Our series profiling the next generation of antiquarian booksellers continues today with Jason Rovito, proprietor of Paper Books in Toronto.
How did you get started
in rare books?
Nausea.
I was working on my dissertation and not feeling particularly pleasant about
academic life. And medieval Bologna charmed me. Especially the scenery of the
early university--with professors and students conducting their business in
rented brothel rooms, while the Papacy plotted to build some spectacular
academic palace, at the centre of which was an anatomy theatre, with its
lecturer's chair supported by two flayed statues. Within all this, I started
paying attention to the booksellers, and to the ways in which they supplied the
material that allowed this academic drama to play out. (Rather than sell full
manuscripts, they tended to rent out individual quires; an early form of the
packet-switching model that built the Internet). Blah blah. When Atticus Books
announced that it was retiring its bricks-and-mortar, and there were bookcases
and shop-stock to be had, I applied for academic leave and opened up an
upper-floor scholarly shop and seminar space. As a business, the project was
totally unsustainable (to be kind). But it got me handling books to pay rent. And
I was able to stay afloat long enough to find my way to CABS (thanks to a
scholarship from Foreseeing Solutions). CABS was a total revelation and I started
to appreciate that a rare book is much more than just an expensive (non-rare)
book. Since then, I've been trying to figure out my way into the trade.
When did you open Paper
Books and what do you specialize in?
The "Paper Books" shtick started last
Spring, while being evicted (more or less) from my first open shop. To raise
money for the move, I needed to launch a crowd-funding campaign, but I didn't
want to play the charity card. Since I was in the process of developing a new website,
I figured I'd link the two projects together by hijacking the language of subscription:
i.e. "subscribe to paper books, to add depth to
your screen." I still think that this hybrid style
of retail can work (inbox as foyer). But I realized after CABS that my
skill-set isn't suited for retail, and that my time would be better spent
working on quotes, catalogs, and fairs. It's been almost a year of fumbling
around in transition. But I think I'm almost ready to confess as "Jason Rovito,
Bookseller." It'll be my third name and hopefully the hardest one to shake off.
As for specialization--it's something I'm
still rather anxious about. I've known for a while that I'm interested in the
nineteenth-century, especially as something that almost happened. But every
time I try to further narrow the focus, something from the periphery catches my
attention (likely because the cost-of-entry at the periphery is much lower). My
latest intuition is that I should just embrace this anxiety as a bibliographic
tool, and become known as "that guy who's really anxious about the
nineteenth-century." For starters, that's got me trying to catalog
nineteenth-century myth, with keywords like [Commercials], [Hygiene],
[Weekend], [White Collar], and [Wireless].
What do you love about the book trade?
Its ethics. It doesn't always happen (by
a long stretch), but it's possible that a single deal in the book trade can
bring value to everyone involved: the creators, the created, the sellers, the
buyers, and the dealers. And I don't mean that in a high-horse kind of way; ethics
can be really pleasurable. The friendships that emerge at CABS are great
examples of what's possible from a trade that (at its best) doesn't involve
zero sum games; where a part of the profits can be shared, especially through
meals, drinks, and conversations. In 2013, I'm not sure that many other jobs
can offer the same health benefits.
Favorite rare book (or
ephemera) that you've handled?
Deutsche Menschen by Detlef Holz (one
of the pseudonyms of Walter Benjamin). It was my first year in the trade and I
was fortunate to be brought-in on an impressive estate; the reconstituted
library of a Jewish exile from Nazi Europe. As the junior dealer, I was
supposed to box-up and haul-off the hundred-plus boxes of common books. But I
was also invited to pull aside a handful of rare books before other dealers
arrived. I'd selected eight books that I could afford to make offers on,
including this pseudonymous work of Benjamin's, which was published in
Switzerland and specifically designed to be smuggled into Germany (which it
was, successfully, until the censors got wise to the second printing). As I was
packing haul-off boxes into the rental van, an employee for an institutional
library arrived in the driveway, said hello, and asked whether I was the
grandson. I said no, I'm a local bookseller. He quickly darted into the house.
When I got back inside, my pile of books had been reduced from eight to two;
one of the two being the Holz (smuggled once again).
What do you personally collect?
Booksellers' catalogs, IOUs, road trips.
Stories, mostly injury-related; really tall fish.
