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Thanks to everyone who entered our Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar Scholarship contest.
Congratulations to Rick Ring from Rhode Island, who won our contest. Rick is an avid collector and librarian and recently opened his own bookstore in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
There were many great entries, it was hard to pick just one person but we think our winner really demonstrates passion and dedication to bookselling. We're looking forward to hearing Rick's first updates from the seminar.
Number of Books: 15,000
Collecting Since: 2004
Books that inspired you to start collecting & selling: A Gentle Madness, Nick Basbanes; books by Lawrence Clark Powell & Gordon Ray
The book you'd most like to own: A first edition, first printing, presentation copy of The Lord of the Rings, inscribed from Tolkien to this son.
Rick Ring - Essay Entry
My first taste of bookselling came at 19 when I helped Half Price Books open their first Ohio store in Columbus in 1987. After several months of sorting, shelving, alphabetizing, and displaying thousands of books in every subject and genre, I was taught to buy and much later to price—all at the "low" end of the trade. I fancied myself a knowledgeable bookman, and resisted their call to management to attend graduate school, erroneously assuming that English professors got to read and teach what they liked.
After two years of teaching freshman comp I fled to library school at Indiana University and discovered the Lilly Library. A walk through the stacks was all it took—I had landed in Faerie. The Curator of Books had been a dealer, and under his guidance I discovered the etiquette and endless variation of the rare book world through booksellers' catalogues. It was then when I realized how hopelessly inadequate my education, comprehension, language skills, and memory really were. But it was fascinating working there, and every single time I went into the stacks I discovered books I had never seen or imagined, each one spawning (hydra-like) a fountain of questions. Aside from formal classes in descriptive bibliography and book history, I read catalogues and made mock-decisions based on a fictional budget and collecting scope, and discussed the choices and reasoning with my mentor. This training landed me the position of acquisitions librarian at the John Carter Brown Library (JCB), where I worked for 9 years, met scores of dealers, and spent over $3 million on Americana for the collection. Buying with institutional money is exciting, but it's nothing compared to selling.
If I have a religious belief about bookselling, it is in the absolute value of the open shop to a community. I opened a very small one (500 square feet) called Book by Book in Warren, Rhode Island in September
2004 and filled it with about 6,000 general-stock used books, based on the Half Price Books model. I did not list online. My wife ran it with our 2-year-old son (I did the buying and pricing, but did not quit my library job), and it supported itself until we had to close eight months later to have our second child. I learned some things about running a business, and sold my first "rare" book—a signed and corrected first edition of Anne McCaffrey's The White Dragon. Taking a book bought for $20 and turning it into $300 through knowledge and persuasive description brought a feeling I'll never forget. I literally went feral, having tasted biblio-blood for the first time. The challenge to one's nerve and creativity is not to be matched in any other aspect of the book world.
In November 2007 I left the JCB to head Special Collections at the Providence Public Library. I liquidated my Brown retirement, and in April opened a 1,500 square foot shop (same name) in a renovated mill
building. We're hanging on, and I love it dearly. It connects me with people and books in a way nothing else does.
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