Dawson's Book Shop: Celebrating their 100th Year
- By Bruce McKinney
Michael Dawson, the third generation
By Bruce McKinney
"The world changes and we change with it." This statement encompasses the history, experience and perspective of Michael Dawson, proprietor and third generation of the Dawson family that has interleaved their lives with the printed word for five score years and this month celebrates the 100th anniversary of the founding of the firm. It is a rare accomplishment for a business of any kind to last so long and particularly unusual for a book seller to so endure because books and printed material are a very unique passion and such passion is not often sustained from generation to generation.
The firm's founder was Ernest Dawson. Mr. Dawson's family had emigrated from England in the decade before he was born [1881] and the accents at the dinner table when he was young must have been an interesting combination of English and native born Texan. In any event the family moved on to California in 1885 where Mr. Dawson would, in the 1890s begin to find work in bookstores. In 1905, the now 24 year old opened his first bookstore at 713 South Broadway in Los Angeles. Within two years, what had been primarily an inventory of new books began the tectonic shift to used and collectible material. And with this change came the beginning of Dawson's as a rare book cataloguer and catalogue issuer. Number one was issued in the waning days of 1907, and is included, in fully searchable form, with this story. In 1908, the firm moved to 518 South Hill Street and would remain there for 15 years.
The 1920s would prove to be a heyday for the firm but Mr. Dawson would take the long way to get there. In 1912 he sold the business to pursue a career as a utopian socialist, then bought back the firm in 1917 and for the rest of his life sought utopia in the pursuit, ownership and sale of rare and collectible printed material. In 1922 he decamped to new quarters at 627 South Grand Avenue carrying with him a growing inventory and client list. There the firm would remain for thirty years. In those decades Ernest and his wife Sadie Alena Roberts raised a family. Their sons, the future bookmen Muir and Glen, began to help in the business in the 1930s. The now senior Mr. Dawson would live into the fall of 1947 and see his two sons, now back from war, firmly taking charge of the firm as it entered the post-war era.
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Dawson's Book Shop: Celebrating their 100th Year
- By Bruce McKinney
Catalogue No. 1, December 1907
Research libraries, university and institutional, soon emerged as the firm's largest and most consistent customers as the instinct to develop collections of disappearing material became a widely held passion. Books and ephemera remained accessible and affordable and institutions looked to experienced dealers to help them find it. For Muir and Glen this was the same business their father had developed only aimed in a different direction and it marked the family's ability to adjust to changing times. Well into the 1980s libraries would remain a crucial component in the customer mix. During those years Glen would issue two groups of publications: The early California Travel Series as 50 volumes between 1951 and 1961 and the Baja California Travel Series as an additional 50 volumes between 1965 and 1992. Edwin Carpenter, of the Huntington, would co-edit the second series and these publications would become collectible in their own right.
During the second generation the world changed and Dawson's changed with it. Where European material had been the inventory Ernest relied upon, for the sons, American material emerged as primary. What libraries sought to buy and Dawson's sought to supply was Americana and increasingly western Americana and the two long series on California solidified Dawson's role as a primary source in this field. For Dawson's the ability to add scholarship fit the firm's changing personality and the increasingly close relationship to educational institutions.
Books age better than people and in time Glen and Muir retired. Muir passed away earlier this year at 83 while Glen, at 92, remains sharp and is still interested in the world of books.
Today responsibility for steering the ship through the next transition rests with Michael Dawson, Muir's son, and the options and possibilities are daunting and intriguing. What is increasingly difficult is to reconcile Dawson's, as defined by its history, with the world of books as framed by society's changing relationship to reading, books and collecting. The internet of course is the heat under the pot but books, as collectible artifacts, would be under pressure in any event to yield time, money and space to the more complex life styles that people today lead. Some people still read in the easy chair, settled in by the fire, and absorb the complete thoughts that the best books express. But such people are fewer and they are older and increasingly moving past their collecting primes. For Dawson's the challenge is to connect with the next generation.
Today this transition is underway and it is taking more than books to get it done. For the past ten years Michael has been using the building his father and uncle built in 1967 to showcase photography that has become, through the lens of gifted photographers, a bridge between the printed word and the visual world of television and movies. And Michael is finding a willing audience that values it.
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Dawson's Book Shop: Celebrating their 100th Year
- By Bruce McKinney
One of the California Travel Series developed by Glen Dawson
These days, when you step into Dawson's on Larchmont Street, you find a visual rhombus that bespeaks southern California in the 1960s and inside a large and relatively open space that houses both books and images. It is impossible not to be drawn to the photographs. They immediately connect in a way no book can because books require patience, determination, judgment and time and both the reader, and the listener if there are any, need all these skills to equally share the book experience. Images, by comparison, reach the spectator viscerally connecting to both the right and left sides of the brain at the same moment, and register a complete feeling [impression] in a few moments. Hollywood is after all only a short mile or so away but to be frank, so is Greenwich Village, at least spiritually. You are in a mind-set, and the geography is intellectual.
Here, on the showroom floor, you see the honored past in the shelves below and on the walls above, one of the barbarians at the gate that threaten the very future of traditional book collecting: photographic images. And why is this? Because, as two generations of Dawsons have already shown, you need to be willing to adjust. The world waits for no one. So Michael Dawson is adjusting. He is doing things differently than his grandfather, father and uncle and in some sense he is doing precisely what the Dawsons have always done: reflect the times. He is trying to find a way to balance the family's relationship to bookselling with his passion for photography, to find a way to interest collectors to help him carry the Dawson name on to the fourth generation. To visit Dawson's Book Shop online click here.
Dawson's will celebrate their 100th anniversary with an open house on Sunday afternoon, April 17th, from 2:30 until 5:00. Bernard Rosenthal will deliver a commentary at 3:00 pm. Those interested to attend should RSVP by phone 323 469-2186 or email Michael directly at michael@dawsonbooks.com.
Those who are interested to collect Dawson publications will be interested in the checklist of Dawson publications prepared by Doug Johns and available at John's Western Gallery.
For those who would like to look at the first catalogue issued by the Dawsons in 1907 it is provided: Catalogue No. 1
To search all the listings in Dawsons Catalogue No.1 in the AED
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