 Thank you for joining us for our online program at Mechanics Institute for Once Upon a Tome, The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller with author Oliver Darkshire in conversation with events assistant Pam Troy. If you are new to the Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854 and we are one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. We feature our General Interest Library, an international chess club, an ongoing author and literary programs, and Friday night please come to our Cinema Let's Film series. Visit our website at milibrary.org for all of the things that we offer you. After our talk, we'll have a Q&A with you, our audience. Also we'd like to refer you to City Lights Bookstore for purchasing books. Well, for those of you book lovers who linger over the dust, the must and the leather covers you are in for a treat with Oliver Darkshire's new book Once Upon a Tome, today he's going to reveal to us the mysteries and the histories of Southerlands, one of the oldest bookstores located in London, and I'd like to introduce our guests. Oliver Darkshire is an antiquarian bookseller at Henry Southerland, limited in London, and the voice of Southerland's Twitter account. He lives in Manchester, England with his husband and his neglectfully curated collection of books. And Pam Troy, who's our moderator and host today, has worked at the Mechanics Institute since 2003, managing events and helping program and run our weekly Cinema Let's Film series. She has worked as a bookseller, a publishing assistant, a freelance writer, publishing occasional articles and short stories, and she is currently working on a fantasy novel. So please welcome a conversation with author Oliver Darkshire and Pamela Troy. Hi, thank you, Laura. So I think the best place to start is always at the beginning, and I wanted to ask you, Oliver, about how you fell into being an apprentice antiquarian bookseller. Did you, the description in the book sounds as though you just kind of walked in when you saw an advertisement. Could you talk about that? Were you in the habit of going in to use bookstores before that, or antiquarian bookstores? So I'm firm in the belief that no one becomes an antiquarian bookseller sort of on purpose. It sort of seems to happen by accident to almost everyone. I wasn't in the habit of going to rare bookstores at all. I actually didn't know a difference really between an old bookstore and an antiquarian one and or a secondhand bookstore. The fact there was any difference between them never went to book fairs. I ended up going because Sutherans, the bookstore, they made a little bit of a mistake. They were looking for an apprentice in the in the Dickensian sent to sweep chimneys and clean floors and things. And the UK government had this apprenticeship scheme under the same name. They were using to train hairdressers and electricians and so on. And Sutherans thought that's some free money. We'll hire an apprentice. So they went to this. They put it up on the government website alongside all these apprenticeships lay tracks and fix wires and so on. And so I was applying to everything I could because I'm hopeless. And this was one or many of my stops through the city trying to find something that would pay me. And I wandered in one day and sat down. Manager looked at my very short CV and said, I see you play the trombone. And that was the end of that. He found that so funny, so inherently amusing that I got a call the same afternoon with the job. So, yeah, a decade later, here I am. So antiquarian booksellers are not necessarily born there. May they kind of fall into the into the into the profession. You become. Yeah. Yeah, you become. So would you be willing, could you please read as there are a section of the book you could read for us just to give us a taste of this delightful book? Which I have read about twice now. It's very nicely said. Yes, but for my favorite section, which is about the which is about our archives. It starts with these other ones website. Which until very recently was this kind of magnificent testament to early computing and it was almost entirely non-functional. And sort of when you operated it, you kind of hear the clickety clack of Babbage's ghost in the back of your mind. The process for buying a book was so Byzantine that it was functionally impossible to order anything without waiting several days for someone to remember to check the website for orders and if they were feeling very generous to respond. The website actually interfered with the ability of a shop to take money from customers to the point where the number of sales every year was lucky to reach double figures. To my mind, that anyone managed successfully to navigate it at all proved that we had some very determined customers. The pedestrian performance of the nigh unusable website was taken by proof sort of as proof by sovereigns that the Internet was clearly a poor way of selling books and that it would be foolish to invest in a better website. This kind of self-fulfilling property happily sustained itself over 20 years whilst the website remained out of sight and out of mind. A large part of it was dedicated to reminding people how old Henry Sutherland Limited truly is. The year 1761 is a long way back for bookshops, which notorious of being run to the ground by booksellers in the grip of debts, scriveners plagued by addictions or owners who mysteriously vanished without a trace. The site described Sutherlands as the oldest bookshop in the world, which was almost but not quite the truth. When it came to making Sutherlands look prestigious and ancient, my colleague James was a wellspring of creative ideas and fascinating recollections to which he was the only witness. He had a litany of things he was convinced were true about Sutherlands, which he repeated so often and with such earnest conviction that eventually everyone else started internalizing them without ever really bothering to look into them. Was Sutherlands mentioned in a passage by Evelyn Moore? Yes, he assured us. Or was it Woodhouse? It changed with the wind. Did Sutherlands have a royal warrant? Yes, most assuredly, but it was lost, expired, destroyed in an accident. Historical evidence was like vintage wine to James in that he theoretically kept it in reserve for a special occasion, but no event ever seemed quite special enough to warrant deploying it. The oldest bookshop in the world, Matty, was about as blatant a thing as Evelyn insisted upon, not least because we received periodic veiled threats from a bookshop in Peru, which laid claim to the title and seemed to take our assertion as a personal insult. Regardless of the specifics, Sutherlands is veiled in the kind of mystique and legend that can only be found orbiting an institution with genuinely rich heritage. As such, the website waxed