To encounter a book, one you remembering reading while young, is like recalling your first love, said book collector, dealer and writer David Mason.
“When you see a copy of that book it just brings back all the emotions you felt when you first read it,” said Mason, 75. “It’s like a recollection of the first girl you ever fell in love with and you were dancing with her.
“When I buy a book that may have changed my life at 15, I will now buy a first edition of it and pay a lot of money for it,” he said in a telephone interview. “But what I’m really buying is a reflection of the emotion when I first read that book.”
Mason will be in Victoria on Thursday for a 4 p.m. talk at the University of Victoria.
His Toronto store, David Mason Books, has long been sought out by lovers of rare or antiquarian books, be they browsers, buyers or sellers.
And his 2013 book, The Pope’s Bookbinder, A Memoir, is a reflection on his life, from book-loving child in North Toronto, to a high school drop-out followed by 10 years of drifting in North America and Europe.
He once slept on the floor of a hotel room in Paris while a then-unknown American writer, William S. Burroughs, banged away on a typewriter creating Naked Lunch. The title of Mason’s book refers to three months of working for a bookbinder in Spain commissioned to create a special book for Pope John XXIII bound in delicate, white Moroccan leather.
Eventually, the travel adventures wound up and it has been finished books, not writing or repairing, that became Mason’s avocation. He has bought them, traded them, sold them and held on to them all his life.
He once owned an original printing of Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, which was purchased for $7,000 and sold about 15 years later for $25,000. Now, it would be worth as much as $200,000.
He has sold some books for more than $150,000. But he also kept them in his house for a time.
“I’ve owned some books in my home that only an extremely wealthy man can afford to buy,” said Mason.
Mason believes a home library is an essential for every literate, civilized person. It’s far more important than an expensive sound system or collection of DVDs.
He insists the dollar value is of no consequence. Everybody has prized books. Those are the books read as a young person, even a child, the ones that change our lives.
For example, the first books Mason remembers seeking out were the children’s stories of Thornton W. Burgess, such as Old Mother West Wind.
As a child he would borrow stacks of them from his local library on Saturday. He would then convince his parents he was sick on Monday so he could stay home and read them.
He eventually built up a fine personal collection of Burgess’s books, which he later donated to a children’s library.
The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, is another book he has always loved and reads at least once a year. So he has collected about 200 versions.
“I could tell you stories about books that I bought for a dollar and sold for a thousand,” Mason said. “But they are not the essence of it.
“Prized books are the ones you read as a young man or a kid,” he said. “When you see a copy of that book it brings back all the emotions you had when your first read it.
“That is the basis of all collecting,” he said.
Mason will speaking at the UVic Mearns Centre for Learning-McPherson Library, Room 129. Admission is free.
Reserve a seat via email at [email protected] or by telephone: 250-721-8211.