My Chat with Tom Ayling - Bibliophile and Antiquarian Book Dealer (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_871)
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Summary
Tom Ayling is an Antiquarian Bookseller from London. He talks about how he got into the business, why he loves books, and why he doesn't want to go back to being an academic. And why he thinks that if he did go back into academia, he'd make a billion dollars.
Transcript
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One. Hi, everybody. This is Gatsad for The Sad Truth. I've had many, many, many illustrious
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guests, but few have engendered as much excitement as this next gentleman, because I think we are
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both geeks in our disposition. We both love books. Tom Ayling is an antiquarian bookseller.
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Thank you very much for having me, Dr. Sad. It's a pleasure to be here.
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Thank you. And please feel free to call me Gatad if you'd like, although I appreciate the proper
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etiquette, which we'd expect nothing less of a properly educated Brit. Okay, so I thought what
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we'd do is start with just your journey, right? I mean, you look pretty young. How does a young chap
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such as yourself become this glorious antiquarian bookseller?
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Well, that's very generous of you to put it that way. The sort of big moment for me,
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I was very fortunate, happened when I was quite young. I was 10 years old, and one of my favourite
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authors came to visit our school to talk to us. And then afterwards in the school library,
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she agreed to do a book signing. So I had very eagerly brought along a great pile of books
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for her to sign. And for me, like for everyone growing up, books are just vessels for stories.
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They are texts. And for the most part, what we get out of them are the stories that they tell us. And so
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I hadn't noticed that in my pile of books, six of them were paperbacks, and one of them was a hardback,
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for example. And she very patiently went through my pile of books, signing them for me. And she got to
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the final one, the hardback on the bottom. And she said, Oh, this one's a first edition. And I'd never
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Something about the cadence of it sounded very special to me.
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How old were you at that point? Sorry to interrupt.
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And then the next thing she said was incredible. She said, because it's a first edition,
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there's a mistake in it that I need to correct for you. So she signed the book for me and
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described it in Latin, of course. And then she turned towards the end of the book and with her
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pen, corrected this typo and handed the book back to me. And that object I received back
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was genuinely transformative. It was a different object to the one I gave her in the first place.
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And perhaps as a competitive 10 year old, it also had the quality of making it feel much
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more special than any of my classmates. And that was the real starter for me that books were
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historical artifacts, they could be things greater than just the texts that they hold. And it's been a
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long slippery slope into bibliomania ever since.
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Yes. Well, as you can see here, and I think I mentioned this when I invited you on the show,
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tsondoku, which I didn't know that term until a fan sent it to me, which refers to sort of the obsessive
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collecting of books. Okay, so you're 10 years old, you have this transformative moment. But then there is a
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big gap until you say, hey, 10 years ago, or however long ago it was, I'm going into this business. Did you
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study? I mean, were you an English lit major or a history major, or, you know, a book scholar, or not
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No, not at all. I didn't study it. It's not, I mean, this aspect of dealing with books, book history,
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treating books as historical artifacts, and the trade of antiquarian book selling, there's not really a
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direct university program for it. I was in the social sciences at university, I studied international
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relations, and became incredibly frustrated with it. And I had initially wanted to go into academia.
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But thankfully, while I was at university, I was working in a bookshop, and decided that ultimately,
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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
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after I graduated, I left the thoughts of academia behind and got a job as a as a trainee antiquarian
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bookseller at a bookshop close to where my then girlfriend's now wife lived.
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Wow. Well, of course, the antiquarian booksellers market gain is academia's lost.
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It's always as an academic, I hate when I hear that someone decided not to go into academia,
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but I can appreciate the romance of what you do now. So then how do you I mean,
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I've often when I play the game with my family, if I had a billion dollars, what would I do? And it
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invariably turns into I would basically become Tom Aylink. But although I wouldn't do it to sell them,
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I would do them, I would do it to hoard them into my in my beautiful mansion. How did you go about
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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
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romance of it. You know, how do you even enter such a market? Do you start with cheaper books,
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so that you can build the collection and then move on to the Hobbit? Or how does that work?