lyrical to Sutherland history in a way that was exceedingly enticing to a certain kind of person. And no small wonder that we attracted researchers like flies to a scholarly dung heap. Many antiquarian booksellers have a deep-seated fear of well-meaning academics. University-types with lots of qualifications embody the kind of thorough, diligent curiosity that a bookseller wants to keep miles away from his stock, his business, and in certain cases, his accounting. Perhaps to James' impressive stream of confident bardic flourishes, or maybe the fact that Sutherland's labels and catalogs are found scattered across the whole of Britain, industrial scholars are constantly finding their way to our door with burning questions, emails with a subject heading, a request, nervous phone calls, and even sternly-headed letters cross our threshold almost every day, asking in more or less polite tones to know the answer to some titbit of Sutherland's law, on which hinges the fate of 20 years of painstaking work. Have you a copy of the 1871 Sutherland's catalogue and Bird to Paradise, that they say? Or, I'm investigating the life of Horace Moneybother. I do believe it was a client of yours back in 1901. Do you have these purchase records? When colleges and universities are on term time, requests come faster and more frequently than genuine book orders or actual clients, and it would take several full-time posts to diligent research and answer them. As the lowly apprentice, there was a time when I attempted to engage with these requests until I started to comprehend that the emails were being passed down to me not because anyone really expected me to deal with them, but because giving them to me meant there wasn't anyone else's desk. The important thing I eventually ascertained was that the task had been delegated, and with any luck, that would be the last anyone had to think about it. I will never forget Andrew's face, as I tried to apologetically explain why I couldn't fulfill a particular project. He had himself passed to me several days earlier. He looked completely mystified, as if he couldn't begin to fathom why, just because he had given me a task, I'd set myself on such a noble, self-sacrificing and destructive course of inquiry as to complete it. That's, I think that one thing I like about your book is your command of language, and there's a particularly very British humor running through it. It's a combination of understatement, very large vocabulary, and just timing for a straight race with prose. One thing, a question that occurred to me when I was reading your book is, how do you feel about, I know that a lot of librarians and booksellers, say they hate it, but how do you feel about marginalia? How do you feel about notes left? Do you ever have books that have extensive notes left by previous owners or? Oh, the arguments we could have over this one, I've had a few. So, as a rule of thumb, and don't quote me on this, but so the older a book is, the more likely you can call it marginalia and charge for it. So if you have sort of a Latin primer from 1700 and some child has scribbled obscenities all over it because they hated Latin, which happened to happen last year, that was entertaining, then that's historical context. And you can add an extra zero to the asking price. If it's from 1980s and someone you don't know has scribbled all over on the inside and we can't prove who it was, then it's more likely to be looked at as kind of undesirable damage, you know? And it's about finding the line between somebody looking at it as important context and wanting to preserve it for some reason and somebody who's just thrown in all over the book. You know, there's a there's a fine money. Each collector is going to see it differently. So we have to use our discretion to try and say that's worth something. That's damage, you know? And I guess we're the ones who make the choice a lot of the time, but it's it's easy. Personally, I love it. I think it adds context to any book. I don't care whose notes it is. I think it means that someone has cared about it enough to make make something of themselves that turns it into a new object, but not all collectors agree with me. So. Well, your book does this wonderful job of combining. I almost want to say the romance associated with older books with the hard realities of selling of antiquarian books or selling rare books. I think one point you make is even if a book is very rare, that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be able to sell it or that it's going to be you're going to be able to make money off of it. But the point about marginalia kind of brings that up. I mean, personally, I'm the same way. Personally, even if something it's something somebody wrote in about, you know, about maybe the 1970s, it's still kind of a bit of the history of the book. It tells you something about whose hands it passed through. And a lot of your stories, I noticed, were entertaining because they talked about that. You were talking about the personalities of the people, even if what they were selling, trying to get you was not something you could make money off of the stories behind these collections and these people were interesting and were engaging. Yeah, I think it's part of what people buy into when they become book collectors in a way and they're buying into the, I guess, romance, a good word for it, kind of the romance of bookselling. It's what keeps customers coming in. You know, they like not only the book, but the fact that the book belonged to someone before them, that it will belong to someone probably after them as well, that they're kind of caretakers in this community of book interested people and booksellers are a part of that system. You know, one of the cogs that keeps the dream going, if you will. You know, the industry kind of lives and dies on this idea that a life with books in it is somehow magical. And that's part of what I wanted the book to be. It had to be equal parts of romance and equal, you know, which would therefore made it also realistic. But that was kind of balance we wanted to trade when writing it. You mentioned, I mean, one of the most fascinating mentions in your book is about poisoned books. I was noticing the American cover for the American edition of the book looks like this. And you mentioned in your in in the book that one of the danger signs for especially old books from the 19th century was a bright green cover because they are infused with arsenic. Yes. Oh, little joke. And I have to forgive us. So, yeah, in essence, I mean, the arsenic is the big one you have to keep an eye out for when it's easy to notice because the books have this this bright green color usually and because they usually sort of Victorian, they haven't faded as much as red or purple. Well, green doesn't fade quite as quickly. So usually quite easy