On your website, you mention that collecting is a "social
activity." Could you elaborate on this idea?
I guess the basic idea is that, unless
you collect dust, you never just collect as a solitary individual. But that's
probably an all-too-obvious point for collectors themselves, since they primarily
interact with society whilst collecting. And so, by definition, the activities
that build their collections are necessarily social. But probably even more
social are the abstract decisions that inform what (or whether or how) to
collect in the first place. An iTunes library is still a library, and an
e-reader is nothing more than a digital collection of texts; it's just that the
collecting is being filtered through the social parameters of the screen,
rather than through paper-based media.
Which is maybe why the bookseller--rather
than the collector or the librarian--is often the only actor within this system
without a salary. I.e. when money starts to dry up in the trade, it's the
bookseller who's motivated (by survival) to stress the social nature of
collection and the social consequences of any changes to how we collect as a
society. Paper-based collections are built through curiosity, conviviality, and
travel (amongst other social things). And the bookseller is the first to suffer
when these values can no longer pay rent. Blah blah (chirps this canary).
All that aside: I've never been much of
a reader. As a kid, I used to withdraw bags of dinosaur books from the library,
shut them up in my closet, and return them three months overdue. So this
"collection" angle helps me sleep at night.
Thoughts on the present
state and/or future of the rare book trade?
I think it's fair to say that this is a
period of adaptation. But I'm sure the trade will remain familiar enough.
Private collectors will continue to be fascinated by their particular fascinations,
even if they work with auction houses and search engines in a more direct
fashion than before. And libraries will continue to collect what they don't
have, as long as they continue to be granted budgets with which to do so. (And
maybe, in that sense, the politics of austerity will have more of an impact on
the book trade than digital technologies.) Urban landlording, through rent
inflation, seems to have shrunk the cashflow-margins that most bookshops relied
upon; so I'm skeptical that any one city can support more than a handful of
open shops at a time. And that makes the pop-up model--whether through fairs or
markets or bars or sidewalks--potentially more relevant to those who might not have
considered it before. (Although the schlepping is a barrier to entry; says the
one with bad shoulders.) It'll be interesting to see how this change in retail
models will effect browsing traditions, especially in terms of sections and
depth of stock; when you don't have an affordable ten-year lease in your back
pocket, it's harder to develop a German History or Theatre section.
But it's also likely that the trade will
expand into rather unfamiliar territory--perhaps in search of some of the
dollars that have been diverted elsewhere (to rents and cell-phone contracts). By
now, on the everyday level, the screen has supplanted paper as popular medium, so
that--strangely--non-rare books have themselves acquired some degree of rarity. I.e.
when you happen to come across someone who's reading a book, and you compare
her to someone who's palming a screen, it's now obvious that the book isn't
only providing her with information, but it's also producing a particular
posture in her, and a certain mode of attention. A number of booksellers--in
their own styles--seem to be hunting for the value within this strangeness (i.e.
Heather O'Donnell's bees or D.
Anthem's zombie-vaccine). But this
probably isn't all that different from Rosenbach hyper-linking the steamship
with the auction house; the tradition of the trade is entrepreneurial, which is
a source of real (and non-sentimental) inspiration.
Any upcoming fairs or catalogues?
For this summer, I'm working with colleagues
to carve out a weekend curiosity
shop
from the front of our shared office space. I thought I'd already sworn off
retail (twice), but it's a good group of people involved, and the location has
promise. If I can settle into a rhythm, I'm also hoping to issue a digital
catalog on Charles H. Kerr & Company. It'll be the fourth--and likely last--catalog
that I design with the subscription service Mailchimp. Past examples (like Withdrawn) have
generated great feedback. But it's just pure windmills trying to compete for
screen-attention with (free) gossip & pornography. For the autumn I'm
working to publish my first print catalog, on those nineteenth-century myths
I'd mentioned before. But the material never seems to want to sit still long
enough.
Call it the ultimate in book preservation or the fuller realization of the book as a work of art, or the inevitable resting place for the codex -- a framed first edition. The Jones Brothers, a luxury book boutique in London, unveiled this week a line of framed books. The collectible books are protected behind UV-blocking glass and sealed in to prevent dust from accumulating. Inside the frame, the book sits on a tightly suspended acid-free ribbon to hold it in place, thus ensuring no harm to the book. 