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Yeah, I mean, maybe it's maybe I'll talk initially about what to do if you're a if you're a collector,
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and that's, you know, what you want to go about. And then then we can perhaps get into the kind of business
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side, which is related, but but separate. The truth is, when you're collecting books, you can buy
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really, really incredible material on any budget. So the first old book that I bought, knowing it was
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old and special, didn't cost me very much. I think it cost me two or three pounds in a secondhand
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bookshop. And it was a copy of Richard Kipling's poetry in a beautiful leather binding. And that
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was an incredibly, you know, special object for me to have. And I sort of coveted it for a slightly
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unexplicable reason. But, you know, people often look at the rare book market, and they'll see that
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a copy of, you know, the Hobbit has just sold for 50,000 pounds, or a first edition of Frankenstein
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sold for a million dollars, and think that book collecting isn't for them. But there are many,
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many copies of be it the Hobbit or Frankenstein or any book of your choosing in the world that survive
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in both interesting editions that are less expensive than that and more affordable. But also
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at the level of the the individual copy can be incredibly interesting because of say, who owned
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it or annotated it or what's happened to that book in the course of its life after its publication. So
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sometimes having the kind of budgetary constraint of not having a billion dollars and just buying
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whatever you want, makes it more fun, because you have to think more laterally, and think more
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creatively. And perhaps look at books that you wouldn't give the time of day to. Otherwise, if you
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were this sort of, you know, billionaire book collector who could just buy first editions of every book they
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Can I engage in what I consider to be a flex, but it may not impress the antiquarian bookseller? Because
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to your point about operating within your means, although I don't know how much it costs, because it
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was a gift given to me by my family last year for my birthday. Are you ready, Tom?
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You ready? Hold on. One more. I'll do one more.
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Impressive or not much for an expert such as yourself?
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No, no, no. They're absolutely wonderful, wonderful things. I mean, there's something
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incredibly transporting in holding in your hands a first edition of a book, because you're
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seeing that as sort of the unexploded tinderbox, especially with two books like the ones you've
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just shown, 1984 and Animal Farm, when you think of the impacts that they had on the world,
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to think of them existing before they had that impact, you know, before they'd even been read.
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And you can hold in your hands when you're holding a first edition. In those cases, they're the first
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American editions, but they're published at the same time as the books in the UK. You're getting
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the very same experience of reading Animal Farm or 1984 as that book's first readers had, which is
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that unique privilege of reading a book before it was famous. Animal Farm, I think, is, no,
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and it's 1984, I think, is when the British public were polled at the book they lie most about having
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Yes. So, so perhaps in that case, it's especially, you know, significant, but also it gets you,
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it doesn't just get you closer to that book's earliest readers. You're getting closer to the
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author themselves. I mean, writing 1984, which was published in 1949, killed Orwell. He shouldn't
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have been up in Jura with poor heating, writing the book. He should have been resting and recovering
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and the process of actually finishing the manuscript of that, scholars now think is, you know, led
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directly to his, to his untimely death. So you are right there in the same universe as, as a great
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book's creator when you're holding a first edition. You know, you, again, not to overly
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compliment you, but in all the years that I've had wonderful conversations, you might be the first
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one to actually given me goosebumps as I heard your passion about these books. And actually, frankly,
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that's, that's how I decided to reach out to you because I had seen you. I love the fact that you do
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all this outreach to get people to love books through your YouTube channel, through your Instagram,
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and I was watching you. And, you know, usually when you go to your Instagram, if, if, if the
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algorithm picks up that you're interested in something, so now you're constantly in my feed,
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and I'm just sitting there consuming Tom Ayling. And so I love that because one of the things that
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I hear when let's say I'm lecturing or something is that, you know, my passion for whatever subject
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I'm teaching comes out, and it certainly comes out of each of your pores. I wanted to show you another
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one, which is the Holy Grail for me. And then I'll ask you to tell me what is the Holy Grail for you.
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Regrettably, it is not a first edition, Tom. Can you, without me showing you what it is,
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it looks as though it could be a first edition. You have no idea what this is, of course, not enough
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information. Not yet. Not yet. You ready? Can you read this?
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So this is a 1975 Franklin edition. Now, I went to Raptus Rare Books. I don't know if you know them.