to identify. You see a book that's bright green, I think again, wash your hands before eating folks. But, you know, all kinds of treacherous books come in, sometimes laden with various devices people have used to stop their books to cane agents, which are usually not very friendly. People over the years, lots of chemical ideas to try and stop the cloth decaying and stop because it's all organic. It all fades and rocks. Most of them are just just don't eat them. Wash your hands off the hand of your red books, books. Well, don't go before turning a page. Maybe just in the name of the road. It's the terrible idea. So, yeah, we do we get our fair share of poison books. And I have a little bookmark somewhere from somebody came and left it with me that has a little grades of green and says poison, not poison, which is quite fun. Get your hands on one of those. Well, that's that's fascinating. And then one of the things I noticed in your book also is you have these wonderful illustrations, often of non-book items that they brought in, particularly gourds. That was that was very that was especially fascinating. Are there are there's some non-book items you didn't mention in your book that people have brought in and somehow lumbered you with and left left behind? Gosh, and people are leaving stuff all the time. They just shed things and broken umbrellas. They've people love to come in and leave broken umbrellas with us. And then people will steal the broken umbrellas, thinking they're not broken. So it's a cycle of life going on. Gosh, there's stores and a chair with a big hole in it that we keep for aesthetic purposes. And people keep trying to sit on it. And we have to run over and say, don't sit in it. It will. It's a death trap. Mostly broken things that have a circle down to us and kind of found the home. We have a big press that we we squash books in when they've been fixed or refurbished or whatever. Or if they do, if they go funny, funny shape in the sun, we have a great big massive iron press and we just screw down to keep them or sit back into shape. That's fun. But lots of things hanging around that bookstore. So my understanding is that you are not present at Sutherland. As much as you were. But you are you are now you're living in Manchester now. Yeah, these days, I'm a bit like their friendly ghost. You're their friend. Like, have you had any adventures since then with used books? I mean, with that query. So when I moved up where I thought, I'll I'll go to the local bookstores, I'll make some friends. You know, I'll get out the house. I've been out for two years. I'll go to the local bookstore. So I left the house to try and find some bookstores and found that most of them were phantasms. They had websites, but no physical premises or they were an attic that never opened. Or and I was reaching the end of my tether when I decided I would go to a colleague's bookstore and said, this one's got a good website. They're still selling stuff. They have to be there. I went two hours out of my way and find that there was a crater with a bookstore. Literally a crater. I don't know what happened to it. What where it went. Why someone decided to evict the entire bookstore and its foundation out of the ground and some found the last 12 years. But something something happened to that bookstore. And I will find out. Well, that's that's that's that's a pity. I mean, that's kind of a sad story. Isn't it? Where did they all go? Where? How would you move? Well, that's I have a lot of questions. Well, I will brick and mortar bookstores. There are a lot of them, you know, are disappearing, sadly. Which kind of brings me up when, you know, about something that occurs to me about one useful purpose and aquarium and even used bookstores serve. And that is just the solidity of books. Let's talk about for a minute, the solidity of a book with pages as opposed to reading something on a Kindle or reading something written in light on a screen. There's something, you know, I would call it textual integrity. You know, if I go, for instance, into an archive of magazines and I open a bound set of time magazine from the 1930s, I am looking at exactly what a 1930s reader looked at. And I am not always positive about that. If I'm reading something online in an online archive, I think that, I mean, do you feel that username aquarium bookstores serve a certain purposes as far as preserving books in their original, the text, not just books, but the text in its original form? Yeah, I think I'd agree. I mean, when they mooted of the internet as an idea, not that long ago, part of the attraction to it was that we would have this eternal record of everything. Not really realizing that, of course, the internet largely relies on having physical disk space to store things on. Somebody has to host it. And if you are a library, for instance, digitizing things on archive, keeping someone has to pay for that storage, that space. Not only that, but it's very easy to alter in a way that forging a rare book isn't. Like, it's much more difficult to make forgeries and alterations to a physical book. So I think I'd agree on that. And conversely, strangely, actually, the physical record is more reliable than the... It's a bit like without security, it's other ones. The most precious things, we don't put them behind the electronic log, put them in a great big safe, but no one knows how to pick a big lock anymore. People could easily get in past electronic sensors or pass the Wi-Fi security. I guess they really wanted to, but they're really important things. Lock them in a great big box with a key, because no one's learning how to pick a lock anymore. And I feel it's a similar deal. I hope people have invested heavily into online shenanigans, leaving physical world japes behind. And I feel like that's important to recognize. So one of the things that's occurred to me is as time goes on, they're obviously the concept of an antiquarian book or even a rare book is going to change. And one of my questions had to be, it has to do with mass market paperbacks, which kind of flooded the market in the 70s and 80s. And a lot of those are left. Do you foresee them becoming, are there rare editions? I know that there are some pulp novels or rare editions, you see mass markets becoming at some point a rarity, not only because sometimes that's the only edition of a book, but because they're rather ephemeral physically, they can, they follow up hard quickly. It's really tricky. I've thought about this, my colleague and I work in literature, we talk about this a lot and we're out buying books and we're deciding what to pick up and what to save and what to put a price on and say, this is valuable. And the fragility of it is it's important because as you say, there aren't that many left after a while, even the best will in the world, paperbacks fall