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POPE'S BOOKBINDER: A MEMOIR.|THE
by Mason, David
- Used
- Condition
- See description
- Seller
-
New Castle, Delaware, United States
33 Copies Available from This Seller
(You can add more at checkout.)
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2013. 6 x 9 inches. paperback. 6 x 9 inches. (x), 11-462, (2) pages. First paperback edition but this printing includes a chapter "The Hemingway Heist" that is not in the first printing.
"For anyone who loves books too well-who lusts after them, lives in them, mainlines them-David Masons memoir will be a fix from heaven. Heartful, cantankerous, droll, his tales of honour and obsession in the trade gratify the very book-love they portray. An irresistible read."
-Dennis Lee
"Entertaining, moving, informative, intelligently hopeful: I know of few other books like this one to warm the cockles of a booklovers heart."
-Alberto Manguel
"An atmospheric, informative memoir by a Canadian seller of used and rare books... Gossipy, rambling and enchanting, alive with Mason's love for books of every variety."
-Kirkus Reviews
From his drug-hazy, book-happy years near the Beat Hotel in Paris and throughout his career as an antiquarian book dealer, David Mason brings us a storied life. He discovers his love of literature in a bathtub at age eleven, thumbing through stacks of lurid Signet paperbacks. At fifteen he's expelled from school. For the next decade and a half, he will work odd jobs, buck all authority, buy books more often than food, and float around Europe. Hell help gild a volume in white morocco for Pope John XXIII. And then, at the age of 30, after returning home to Canada and apprenticing with Joseph Patrick Books, David Mason will find his calling.
Over the course of what is now a legendary international career, Mason shows unerring instincts for the logic of the trade. He makes good money from Canadian editions, both legitimate and pirated (turns out Canadian piracies so incensed Mark Twain that he moved to Montreal for six months to gain copyright protection). He outfoxes the cousins of L.M. Montgomery at auction and blackmails the head of the Royal Ontario Museum. He excoriates the bureaucratic pettiness that obstructs public acquisitions, he trumpets the ingenuity of collectors and scouts, and, in archives around the world, he appraises history in its unsifted and most moving forms. Above all, however, David Mason boldly campaigns for what he feels is the moral duty of the antiquarian trade: to preserve the history and traditions of all nations, and to assert without compromise that such histories have value.
Sly, sparkling, and endearingly gruff, The Pope's Bookbinder is an engrossing memoir by a giant in the book trade-whose infectious enthusiasm, human insight, commercial shrewdness, and deadpan humour will delight bibliophiles for decades to come.
"For anyone who loves books too well-who lusts after them, lives in them, mainlines them-David Masons memoir will be a fix from heaven. Heartful, cantankerous, droll, his tales of honour and obsession in the trade gratify the very book-love they portray. An irresistible read."
-Dennis Lee
"Entertaining, moving, informative, intelligently hopeful: I know of few other books like this one to warm the cockles of a booklovers heart."
-Alberto Manguel
"An atmospheric, informative memoir by a Canadian seller of used and rare books... Gossipy, rambling and enchanting, alive with Mason's love for books of every variety."
-Kirkus Reviews
From his drug-hazy, book-happy years near the Beat Hotel in Paris and throughout his career as an antiquarian book dealer, David Mason brings us a storied life. He discovers his love of literature in a bathtub at age eleven, thumbing through stacks of lurid Signet paperbacks. At fifteen he's expelled from school. For the next decade and a half, he will work odd jobs, buck all authority, buy books more often than food, and float around Europe. Hell help gild a volume in white morocco for Pope John XXIII. And then, at the age of 30, after returning home to Canada and apprenticing with Joseph Patrick Books, David Mason will find his calling.
Over the course of what is now a legendary international career, Mason shows unerring instincts for the logic of the trade. He makes good money from Canadian editions, both legitimate and pirated (turns out Canadian piracies so incensed Mark Twain that he moved to Montreal for six months to gain copyright protection). He outfoxes the cousins of L.M. Montgomery at auction and blackmails the head of the Royal Ontario Museum. He excoriates the bureaucratic pettiness that obstructs public acquisitions, he trumpets the ingenuity of collectors and scouts, and, in archives around the world, he appraises history in its unsifted and most moving forms. Above all, however, David Mason boldly campaigns for what he feels is the moral duty of the antiquarian trade: to preserve the history and traditions of all nations, and to assert without compromise that such histories have value.
Sly, sparkling, and endearingly gruff, The Pope's Bookbinder is an engrossing memoir by a giant in the book trade-whose infectious enthusiasm, human insight, commercial shrewdness, and deadpan humour will delight bibliophiles for decades to come.
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Details
- Bookseller
- Oak Knoll Books/Oak Knoll Press
(US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 129019
- Title
- POPE'S BOOKBINDER: A MEMOIR.|THE
- Author
- Mason, David
- Format/Binding
- 6 x 9 inches
- Book Condition
- Used
- Quantity Available
- 33
- Publisher
- Biblioasis
- Place of Publication
- Windsor, Ontario
- Date Published
- 2013
Terms of Sale
Oak Knoll Books/Oak Knoll Press
All items are offered subject to prior sale. We accept payment with Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, wire transfers in US$, personal or business checks if in US$ drawn on a US bank, and PayPal to orders@oakknoll.com. Invoices and shipments are processed and shipped within 5 business days (excluding weekends and holidays.) Orders in the USA are normally shipped using the US Post office. Other services such as UPS, air mail through the US Post Office and FedEx are available upon request. Foreign shipments are sent via USPS International Mail (either USPS First Class International Mail or USPS Priority International Mail, depending on package weight). In the US, please include US $7.50 for first volume and US $1.00 each additional volume. If ordering outside the US, postage is $30.00 for a single volume unless the book is very large. Postage for heavy books and larger quantities is based on weight. Books are returnable within two weeks. Please notify us before returning a book. Thank you.
About the Seller
Oak Knoll Books/Oak Knoll Press
Biblio member since 2006
New Castle, Delaware
About Oak Knoll Books/Oak Knoll Press
Oak Knoll Books was founded in 1976 by Bob Fleck, a chemical engineer by training, who let his hobby get the best of him. Somehow making oil refineries more efficient using mathematics and computers paled in comparison to the joy of handling books. Oak Knoll Press, the second part of the business, was established in 1978 as a logical extension of Oak Knoll Books. Oak Knoll Books is a thriving company that maintains an inventory of about 20,000 titles. Our main specialties are books about bibliography, book collecting, book design, book illustration, book selling, bookbinding, bookplates, children's books, Delaware books, fine press books, forgery, graphic arts, libraries, literary criticism, marbling, papermaking, printing history, publishing, typography & type specimens, and writing & calligraphy - plus books about the history of all of these fields.
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