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In Palm Beach. Exactly. On Worth Street. And I actually got the incredible honour of holding
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a first edition of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. Not wishing to put you on the spot,
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I know what I would price it at. I mean, if you have it in, it depends on the copy and the
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condition of it, but a sort of a decent copy in the original cloth binding in nice condition,
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Wow. That's almost exactly right. It was priced at $400,000. You're exactly, I mean, literally
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almost exactly right. Now, maybe we could talk about this and we can oscillate from the romance
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of book collecting to the business of book collecting, but what are the key factors that
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I mean, what lots of people are looking for when they're buying a first edition of a book
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is getting as close to the point of origin as possible. After all, that's why we want
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the first edition and not the 18th or 130th. So if that book was published in, say, the 20th
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century, then you'd be looking for a copy that is, you know, in nice condition. It's still
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got its dust jacket. It looks the same as it did the day it was published. And in that
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circumstance, you've got almost a kind of time capsule piece that is, you know, as it
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was when it first entered the world. With a book like Darwin's Origin of Species, of course,
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published in the 19th century, you don't have books published in dust jackets at the time
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of Origin of Species. You do get them later in the 19th century. But there you're looking
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for, you know, the sort of summer would be a, you know, a copy in the original cloth still
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gleaming in that green and gold in lovely condition. So originality is really, really
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important. But it is only one factor. And there are a multitude of things that can happen
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to a book in the decades or centuries after it was published, that can make it more valuable
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and interesting. It might have been owned by somebody important or owned by several people
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who were important. You know, Alfred Russell Wallace's copy of The Origin of Species would
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be interesting, as would David Attenborough's for that, you know, for that matter. And he does
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collect The Origin of Species, so that would make sense. But, you know, a copy that, you
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know, Darwin gave to somebody close to him, or even inscribed, would be kind of the pinnacle
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for a book like that. Sometimes it's fun to play a little game and, you know, you think
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of a book from history, and you think, well, what is the best conceivable copy in the world
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of that book? You know, whether that's Great Gatsby inscribed by Scott for Zelda, or, you
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know, I guess, Origin inscribed for Alfred Russell Wallace, or, you know, any of those
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things, you know, The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit inscribed for C.S. Lewis, you know.
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But aside from those kind of famous examples, you can just have a copy that perhaps of a book
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that has been annotated very vigorously by an early reader. And then, as we look through that
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copy, we are getting the sense of how people were responding to that book at the time, and how that's
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changed. If you look at books that are 500 or 600 years old, some of which, you know, I have behind
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me, these books have passed through many, many hands in the, you know, half a millennium that they've
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taken to get to the present day. And so, you can not just see the book at the time it was published,
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but all the different things that have happened to it since in those intervening centuries.
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You were mentioning sort of signed copies as being, of course, one of the markers of how
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expensive a book will be. On average, do we have a sense of how much added value a signature on a first
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edition brings? It, again, it all comes back down to rarity. So, there's no hard and fast rule.
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If it's an author who you literally can't stop them signing a book, you know, it might add little
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or no value to it. But if it's a reclusive author, for example, then, you know, it can add untold value.
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A book like 1984, for example, is published right near the end of George Orwell's life. And only one
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inscribed copy has been offered for sale. It's the copy he inscribed to Malcolm Muggerich, who is a
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British man of letters, who was very close to Orwell in his final days, attended his deathbed wedding
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to Sonia and visited him regularly in hospital. So, in an instance like that, where very, very few
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inscribed copies of that great work of literature are known, it can turn a, you know, five, ten thousand
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pound book to a, you know, quarter million pound book quite easily.
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Wow. Is there a difference? I mean, both in your personal preference, but more generally
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economically, between fiction, you know, fictional works versus non-fictional works in terms of
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how excited the antiquarian book collector or the bookseller will be?
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I mean, the wonderful thing about our world is that it's not kind of one homogenous market
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of rare books, but it's made up of all these wonderful little microclimates that can be
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incredibly small, you know, single author markets. So, you know, the market for a Tolkien book and the
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Tolkien market is very different to the Orwell market, just like the market for, you know, 19th
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century science books is different to 20th century psychology. So, all these different things have,
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I suppose, they're in different places on the sliding scale as to what's important. Condition,
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for example, plays a far bigger role in value when it comes to particularly modern books, but certainly
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works of literature than in general non-fiction. And that's in part because I think when you think
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of something like a dust jacket on a book in the 20th century, they can become so creatively central
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to our memory of the book that they're kind of really part of the book itself in a way that the dust
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jacket to a work of, say, science or mathematics or whatever, they're usually plainer, they might not even
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be decorated in any way. Certainly the early jackets for those books are simply, you know, printed titles
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on the covers and no pictorial element at all. So, simply in terms of kind of attractiveness and
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appeal, as well as sort of the sense that they're forming part of it as a historical object, they can
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In your pursuit of rare books, do you have a preference in terms of which of the ecosystems you'd like to
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I mean, for me, what I'm interested in is books that have the most to tell us. And by that, I mean, individual
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copies of individual books that reveal quite a lot to us about their time. So, these are often not books that are,
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you know, totemic or famous. A book like the Shakespeare First Failure, the first collected
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edition of Shakespeare's plays, it's a rare book that most people interested in books have heard of.
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It's a very valuable book worth, you know, 10 to 15 million dollars, depending on the sort of condition
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it's in. It is also sometimes an incredibly boring book, because many copies of it are just copies.