apart soon as you look at them. When you get to 30 or 40 years, they become really fragile, particularly if the paper's not very good quality and they all vanish, but the collectors for the most part, they ask us for hardbacks usually. So we're in a strange place where we're buying the things that we think will make money. So we buy the hardback first edition. And in the meantime, the paperbacks quietly fritter away and are in boxes somewhere and then when it might never be seen again. So I think in time, paperbacks are sometimes harder to find than the hardbacks, because the farther back you go, it probably depends on your genre as well and to publish a history sometimes. If the book was published in paperback first, obviously it's easier to justify putting it on the shelves and saying to a collector it was actually the first printing. So despite the fact that paperback, we find ourselves apologizing for paperbacks a lot. So paperback, but it's really important for these reasons. I wonder if the wind will change one day and people will say, actually the paperback's a lot more difficult to retrieve now. So we're interested. Well, I think you obviously, anyone looking at the shelf behind you knows you love reading. There's a particular genre of fiction or nonfiction you're especially fond of. And as a particular rare books you would like to collect. I'm a big fantasy reader. So my shelves are everything from LaGuin down to Pratchett through to Strange and Mr. Norrell. You know, I love my role playing books, game books at the bottom or big shelf at the bottom is full of dice games and everything, goblins and ghouls. And kind of thematically oddly, rare books wise, I have this little growing collection of English folklore from about the late 1800s. It was a fascinating period where they were walking around the country trying to save all these stories and legends from like, there was a good like 50, 60 years where they were doing that and binding all the books together. So I've been looking for those. So yeah, it's mostly creepy scrollies and ghouls. Well, speaking of rare books, I can see some of the old role playing game, particularly like Chaosium, Lovecraft role playing games becoming at some point prized possessions. I mean, they're, again, they're kind of an ephemera in their own. And yeah, this is my hunch, possibly because I mean, if you look at them, I was buying books for Sutherland's the other day and I picked up a Dunder and the Dragon's Monster manual to because people played with them firstly and kids got their hands on them. Anyone who collects children's books will know that there's nothing that would destroy Arabic faster than doing it, what it was supposed to do and giving it to a child to read, you know, they get destroyed pretty quickly. In addition to which, you know, game books, they're printed in small print runs, usually. Even today, like most game books are printed in red, silly, small print runs. So a combination of those two things means that, you know, good copies of those are quite hard to find already, let alone in 50 years. Now, we have an antiquarian book fair and art book fair here in the San Francisco Bay area. In England, if we were visiting, some of us were to go visit England, are there particular antiquarian books or book fairs you'd recommend paying a visit to? Yeah, so the main one, I think it's coming up in May, which is called Firsts at the moment, and that's the one done by the Antiquarian Booksellers Association. It's their big flagship fair. They hold that in London at the moment in the Sachi Gallery, I think, which is quite good. And that's where all the kind of booksellers in London get together in a room and hawk things at each other. But there's usually one in York on point, which is a bit more, York's the other big bookselling town in England where all the booksellers come from originally. And that's a bit more, bit quieter. You can find more interesting things that I tend to think personally. So my bit would usually be York. But yeah, I'll watch the calendar for those because they don't always, dig around for the information because they don't always publicize it very well. How did Sutherland's change from the time you started working there and the time when you moved to Manchester and especially how was COVID, the shutdown changed Sutherland's? Gosh, I mean, I think they found COVID quite peaceful. There was no one bothering them for anything. There were no emails coming in. In some ways it was a delight. Part of them obviously the plague. But the plague notwithstanding, it was quite quiet. Even since I joined, that they've been doing various works. They're always doing works in Sutherland's. Ever since they moved in, they've been losing floors, gaining staircases. I still don't know what the hatch in the ceiling does. It goes somewhere. I just can't prove why. Nobody wants to investigate because then it's their job to deal with it. So we kind of leave it. And there's very, we took shelves apart to try and find things that have been hidden there. So you notice how long have been stuffed there by colleagues that are long dead. So we did some rooting about to find things and just found more questions and answers and put it all back. So it was fun, not very productive. Well, it was, I mean, the building you're in, how old again is the building? I know that Sutherland's only been in that building relatively, you know, not relatively recent, but now it's a building as well. So that was the first tenants in that building. It was put up in the 1930s, I think. They moved around London a bit before that hopping, skipping, jumping. They were promised it was going to be this grand we developed, so like shopping hub. And so they moved in like the gullible fools we all are. And then nobody else moved in. So it's been a desolate wasteland ever since. And so they've been stuck there since the 1930s in the basement. They had the mettonine floor at one point, but then we moved out because of some tragedy that no one will explain to me. Something bad happened. I don't know what it was. They moved out the mettonine. So now we have the grand floor and the basement cellars, which is where we currently hide everything that we don't want to think about. Well, Sackville Street, I mean, it's on Sackville Street, correct? Yeah, that's Sackville Street. That's a great name for a street, I always think. Well, it's very, very old. I mean, I actually looked up the name Sackville to see if it was any relation to Sackville West. But no, it's a ship captain or something. So it's not an area, it's an old neighborhood, but it's not one that's been cared for judging from what you're saying. Not particularly. They keep trying to revitalize it and the one trick they have for this, the council, and they keep trying to do it is by changing the traffic direction, that's