Entertaining, moving, informative, intelligently hopeful: I know of few
other books like this one to warm the cockles of a booklover's heart.
--Alberto Manguel
For anyone who loves books too well--who lusts after them, lives in
them, mainlines them--David Mason's 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
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 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. He'll 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.