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You can read through it, but no one's annotated it. They haven't necessarily been owned by people
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throughout history. They don't always have a great sense of, or a great amount of things to tell us
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about Shakespeare's day and 17th century theatre, beyond the plays that they're reprinting for us.
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Whereas there are certain copies of less interesting or less famous books that have an outsized impact
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in terms of historical importance, if not monetary value. I'll give you a couple of examples. In the
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University of Rochester, there is a copy of Robert Burns's poems. It's an American edition printed in
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Philadelphia in the mid-19th century. And this is a book that you can buy copies of this edition
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of Burns's poems for 15, 20 pounds. It's not a valuable book. But the copy owned by the University
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of Rochester has an inscription in it. And the inscription, when you open it up, says,
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This is the first book bought by me after my escape from slavery. And now I give it to my son,
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Wow! Hold on a second. Hold on a second. I want to show you something. You see, Frederick Douglass?
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Wow! It's funny that you said University of Rochester, because when I was finishing off my PhD
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and looking for, you know, professorship, assistant professorships, one of the places that I was about
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to accept an offer was at the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester. Okay,
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let's go back. You said, I'm going to give you a couple of examples. That was an amazing one.
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Continue with some other ones if you have those.
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Well, one of my favorites is, do you know Procopius' secret history?
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So Procopius' secret history is his history of the court of the Emperor Justinian. So Byzantine
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Emperor, some people consider Justinian the final Roman Emperor. And Procopius was the court historian.
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He was a man of court. And he wrote the official history of Justinian's reign. But he also wrote
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this other book that in the earliest records is called his Anecdota, and is later called his
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secret history, which is kind of the truth about Justinian's reign that wasn't published in
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Procopius' own lifetime. And there was a good reason for that. It's incredibly,
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to say it's rude about the emperor is to understate it. He spreads all sorts of rumors about the
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emperor's wife being a child prostitute and them all engaging in group sex in the palace and the
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emperor himself being the devil incarnate. So it's an incredibly incendiary work. And this is written in
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the mid-sixth century and remains lost and unpublished for over a thousand years until a Vatican
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librarian around the year 1620 called Niccolò Alemani rediscovers the manuscript of it in the Vatican
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Library. And I went to the Vatican Library to see that manuscript and the first edition of the book
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that was published in 1623 last summer. And it's incredibly interesting because as you're going
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through the printed edition of the book that's published in 1623, you discover that Alemani took
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out all the juicy bits. So any reference to the Empress Theodora and what they were up to,
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or the incredibly scathing bits about Justinian, were not published when the book first came out
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in the 1620s. In part because Alemani was a man of the Vatican. He didn't want to embroil himself or
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his position in the church in scandal. But the copy of the book in the Vatican Library is very,
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very interesting because somebody has added extra pages at each of these sections where Alemani skips a
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bit. And they've handwritten in, in the 17th century, all those sex scandals and gossip and
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accusations that are left out of the published version. And that is one of the things that makes
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me so interested about this because printed books, by their nature, are objects that exist in
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multiples. They're naturally duplicated. But after 100, 200, 300, 400 years, no two copies of a book
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from the same print run are still the same object because people own them, people annotate them,
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they read them, they give them away, they lose them. All sorts of things can happen to them.
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That means that when these objects arrive to us here in the 21st century, they're totally different.
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And in this case, with the first edition of the Secret History in the Vatican Library, you're getting
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a full sense of what someone in the 17th century had to do to pursue knowledge.
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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
00:26:09.760
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
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Guardian newspaper a little over 100 years ago, I think just after the First World War, where they asked
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their readers to predict which author writing today would be most read in 100 years' time. And you had rich pickings
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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
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No, exactly. And he wrote a novel called The Foresight Saga, which is his most famous book. But, you know, if I
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owned a copy of The Foresight Saga in first edition and had it on my shelf here, it would take me years or decades
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to sell it. So, you know, it's really, really difficult to predict which authors are going to sort of, you know,
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rise above, you know, rise and separate themselves from the pack, and which authors will be considered,
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you know, simply period pieces. Going back, you know, in history, there are countless examples of
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this, people who were incredibly popular in their own day that don't have longevity.
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When you look at the playwrights of Shakespeare's day, you know, Shakespeare occupies, you know,
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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
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it's very, very difficult to predict anyone alive today that will be read in 150 years' time.
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It might be that nobody publishing novels right now is going to be considered, you know, a great
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writer after all of their contemporaries and perhaps the two generations that follow them are gone.
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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
00:30:01.500
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
00:35:06.020
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
00:35:23.960
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
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,
00:50:07.920
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.