their trick. And every few years they'll do it. And the traffic is so confused at this point. The cars just ran into it, end up halfway down there, which doesn't solve the problem at all. It's just a confusion of parked cars in the wrong places. Every few years they'll say, we're revitalizing the street. We're gonna change the traffic direction again. So they try, not very hard, but they try. Kyle, can you talk about some of your, I know there are other customers that you didn't mention who you think would like be, or something from a book or something from a novel that you would... Gosh, so when I was putting the book together, one of the things I didn't wanna do was pull out a particular customer and make fun of them or anything that didn't seem fair or right, because I work with them a lot. Most of them are very nice and we get along. So what we did was we kind of camearied the traits from various people together into archetypes, the kind of people that we find in Sutherland. So we didn't have to, apart from one entity who I will not name, who I basically pulled straight from real life into the book. And the other day I got a text from Rebecca who worked for me in literature and it was just he knows in four caps and I hadn't been back since. So I will not be naming any other. I've learned from my mistake. Were you worried about offending? I mean, when you were, you were also, you do write about your coworkers. I mean, were you concerned about, I mean, I'm sure that's walking a very delicate line. You have to, even with the best of intentions, you want to make sure you don't, I mean... Yeah, they were, I was really worried. The first thing I did was take the, you know, proposal or part of the draft I had written into the manager, Chris, who wrote the forward for me and said, this is what I'm thinking of doing. How do I do this? Is this all right if I do this? Is it gonna cause problems? And he was exceptionally good. And he helped me rewrite it and helped me draft certain chapters that I thought were problems and told me which bits that he thought were gonna be issues. He did help me edit it and craft it. And all my colleagues, I showed them the bit before, I published it and said, this is you. Tell me if this is offensive with the pen and they went through it with the line and said, I like this, I don't like this. I'll put a footnote here. They were all really supportive. And honestly, I was surprised. Because if someone said to me, I'm gonna write a book about you and your work. I would have told them to jog on, get out of my face and never darken my doorstep again. So they were really supportive. They have been all the way through. Would you consider offering another short reading? I don't have anything prepared. Well, I was going to ask you also, you mentioned that there are ghosts. That there's an issue that you mentioned ghosts. And you mentioned them in terms of them existing, not them might maybe existing. You seem to at least come across as though you believe in them, that the place is haunted. Well, I mean, on some level, you work in a bookshop that's not long enough and you just kind of accept it. Because if you lock a case with your own two hands, and it's right at the top, nothing's touching it. There's no wind in the bookstore and it opens itself and throws a book at you. After a while, you just sort of accept the fact that either you're going crazy or there's a ghost. And simplest, I'll come straight to the simplest explanation is the books I wanted. So that is what I have gone with. I refuse to investigate or interrogate any more than that. It is what it is. But they've been better since we moved the portraits around. So, you know. So, you think that it was the original owner who is? Who is? Possibly, yeah. But I think it was the last Sutheran who was killed crossing Piccadilly by Tran. I think he was annoyed with the indignity of that, I think, rank with him. I have a suspicion, but it varies depending on which member of staff you ask. That all the Sutherans are a bit odd. So, it really could be any of them. My bet is it's one of those. But for ghosts, they're relatively the nine rattling pipes and throwing books and things. So, you learn to live with it. Well, I should think books kind of invite. At least being in an area filled with old books would kind of invite either the perception of it being haunted or if ghosts exist, it would be definitely a place to be haunted. Especially if the ghosts were book lovers. If they're lurking anywhere. They're lurking in an old bookstore. There are lots of new people to meet every day, I suppose. And things to rattle and stuff to read, I suppose. Who knows? But I think people almost expect it. And after a while, you just sort of learn to accept it, I think. Have any of your customers been troubled by a ghost? Or is it strictly the people who work there? I mean, we go to a lot of odd places to pick up books. Some of which, I went to a lady's house who had, whose attic was filled entirely with portraits painted by a dead husband. They were just hanging in rows in the ceiling. I had to duck on it. She was like, the books are in there somewhere. And I'm like, I'm not worried about the books and worried about the haunted paintings. So we go to all sorts of strange places looking for books. And the odder the place, the better the books usually. So, very possible. How has Southerns survived financially? I mean, I know that you say it's a, it's a, you know, one of the things you bring out is how it's catch-and-catch-can, oh, rare bookselling is. But Southerns has been around for about, more than one century. How does it, how does that, how do you count for that? So my running joke, which I'm not allowed to make anymore is that Southerns been one year away from closing since 1761. And I say every year I'm like, we're about to close every year and it never does. So it depends on the various points in its history. It's been doing incredibly well. And then, you know, the tides change, everything goes, you know, helpful. Everything goes to hell and the bookstore is desperate for money again. And then suddenly it has them again. I mean, at various points, it's been supported by, what's the word people use? A philanthropist who have, you know, put money into the bookstore and then regretted it. I think there's certain, various other bookstores in London have the same story in a way. Like a lot of times booksellers are bought by people who want to run a bookstore or like the idea of owning a bookstore and accept the fact that they're not always gonna be massive money-making machines, that sometimes you're providing something to a community or you're, you know, I don't know, you're funding an institution, I guess, during a time when it's a little rough for it and then sometimes the bookstore makes a lot of money every 10 years. It's strange, the