The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB)’s website redesign is now live on the Internet.
In an open letter to visitors, ILAB President, Adrian Harrington, said:
“After eight years with essentially the same website, we at ILAB have decided to give it a whole new look, with greatly improved and deeper content. It will have a far greater selection of what the ILAB website has always provided: the best rare books in the World, supplied by the World’s best rare booksellers. Over the coming months you will see a great variety of news articles, bookseller interviews and scholarly pieces being added to the site, so look for new additions almost daily. Our official launch will be on 1st January 2010.
“One major innovation is our new search engine for rare books. We now search our dealers’ inventory using a variety of commercial sites where our dealers show their books. This means that you will be able to buy your books direct from the dealer or choose to buy it from the same dealer through one of your favourite sites, shown on a list with the book description.
“In the meantime, tell us what you’d like to see on an ILAB website. Feel free to send an email to our web editor, and suggest and submit articles of interest to the rare book community or other suggestions.”
The visual look of the site is much improved, and the content excellent. Our colleague John Wronoski of Lame Duck Books has posted a lengthy and insightful article, Young Booksellers, Young Books: The Prospects of the American Rare Book Trade. It is a good read.
Within, John makes an excellent point about “The ABAA… long been pulled back and forth by conflicting strains of populism and elitism within it. If a real and vital democracy is to be achieved, it will be only through an integration of these strains on a higher plane.”
Yet, Wronoski’s conclusion that “the best way to effect this may be for us to take up the matter of the education of our next generations as a responsibility of the established trade,” is not new; it has been talked about for years. It’s time to begin to think about just what that educational program might entail.
The difficultly with the education solution is that the love of reading and books is developed as a child, and children today have so many new, competing activities to choose amongst that to try to persuade youngsters to put down the video game joy-stick or walk away from the computer for awhile is an uphill battle, at best.
Everybody loves to learn but few youngsters like to be “educated.” It’s onerous. But everyone loves to discover. It’s exciting.
In this modern, digital world of cynicism and ersatz everything, I suspect that efforts to develop an appreciation for the rare book should begin with teenagers, involving a counter-perceptual promotional campaign highlighting concepts of authenticity, genuineness, art, craft, deep meaning, and the value of the old and time-tested over the new and short-lived.
In short, promote the retro, non-B.S. aspects of rare books, and integrate the geek-factor, which has become an important badge of personal honor to the younger generation.
The strain of populism that Wroronski refers to I believe to be ascendant. The Internet has inverted the standard model of top-down marketing to a grass-roots-driven hobby and trade. For long-term health, that is how it should be.
The trade once thrived upon educated dealers telling collectors what books they should be collecting. The future of the trade depends upon listening and adapting to what aspiring book collectors are telling them.
And to grab those young, aspiring book collectors our message has to be clear:
Real Geeks Love Rare Books. Wanted: Misfits and Mavericks.
The key is to take advantage of the perception that the rare book hobby and trade is old and creaky and position rare books as so far out of the mainstream that they are cool, genuinely hip, waiting to be re-discovered, and not transient objects of a throw-away age. Counter digital with the blessings of analog.
Collecting books is an act of rebellion in the digital world. There is not a single person in the world aged 16-25 who is not in some way rebelling against parents and/or the cultural status quo. We need to marshal that spirit of rebellion.
It’s hip to be square.