Legacy of art and books

Whether we settle in a castle or in a studio, the first thing we look for is to make the space where we are going to live our own. My stepfather had made his house a permanent exhibition, so overloaded that it was hard to see each other, my boyfriend and me. We even had difficulty breathing, not knowing if it was caused by the dust bunnies on the books and canvases, or by the objects themselves.

“The estate is the collector’s greatest enemy,” my bookseller friend Bruno Lalonde often told me.

It is totally true. How many marvelous collections have been scattered (or worse, destroyed) by ungrateful or uneducated descendants?

By inheriting the house from my in-laws, Djo and Mo, my boyfriend and I couldn’t help but clean up the hundreds of books they had kept for decades, because we too keep too many. We had to make room for ours, in a kind of literary war where books fall on both sides of the front line, since we also clean our libraries before moving in. Besides, my boyfriend has a big collection of horror movie soundtracks on vinyl — I know, it’s sharp like trip – which takes up a lot of space. It’s different from collecting stamps or collecting hockey cards, let’s say.

Great readers and art lovers, my in-laws had an impressive collection of beautiful books, especially since my mother-in-law was a visual arts critic for a long time in her life. My stepfather hadn’t thrown away several books by his journalist grandfather, Léon Trépanier. There were autographed copies dating from the beginning of the XX^e century…

But were we really going to read old books on Canadian martyrs or exhibition catalogs of artists we don’t really know? Before committing irreparable acts, we called on the bookseller François Côté, a specialist in old books. A fascinating job, I swear. It’s not that we wanted to know if there were works in there that were worth a fortune. Above all, we were thinking that we might have in our possession titles that people have been looking for for ages. All of a sudden that we would make people happy while relieving ourselves of a jumble?

François Côté spent an afternoon gossiping about in the libraries, teaching us a lot of stuff.

For example, it’s not always true that old books increase in value over time. It’s all about demand, and collectors are getting old, too. The theme that was much sought after yesterday is no longer so when those whose passion it was die without relief.

In any case, it seems that the fashion today is much more on the side of the history of Aboriginal people than of French Canadians, on the writers of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s more than on Émile Nelligan, and no one doesn’t want old encyclopedias whose info will never be as up to date as Wikipedia.

It’s the same with old pianos. They give themselves to the shovel on Marketplace because they are an ordeal to move. The duty even wrote a dossier on it.

Even if it’s out of tune, we kept the house one, which had already been there for a long time when my in-laws bought it 50 years ago. I think it’s beautiful, it’s always a hit with the kids at Christmas.

On the other hand, what has always stuck, according to François Côté, are sulphurous, forbidden, problematic books. A rare edition of Mein Kampf, for example — if it exists, since every German had to have one in his house under Nazism. We had a dodgy book from the 1900s on eugenics, but we wanted to keep it, because it’s too weird.

Finally, it seems that collectors of works of art in Quebec are very much in search of the exhibition catalogs of the artists whose paintings they own. A bit as if they wanted to have the complete “package”.

To return to the subject of uneducated descendants, we had several that we were going to throw away, because Mo and Djo had been running the galleries since the 1960s. François Côté took everything while we kept beautiful Taschen books. And it wasn’t until we came across some papers in my father-in-law’s filing cabinet that we learned that this tiny web in the passage I found milk was a Delfosse, Quebec painter who died in 1939. I was going to throw it in the trash. On the other hand, no idea of ​​the value of the enormous and heavy Egyptian-type sculpture of the artist Pierre Granche, rather weakened, whose arm was broken while trying to move it.

It took us François Côté to separate the wheat from the chaff to allow us to free ourselves from the rest stripped of rarities. Djo was too fond of thrillers, which would gather dust, because I read very little of them.

Bruno Lalonde then took over. The one we call “the Aspirator”, which cleans “by vacuum”, and which I have already seen move nearly 100,000 books. I was sure he was going to go crazy, but it’s bad to know him, and it gave this portrait in 2019.

Our libraries are small beer for him. He has seen much worse by helping heirs encumbered by the books that came with the wills. He emptied all our shelves in record time — it’s not for nothing that there is good turnover at his bookstore. And we finally got to paint the walls.

The war is over. We got rid of hundreds of books from Djo and Mo and ours. But the eternal silence of the empty libraries frightens me, I can’t wait to fill them with my books. Between you and me, I hope this is the last time my books move. I cherish the dream of delighting (or making suffer) potential heirs who will do the job of the estate. In any case, I wish them valuable booksellers.