tides come and go and the Sutherland's just been quite lucky, I feel. A lot of bookstores have been not quite so lucky, have not quite, you know, as many patrons or have just made one bad decision that can turn the whole thing over. I think the Sutherland's has just been, yeah. I mean, it owned by a bunch of people who make good decisions at the time, bad decisions other times and then been lucky at other points. That's all, I suppose it sounds bad to say it's all luck, but I think that's a big part of it. Do you, I'm trying to frame this, it seems to me that people have been predicting the end of reading ever since I, they said it, you know, when movies, when radio, when TV and now the internet. What my observation is that people, bookstores still, they may not, they may struggle, but I always see people in bookstores. I mean, do you think, are you optimistic about the future of bookstores? Is it that, do you think reading will shift entirely to online or to Kindle or? As you say, people have been predicting the end of readings since who knows when, since they invented the book, haven't they? And since the wax tablet, they've been saying, people will stop doing this at some point. And I just don't think that's true. I think there's something material to the book. I just, it's about that physicality we mentioned earlier that makes it unique in forms of literary pastimes. I mean, if you spend all day looking at your phone, a book is an escape from that, you know, in a way that other kinds of, you know, watching films and so on isn't necessarily, I'm looking at a screen all day and the book is a way to put that down for five seconds. And I think even people younger than me are exhausted sometimes by being, looking at a screen all day. Like everything I do is online. I work online, you know, I write my recreations online, I socialize online, and a book is a way to escape, escapism without having to do that. That having to resort back to my screen which invades every other aspect of my life. So yeah, I think they're really good. I think people will stick with them because they, you know, technology is everywhere else. I mean, it doesn't need to be in my recreation too. It doesn't need to be in my personal time too. So yeah, I don't think we need to worry. And we've got questions from the audience so we could have Alyssa read out a few of the questions to engage our audience as well. You're muted. Alyssa, you're muted. All right, ready to roll. Our first question comes from Michelle Anderson from our chat. How antique does an antiquarian book have to be? Well, okay, so we argue about that and we'll start all the time. We'd be pleased to hear. Some people will insist that it's, you know, if it's, they'll have a hard line in the sand, they'll say if it's not before 1950 they're not interested. And the general line is that, you know, antique thing is over a hundred years old but people won't always stick to that. And we have books since the 80s, 90s, you know, sometimes even relatively recent things if we think they're notable. The trick is to call it rare and antiquarian book selling so that you can do whatever you want. No one can shake their fist at you. When the general bar is that, you know, a hundred years is an antique but you'll find people breaking that rule all the time as long as it interests them really. Our next question is from Laura. And you've covered a small part of this but I think it's an interesting piece of history of the bookstore. How has the bookstore changed over the years in terms of ownership or focus? Shakespeare and Co and Paris changed location and now has new young ownership. How has that been for Southerlands? So Southerlands, it actually started off in York. I mentioned earlier York is the other big book selling city in England really. And it moved after some scandal. Again, we lost the details of. And after that scandal, it moved to London and set up a new premises which became the big store. And it moved premises all the time. So it started and it had one of the strand that had one in Piccadilly. And it was only by the 1930s actually, it settled down in Southerlands Street. So it had various different premises all owned by the Southerlands. This family of booksellers who had nephews and cousins, all of which eventually became booksellers. It was a lineage of booksellers really. You'll find that with a lot of London bookstores. You know, they're owned by families, mags, courage, and so on that owned by the dynasties of booksellers. And only when the last Southerland died in a tragic accident before having an heir did it pass on to, I think it was bought. It was saved by one of these wealthy philanthropists that wanted this bookstore to continue knowing that bookstores vanished so easily. And then it's been owned by various people down the years until the present powers that be, who we do not discuss in the shadowy form. They can't keep it, own it and keep it going. But yeah, it's after the Southerlands, that was the mid 20th century, I think, a last Southerland died. It's been owned by various people since then, keeping it in the same place, sort of an institution. But it's fact, there's a book connect by Victor Gray called Bookman, which is about the history of Southerlands, which, I mean, it's a struggle in places, but it does have some very interesting facts in it. He was a historian that did some, he did it from 2012, I think it was published. So if you wanna look into Bookman by Victor Gray, it's quite a good read if you willing to get to the end, sort of it gets very dramatic in the last 50 years. Our next question is from Sheila Cunningham, and it's about demographics of the guests of the bookstore. Do you have any traction with younger readers, some of the maybe people in their teens, 20s, 30s? I mean, increasingly we do. And I think it's to do with that collector's impulse. In every generation, there are a bunch of people who like to collect nice things and put them in a row. And I don't know whether we're always saying we need to reach out to new demographics and so on, but I think they just grow with time. I think every, you know, at the time they have, some of my colleagues like to say that, but at the time they have money, they're ready to put their collections together. But you often see people are mooching about of all kind of ages in Southerlands really. You have people dragging their parents in by the hand, if they wanna look at the shiny books, you know, at every different age shocker there's people, but only at a certain point do they have the money to realize that collecting can be expensive, you know? But we do see them milling around, sort of waiting in the wings ready to swoop in. So they are there. I do have a question. Do you, has there ever been a book that came into Southerlands that you wanted? Gosh, well, I mean, one of