Stuart Bennett Reflects on his First Year as President

All of you have by now received a copy of the ABAA's annual report.  I'm pleased to say that thanks to the support of our members and the continuing success of our book fairs, the Association is in good financial health.  And thanks to the hard work of Treasurer Tom Goldwasser and his Finance Committee the state of the Association's health is out there, transparent, for all to see.

We've achieved some important goals in the past year.  With respect to book fairs three's a good chance we'll add a fourth fair to our calendar next year, probably in Chicago.  Tough economic times make new book fairs a risky business, and we must also accept that over the last twenty years the ABAA has allowed independent fair producers and regional bookselling associations to preempt the calendar for smaller book fairs.  Any bookseller willing to break his or her back can easily do one or more book fairs a month without reference to the ABAA.  

I regret this.  If I were the CEO of a for-profit ABAA, which I thank all my stars I am not, I'd bring the ABAA into regional markets like Seattle and St. Petersburg and do my best to tempt our members with upmarket piggybacking on the fairs there, in the same way the satellite fairs do downmarket piggybacking on ours here in New York and elsewhere.  This is a personal view.  It is not ABAA policy nor likely to become so.

But the good news about our book fairs is that they're still the best places to be.  San Francisco is, I believe, the largest antiquarian book fair in the world, and New York is, in Andy Rooney's opinion, the best and, I would add, the classiest.  Los Angeles and Boston also make the running in their respective venues.  I take my hat off to all of the ABAA's book fair organizers, who've made these successes happen, year in and year out.

Our membership remains stable thanks to the referral and recommendation of new applicants by our members and the hard work of the ABAA's Membership Committee, led by Vice President Sarah Baldwin.  

John Thomson, ABAA Secretary, has spearheaded our successful negotiations for a new ABAA e-commerce site, to be operated by Bibliopolis, which has worked with many ABAA members already, and hosted by Biblio.com.  I'd like to encourage everyone in this room (and everyone who may read these remarks in the ABAA Newsletter) to spread the word.  It is an essential part of our marketing plan to try to persuade our members to upload to ABAA before they go to ABE or elsewhere.  It's in our members' interest because our site will charge no commission.  And it will be the most effective way to get the news out that ABAA is where the best books go first, and is therefore a site to watch and a site where collectors should enter their wants.  We are working to create a system whereby subscribers to our new site can upload their books and have them subsequently -- with a delay of each subscriber's choosing -- uploaded to commercial bookselling sites.  

I could go on and on citing the hard work of ABAA volunteers both on and off the Board of Governors.  But I won't keep you that long, except to point out the extraordinarily hard work that the Publications Committee and Susan Benne and Annie Mazes at Headquarters put into getting the new directory both to meet members' expectations and on the tables for distribution at the New York Book Fair.  Thank you all.

I also want to thank the entire Board of Governors for its hard work in accomplishing an important housekeeping move: consolidating chapters to give members more equal representation and to reduce the overall size of the Board.  For purposes of Board elections this meant amalgamating the Southwest and Southern California, and the Pacific Northwest and Northern California chapters, reversing steps taken in the expansionist days of the 1960s and 70s when the ABAA anticipated its membership would continue to increase by leaps and bounds.  We could not have managed this consolidation without the constructive support of the chapters involved, and especially ABAA Governors Ed Smith and Sam Hessel of the Pacific Northwest and Southwest chapters.  Nor could we have accomplished the By-Laws changes just approved by our members without the guidance of ABAA counsel Larry Fox.

I must now say goodbye to two governors whose terms have ended.  Both are old friends and I'll miss them.  Michael Thompson is a veteran of both the national Board and the Southern California Chapter and his experience and common sense have served us well on the many committees he's served.  David Szewczyk leaves us with places to fill at the head of both the House and Security Committees.  He leaves a legacy of thoughtful good government, and I know he'll need every extra minute to rebuild Philadelphia Rare Books and Mss after the devastating fire at its premised last month.  Thank you both.  And welcome to our new governors: Ken Karmiole from Southern California and Fran Durako from the Southeast.  And also to Mary Gilliam, who stepped into the breach when John Thomson became ABAA Secretary and now takes on a full term of her own.

Finally I'd like to say a word or two about a few of the problems facing us as booksellers.  I commented this time last year on the graying of our Association.  It's sixty years old this year, probably about the same age as the average of our members'.  We aren't attracting as many younger booksellers as we did twenty and more years ago and I hope that the expansion of the ABAA's book fair calendar and a state-of-the-art e-commerce site will help show that we're still at the cutting edge and that younger booksellers prepared to meet the ABAA's high standards should join up.

