Dec 7, 2021
William (Bill) Matthews
has been dealing in old & rare books, manuscripts, maps and related
material since 1976. He began working for a bookshop in Saskatoon,
then opened his own in Vancouver in 1976, and subsequently moved to
Toronto in 1980. He was in Ontario until 1996 when he moved to San
Francisco / Berkeley and was part of Peter Howard's Serendipity
Books for a few years. He's now the proud owner of The Haunted
Bookshop, a bricks and mortar shop in Sydney, B.C. just north
of Victoria.
We met in the shop to talk about Bill's
career in the used book business, about young collectors; Odean
Long, previous long-time owner of The Haunted Bookshop;
pseudonymously and anonymously authored books; scouting trips,
Acres of Books in Cincinnati, little book fairs, book scouts Martin
Stone and David Sachs, Driff's Guide to All the Second-hand and
Antiquarian Bookshops in Britain, fantasy fiction, booksellers
Peter Howard and Bill Hoffer, the great Winnipeg book sale, Maurice
Sendak, and much more.
After our conversation Bill and I
chatted a bit about Saskatoon, where the two of us had grown up,
discovering that we'd both gone to the same high school, at the
same time - in the same grade. Bill later produced the yearbook to
prove it.
Apologies in advance for the poor
audio quality (something about soft-spoken booksellers and the
acoustics of used bookstores).