the privileges of being a book seller is that you can swipe things before they hit the shelves, which we routinely do. Gosh, there was, yeah, hold on. So this copy of the Stella Almanac came in, which is one of my favorites, which is a publication by P. Scott Hollander. And it basically, she wrote like an entire manual, a tour guide to hell. And it was published in, I don't know, two copies or something. And nobody'd ever heard of it. It's completely mad. But I looked at it and I fell in love with it. And I was like, I'm swiping this before it hits the shelves. I'm paying a reasonable amount for this and then it's coming home with me. And I've seen, honestly, I haven't seen another one since. And I've looked just in case I get a second copy for someone else people ask me to, but I've never seen another one. So I'm glad I did. But yeah, books are a privilege. You swipe things before they catch the shelves if you need to. We have a question. Does your shop do restoration work on books which need spine or cover repairs? I mean, you were talking about that big machine, the press, but tell us about some of the restorative work that that's done there. So we have, and we don't have a restorer per se. We have what's called a furbisher, who's a little chap called Stephen, who is a magician. And he works dark arts under the stairs. And when I give him a book, his little sorry, and when it returns, the sorry has gone away. And I don't ask questions because I don't want to know. He does it all. He removes the dirt as best he can. No, he, I don't want to say tarts it up, but he sort of, you know, he puts a cover on it. He stops it, moves the dust away. You know, he does everything he can to make it look as best it can without actually altering the book itself. And a restorer would probably do a lot more. They don't want tools, a lot more involved. They have a whole workshop. We don't have a workshop in the store. But we can do things that we can correct the, you know, if a book is warped, or Cox and London can sometimes fix that little things to make sure that, you know, it's not getting any more damaged while it's with us. And then once you pass off it's, you know, it's someone else's business, how they store it. But yeah, full restoration. There are books to one, Shepherds in London does really good restoration. They have a whole department for that. And they're fabulous. They've done work miracles in the past. So you'll often find that restores and bookbinders work quite closely together, not always within bookstores. We just have a comment and a question from John a few decades ago before the internet. I was delighted to visit Hay on Why in Wales. It was a marvelous village and antiquarian bookstore center. Do you know if it still has such a place or was it killed by the internet? I hear it is still fabulous. I have never been to my great shame regret. I haven't had a chance. But I hear it's still a wonderful place to visit. Yeah, it's a great trip. I've been meaning to another. I'm more free on my travels. One of my things on my list to do is go down there and spend a weekend and call it work. That's the plan. All right, we have another restoration question. Any tips on how to remove odors from old books? Oh, gosh. What do we call clothes pegs for the notes? They're great. They work wonders. So you just, oh, a different room. Also, the odors, it's tricky because once the pages have absorbed the smell, there's not much. It's a bit like foxing on books. You can remove it, but it makes the problem worse. So a lot of the stuff you would do to remove odors from paper, it's gonna damage the paper to a point where it wouldn't. At that point, you just, you might as well throw in the blender. It's very difficult, honestly. I mean, you can remove the odor from the room, you know, in the conventional ways. And that probably helps, but honestly, it wants the smell to go on the book, particularly the cloth or the paper, any removing of it. And at least that I know how to do, would probably be better, worse than that. Solution to be worse than leaving as it is. I'm honest. Oliver, I wanted to ask about the London Book Fair, which is one of the largest international book fairs. If you attend book fairs yourself, like that particular one, and if they have an antiquarian section in the book fair, I think it's coming up soon. Yeah, so the London Aquarium Book Fair, which they now call first, is which is currently being held in the Sarchi Gallery. That's the, when I sometimes go to that, more when I was made to under duress and more regular book fairs, a lot of standing around talking to people and that's not my forte. But we do sometimes have a stand at those things, because it's good to buy and sell from other booksellers as well. It's a good chance to catch up with everyone in the trade and mooch around and say hello, I suppose. Socialising is a big part of it. And booksellers swap a lot of books there as well. So it's not only meeting customers, it's also touching base with everyone else in the trade, which is a good idea, if you wanna make friends and influence people and so on. So yeah, we're often at that. And there's another one in Chelsea in London, which is in the autumn usually, which is great at the Chelsea Town Hall, which is fabulous. Again, a lot of the same people go, but it's the principle of the thing, you know? Get out of the house, air the books a little, how it is, good for the soul. Yeah, the book fair industry, well, of course, for over 20 years, the America Book Association and also the BEA Books America used to have a wonderful, huge book fair at the Javits Center in New York and in different locations, but that's closed down. But I attended for over 20 years, which was incredible, it was an incredible experience. And it also had international, you know, the royalties and media and e-books and it had somebody's going on in one location, Book Expo America, that was the title. Anyway, any other questions from the audience? Anyone want to pose a question to Oliver across the pond? Michelle has one. She's asking about a book fair in Jivefield. Honestly, I don't know anything that happened outside of my house most of the time, alone outside the country. So I honestly, I couldn't, I barely know what goes on in my own backyard, which, you know, is a mess, by the way. So I honestly, I couldn't tell you. I said, I probably vaguely get jacked with the ones here, sometimes in the north of England now, trying to keep an eye out for them. But once you get across the channel, I'm useless, hopeless is the word. There is a suggestion from Alan Rodman. Freezing will stop pests and place enclosed container of kitty litter with diatomaceous earth to dry and deodorize books. Does that sound right to you? Does that sound like a good suggestion? I couldn't speculate. It may well work. I don't want to