It's hard to make a rational case for publishing these expensive print showcases, notes the Guardian, but they are a defining aspect of the trade.
From the story...
I issued my first catalogue as a rare book dealer in 1982, while still lecturing in English at the University of Warwick, from which I resigned a couple of years later in order to deal full-time. By contemporary standards it was pretty fancy: photos of the best items, glossy paper, decent typesetting. I was a bit taken aback when my printer described it as "cheap and cheerful". Or maybe it was me he was referring to?
The contents, though, were hardly inexpensive: there was a first edition of Ulysses, a Virginia Woolf corrected typescript, and a number of excellent inscribed books, including TS Eliot (to his first wife), and Joseph Conrad (a pre-publication inscription of Almayer's Folly, his first book). But the catalogue was based on my personal collection, so the problem was how to do another one in six months' time, and another after that. It isn't easy to find the right books: I try to find unique material, and buy in ones, not in lots. When offered a library or collection of books, I pick out the best few, and refer the rest to dealers who are better at books in bulk (yuck) than I am.
For a time I kept up the (to me) hectic schedule of two catalogues a year – there are dealers who manage six – though mine never had more than a couple of hundred items in them. But as time went by, and email and the internet came to have a great influence on the trade, I've done fewer and fewer catalogues. Nowadays, I am lucky to get out one every 12 months, and limit them to 100 items.
We sent one out last week (Catalogue 34) and I wonder, a little, why I bother? Our catalogues cost £5,000 to print and distribute (in envelopes! with stamps!) to the 800 people on my mailing list, 790 of whom will not order from it. In the first five days after we sent it, we had so few phone calls that we began to suspect the phone was down.
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