean, in a sense, the way you just described that story, it's part archaeology,

00:42:06.600 part history, right? I mean, and I've often said to my wife when, you know, she's getting annoyed at me

00:42:13.120 because I want to go to another used bookstore. And I say, look, I'm an archaeologist of books.

00:42:18.000 I mean, I don't want, I mean, I could easily buy it on Amazon, right? Like, but I want to find

00:42:23.420 exactly to your earlier story, hidden behind a bunch of books that cop. And it's not because I

00:42:30.300 just saved $17 because I'm on an archaeological hunt. And then that dopamine hit that I get having

00:42:37.900 found it doesn't come from any pecuniary concerns. It's not that, oh, I just saved 12 bucks. It's that

00:42:43.980 I've gone on this journey. So having said all that, the way you speak, Tom, first, number one,

00:42:49.140 I regret that you didn't go into academia because I'm sure you would be an incredible professor to a

00:42:54.780 lot of students who are otherwise saying, oh, this is so boring. Is there a way we can bottle

00:43:01.360 Tom Ailing's passion in a bottle so that we could sprinkle it maybe on my teenage kids so that they

00:43:10.080 could be more into reading books? Is there a way we can solve that conundrum?

00:43:16.080 The, I mean, the best way that, that you do it is by getting that experience for yourself. So some

00:43:23.980 corollary to that experience I had when I was 10, when I had someone sign a book for me, and I felt that,

00:43:30.260 that moment that a book could transform in value sort of before your, before your eyes. So yes,

00:43:36.520 I mean, everyone listening to this should be out there every weekend in secondhand bookshops,

00:43:43.760 looking for books and feeling the joy of, of the tactile, of the real thing. Um, it's such a

00:43:51.700 different and more pleasant way of, on one hand, consuming information and on the other, the actual

00:43:58.480 process of, um, discovery and learning that you go through when you actually see these things and

00:44:04.240 feel these things with, um, with your own eyes. I mean, the one thing that eBooks can't replicate,

00:44:11.060 and I use eBooks every day in, in my research. Um, but the one thing they're not is 3D objects with a,

00:44:18.500 you know, a smell and they engage all the senses. And there's this sense where you can, you know,

00:44:22.720 look at the cracks between the binding and see the old paper that's been used to, um, fix the binding

00:44:27.860 together and all these other things that you can only get when you're dealing with the,

00:44:33.880 with the real thing. So people should get out to bookshops. They should visit book fairs. Lots of

00:44:39.740 people now, unfortunately don't have a local antiquarian bookseller that, that they can go to,

00:44:45.720 but organizations, um, in Canada, in the U S and the UK, across the world, um, trade associations

00:44:53.060 of booksellers run secondhand and antiquarian book fairs. Um, I'm at one this weekend in Oxford and

00:45:00.900 at another one next, the weekend after in, um, in York in, in Northern England. And there you're

00:45:07.240 going to a space where maybe 30, 50, maybe a hundred or 200 people like me who sell old books,

00:45:15.020 books, bring books to share with everyone under one roof for, for a weekend. And you can take them

00:45:23.100 down and look at them and have that feeling of holding a first edition or a very old copy of

00:45:27.960 your favorite book in your hand. And if that doesn't get you the bug, then I'm not sure I can help you.

00:45:34.720 I was going to say, so my, in my last book, it was a book on, uh, happiness, which is a daunting

00:45:41.800 subject to write about because, uh, the ancient Greeks have already, uh, cornered that market on

00:45:47.500 how to live a good life. And so in one of the early chapters, I talk about, uh, occupational happiness

00:45:53.760 and how can you find that? And of course I talk about, you know, purpose and meaning and so on.

00:45:58.500 And I think you might be the exemplar of someone who is maximally occupationally happy. Would that

00:46:08.500 be a correct statement? I mean, I, I absolutely adore the, I adore what I do. Um, I feel incredibly

00:46:16.040 fortunate to be able to spend my life in books and talking to people about books and, and, and sharing

00:46:21.340 my love of books with people. Um, but of course, like everyone, you know, what people see when I

00:46:27.600 talk to you here or when I make videos online or when I write about books is only a very small part

00:46:33.600 of me, you know, the, the part of me that is currently stressed because I'm behind on six

00:46:38.180 different deadlines and I've gotten a full inbox of people I need to get back to and all that side

00:46:43.560 of things, um, make it, make it a sort of, you know, at times a stressful job like any other,

00:46:49.900 but you can't compete with the, the opportunities that it provides for, um, for discovery and,

00:46:57.600 you know, that, that for me is the greatest, greatest pleasure in the world.

00:47:00.940 One or two more questions, and then I'll let you go, uh, to get back to your emails and so on.