recommend it to have someone's book turned into a cat or something. It may well do. People have their own various home remedies and things, which sometimes do work, but I'll admit, so we haven't found anything that was consistently for all, isn't it? Books of various ages all made in different things. They were required in treatment, and that's part of the problem. So what works for one collection might may well work for the whole thing, and may well not work for other ones. So we tend to not recommend it purely because we don't know what someone's collection is going to compose of. And a little ephemera, box of ephemera sort of pamphlets and things that quite fragile might not withstand the same punishment as a big letter bound thing. So it depends. Your mileage may vary. We have a question. Has Southerland's been featured in any television shows or films, either as a real store or as a fictionalized shop or a backdrop or setting? I mean, people, we get requests from film crews all the time. Can we film in your bookstore? And the answer is no. That's an inconvenience. Because what they usually want is to remove all the bookshelves and then replace them with sitting appropriate books for their particular movie. And I'm like, that's like three days of work for literally no book sales. So we don't often do that. I'll admit it's a massive hassle, as Andrew used to say. So we don't often, because people don't know Southerland exists, we don't really feature in our own right either. So we're blissfully under the radar most of the time. It's quite nice, actually. Another question, we have a question from Denise. Do you have correspondence across the way in Ireland? De Berca, rare books. I mean, various, so my colleagues love to keep their secrets. And they all have various contacts, some of which I know for a factor in Ireland, but they weren't always as close as me. They all have their very strutted sellers they required and they source things from. Not many trips made it, I think, but I happen to know that they have some contacts that I'm not yet privy to. And they're very, they're farlef acts of various interested booksellers and so on. There's a lot of trade going on on the surface. One of these days I'll find out. Of course, we just passed the 100th anniversary of the publishing of Ulysses by James Joyce. Has James Joyce ever come into the bookstore and do you have any signed copies by him? Gosh, there's this fabulous example, which is probably quite well known, that we get in sometimes, which was, it's an illustrated version of Ulysses, have you heard of it? And who was it that the illustrations for it and got them completely, who he didn't read it, I forget now, was it? The recent publication? It was the little while back. I don't remember if he did illustrations now, hold on, was it? Was it the Italian illustrator, the one that came up from, it was with the Italian illustrator? Hold on. I don't have it in front of me, let me see. It sounds familiar, Oliver, because I think it sounds like we do a big Ulysses event every year. And I think I know what you're talking about. I wish I could remember the name of it. Yes, it's iconic. I can't remember which illustrator it is. They're really famous. They're very avant-garde, they're very... Yes, I mean, they gave this, the publisher gave this copy of Ulysses, the illustrator, who thought that it was about Troy or something. So they did a bunch of illustrations without reading it, and then sent it back. And because the illustrator was so expensive, they ended up publishing it because they had to. They ended up with the wrong illustrations. So it's silly, I can't remember the name. It'll come to me later. But we get that in a lot because it's so funny. Like this copy of Ulysses knocking about with all the wrong illustrations in, I think. That's the right one. Oh, let's see if I can find it while we're walking. Well, in the meantime, do you have other books that are signed that are quite... Celebrity authors of note that you'd like to mention to us? We do, we do sometimes. We get them as often as signed books as often as we can because they're more popular. We had Orwell a little while back, sort of homage to Catalonia. That was quite good. That's quite rare signed by him. Fleming, we try and get what we can because that's quite valuable still. People love James Bond and they seem to... I think it's the covers they go for really, but if we can find signed versions of that, they're worth Kings Ransom. But modern first a lot, yeah. So anything from the late 20th century, early 20th century, if we can find signed copies of those, which is doable, we get hold of them where we can. Though increasingly difficult in today's market. Is there a market for Irata? For books that have misprints, things like that. I know that in their Bibles, there are famous examples of Bibles, like the adulterous Bible where it says, thou shalt commit adultery in terms of a misprint. That's right, yeah. I wonder, I mean, we don't see a lot of them. Not that I'm marked that way. I mean, a lot of the famous books are famous because they've got the... So if we take Fleming, for instance, in particular, we had this massive bibliography published a little while ago, which was huge with all the Fleming books inside it. And you can basically identify which one was first by the various mistakes that were made. And that's generally how it's done. Oh, it's the first edition because it's got an M on page seven. So it's not necessarily because it's in Irata so much because you can use the mistakes to identify what all the things were done in. Particularly if the editions all look very similar and someone forgot to date them, which happens more often than you'd like to think. But yeah, so they're important, but often we'll identify them really. It helps us keep track of the various editions and printings, you know, if it happened a lot at once, it's a very popular book. So it's worth knowing. A lot of bibliographies on the shelves to keep track of it. Thank you. Well, you know, we've come to the end of our hour and I want to thank Oliver Darkshire, author of Once Upon a Tome, The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller. We're so pleased that you could join us from Manchester. And I hope for those of you who are traveling to London, you will check out Southerns on Sackville Street. Also thanks to Pam Troy, our host and moderator today, our events assistant and cinema lit film curator here at Mechanics Institute. Please check our website out at milibrary.org for our author events, for our book clubs, writers groups and all the things that we offer here. We have our chess club, chess tournaments and our beautiful library. And once again, we want to thank both of you for a great conversation. Thank you book lovers for joining us and come back again for our next program.