The Pope's Bookbinder

Includes episodes on: hitchhiking cross-country and provoking arrest to get out of the cold, being itinerant in Europe, sleeping off an amphetamine high on the floor in William Burrough's Spanish hotel room, working at a bookbindery in Spain doing a special commission (in white morroco) for the Pope, and blackmailing the head of the Royal Ontario Museum Chapters about his youth are as much about the beat movement & drug culture as they are about books Snapshot of book culture in the 50s and 60s, including time spent in Spain at the Beat Hotel and in Paris at Shakespeare & Co. Compare to Larry McMurtry's Books: A Memoir (2009), Nicolas Basbane's Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book Hunter in the 21st Century (2003), David Meyer's Memoirs of a Book Snake (2001), Lawrence Goldstone's Used and Rare(1998), or John Baxter's A Pound of Paper (2005) Insider takes on the secrets of bookselling, including the risks of high-stakes auctions, dos and don'ts, costly mistakes, happy accidents, and wonderful finds Author is now a very well-respected and well-connected dealer who's been in the book business since 1967 Antiquarian memoirs have a built-in audience with a higher price-point 32 pp B&W photographs 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.