00:47:06.600 Uh, will there ever be, so this is kind of a meta book question, will the antiquarian bookseller

00:47:13.540 ever write a book himself? Because by the way, as you're speaking, I almost feel you're sort of like,

00:47:20.700 and again, I think I'm giving you too many compliments. You're kind of, maybe it's the accent,

00:47:25.340 maybe it's the background, but I almost feel like I'm in a David Attenborough documentary the way

00:47:31.800 you speak. But instead of speaking about the great, uh, Kiskadi bird in Bermuda, you're talking about

00:47:37.700 some great, uh, you know, work of, uh, fiction or some book, uh, any chance, or are you thinking

00:47:45.220 about ever writing a book yourself, Tom? Um, I'm, I'm writing one at the moment. I'm not allowed to say

00:47:50.520 too, too much about it because my publishers haven't, haven't announced it yet, but a spring

00:47:56.780 of 2027, uh, it will be published. I'm working on the manuscript at the moment and I'm delivering it

00:48:03.040 early next year. Um, it will be about your life as a bookseller. Uh, it's, it's not autobiographical,

00:48:10.460 but it's a, it's a history of the world told through rare books and our encounters with them.

00:48:17.680 And this essence of books as historical artifacts that have more to share with us than simply the

00:48:23.740 text they contain. Will you send me a signed copy when it's out? Oh, absolutely. It'd be my pleasure.

00:48:29.700 Oh, and please return. So other than that project, uh, are there any other things that you're currently

00:48:36.040 working on that you'd like to share with us? Um, well, we're always cataloging new material. Um,

00:48:43.120 one thing we haven't talked about is, is a big part of our business, which isn't printed books,

00:48:48.060 but medieval manuscripts. So not things that were produced by the printing press in multiple copies,

00:48:54.600 but were handwritten by medieval scribes. Um, and therefore all of them are unique. Um, so my colleague,

00:49:02.920 um, uh, Sienna Wells, who specializes in medieval manuscripts for us, she's just published,

00:49:09.900 um, this publication, which came out a couple of weeks ago called saints and sinners, um, where we

00:49:17.420 explore the encounters between good and evil in medieval manuscripts. So you've got St. Michael

00:49:23.980 slaying the devil there. You've got beautiful medieval paintings of the last supper, um, and

00:49:29.840 so many other different, wonderful and interesting things. And I mean, those are extraordinary objects

00:49:36.920 to behold where you can see six, 700 year gold glimmering off the page back at you. It's a,

00:49:46.440 it's an incredible, um, incredible experience. Um, so, so yes, we're always, um, publishing catalogs.

00:49:55.040 We've got another catalog of, um, J.R.R. Tolkien's work that is currently in, in progress. And, uh,

00:50:00.860 the catalog after that will be on the, on the history of the Bayer tapestry ahead of it coming to,

00:50:06.600 to the UK next year.

00:50:07.920 Do you deal with, so in, in the rare medieval manuscripts, do you deal directly with say,

00:50:14.740 book restorers who are trying to improve the quality of, of the, of the books in question?

00:50:19.580 Yeah. We, we don't particularly, um, I'm really passionate about the, the integrity of these

00:50:28.900 things as historical objects. So wherever possible, I want to leave them as they are when they come to

00:50:36.460 me and not make a mark on them. Um, one of the things about what I was talking about earlier,

00:50:42.280 um, with, uh, the condition of books that's really important is that you have that

00:50:49.260 historical integrity and originality to it. And when you start restoring a book, if you're

00:50:56.500 adding new material to it, new bits of paper, new bits of leather, um, coloring it in to match

00:51:04.020 that to me dilutes the, um, the historical integrity of it as, as an object. So we want

00:51:12.040 our marks to be left on, on these things as, as little as possible and, and kind of pass them

00:51:17.380 on to their new owners as they are. It's a bit, it's a bit of a sort of ship of Theseus

00:51:22.320 problem where, you know, if you start taking these books apart and adding new things to them,

00:51:27.540 are they still really that original integral historical object?

00:51:32.560 Amazing. Uh, after we finished this interview and I get a quick lunch, I'm actually going to visit,

00:51:38.540 and this wasn't by design, it just the, the, the, the gods of books decided on it. The,

00:51:44.120 the place, the antiquarian bookseller where my family got me those two Orwell books that I,

00:51:51.060 I'm going to meet her at around probably 1.30. So in about an hour from now, I would love to connect

00:51:57.840 you two together because she has, and I don't know if this is of interest to you, but I think

00:52:01.980 you mentioned earlier, uh, Virginia Woolf. She has one of the biggest collections of Virginia Woolf,

00:52:08.720 you know, books and memorabilia and so on. So maybe it might be a good thing for you to,

00:52:13.760 to, to know of one another. How does that sound?

00:52:16.260 Yeah, no, that sounds, that sounds marvelous. Thank you very much.

00:52:19.000 And, and if I do uncover some unbelievable book that I purchased, I will be the first to email

00:52:24.740 you and tell you with glee that I just got a new book. Tom, I have to say one of the greatest

00:52:30.820 pleasures in terms of hosting someone on my show, your passion comes out of every one of your pores.

00:52:36.540 Thank you for all the wonderful stuff that you do. And please come back when your book comes out

00:52:42.800 in 2027. Thank you so much, Tom. Stay on the line so we can say goodbye offline. Cheers.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - September 08, 2025

My Chat with Tom Ayling - Bibliophile and Antiquarian Book Dealer (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_871)

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