We also need to remember that the ABAA sets more than just book fair and Internet standards for antiquarian bookselling in this country.  We've seen the growth of commercial bookselling internet sites and I'm sure we've all heard from customers how disappointing it can be to order books on them only to discover that even if the book is the edition it's said to be, which sometimes it isn't, the physical description bears little if any relationship to the object received.  Our care for our descriptions is one of the many things that sets us apart.

And wasn't it only a few years ago that everyone was all abuzz about selling on e-Bay?  Now with that site seeming largely a dumping ground for unsaleable and often-defective retail or, as e-Bay calls them, "Buy it Now" items, the percentage of sales to listings, which seems to be a closely-guarded e-Bay secret, can't, as far as I can tell, be much more than twenty percent.  "I'm tired of getting burned," is a complaint I regularly hear.  We need to make sure that the ABAA continues to be the salve, at least for book collectors.

Sometimes when our Ethics Committee seems overwhelmed with complaints it's hard to remember that the ABAA is the standard bearer for ethics in antiquarian bookselling.  The Ethics Committee deals with disputes between members, complaints from customers, sellers, irregularities at Book Fairs...it goes on and on.  Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about this stuff, and I'm normally not even the first point of impact for those with grievances.  David Lesser is.  He's the chair of the Ethics Committee and he deals with each new arrival with a thoroughness and impartiality that I'm sure would put many judges to shame.

We require and enforce high ethical standards of our members, but the glue that binds us together is collegiality.  This collegiality sets us apart from the rest of the world of commerce.  When I hear of a member who doesn't pay his bills from other members promptly or at all, or the recent rumor that a member might either refuse to offer trade discounts or else mark up books for fairs in order that a discount does no more than return a price to its original retail, or members wrangling with each other for any other reason or no reason at all, it bothers me because these activities dissolve the collegial glue.

We're planning to revise guidelines and reminders for our members on certain aspects of our business in the hope that such reminders will help members avoid misunderstandings and disputes.  Among the areas we plan to address -- and we'd welcome additional suggestions -- are book fair etiquette, sample agreements for joint book ownership, and handling consignments.  For these last two we'll be working with counsel to provide sample agreements.  Written agreements protect you if something goes wrong with your partners or consignors, and protect your partners and consignors if something goes wrong with you.

One of the dangers members face is the temptation to use the proceeds of consigned and jointly-owned books as if the money were their own.  This is at best defalcation and at worst fraud.  And -- I'm speaking hypothetically here -- if a bookseller sells a consigned book and keeps the money, and then sells a book from another consignor and uses those proceeds to pay the first consignor, he's a bookselling Bernard Madoff.

Times are tough right now, tougher than I can remember even in the 1982 recession that hit us a couple of years after I started my own business.  The ABAA does its best to uphold standards for its members, to mediate between them and sometimes to defend them against unjust accusations.  The Association does a good job policing and defending, but it can only do so much before its volunteers are overwhelmed.  And it's important to remember that we are volunteers.  In purely commercial terms our volunteering makes us suckers.  We're giving away our time and energy for nothing.

One of the enduring pleasures of the thirty-five years I've been in this business has been the way I've seen booksellers help each other, not just with the long-standing and now-sometimes-endangered courtesies of trade discounts and deferred payment terms, but with bibliographical advice, marketing tips, heavy book fair lifting, and general good fellowship.  I'm sure everyone here has been on the receiving end of any number of good deeds, and have had the reciprocal pleasure of giving back.

Collegiality is what makes our trade special.  And our love of what we sell.  It's not for nothing that the ILAB motto is Amor librorum nos unit; the love of books unites us.  We need to continue that tradition, and to make sure our love for books carries over as far as possible to our attitudes towards our fellow booksellers.  We should continually ask ourselves as we conduct our businesses whether we are treating our colleagues and customers as we would wish to be treated ourselves.  And of course we need to maintain the highest standards of description when we offer our books for sale.  By doing so I think we'll find that even, or maybe especially, in a troubled economy that those still willing and able to buy books will seek us out.  Maybe not to the exclusion of all others.  But as preferred purveyors.  

Thank you all for coming to this Annual General Meeting, which I now declare adjourned.

Stuart Bennett Rare Books
stuart@sbrarebooks.com

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