From his drug-hazy, book-happy years at the Beat Hotel in Spain and throughout his career as antiquarian book dealer, David Mason has led a storied life. He spent two nights on the floor in William Burroughs' hotel room, quivering in an amphetamines-soaked fever. At a Spanish book binding factory he gilded a volume in white morocco for Pope John XXIII. He's owned five antiquarian shops, exhibited at the most prestigious fairs in the world, and once blackmailed the head of the Royal Ontario Museum. Yet whether he's regaling us with stories of cross-country hitchhiking or sharing industry wisdom about auctions and scouting, David Mason's humour and expertise is everywhere apparent - making The Pope's Bookbinder a must-read memoir for Beat buffs and bibliophiles.

David Mason's profile page

David Mason became an antiquarian bookseller in 1967. He has since then had five different locations, and continues to insist on having an open shop in downtown Toronto in spite of the huge costs, general indifference, and the disappearance of most of his colleagues.

"Mason is a confessed "inveterate gossip," unafraid to name names or pass stern judgment on various bitter controversies that have rocked the Canadian trade. But his portraits, rarely black and white, are typically affectionate, with page after page displaying his plentiful stock of unusual characters... The Pope's Bookbinder strikes a fine balance between impressing with insider lore and welcoming the outsider... The chatty digressions and omissions - sometimes hinting at truly salacious tales sealed up for the principals' lifetimes - invite you to learn more". - The National Post

A sweeping tour of the bookselling industry through the eyes of a man who has been at the heart of it for decades. - Toronto Star

"David Mason's absorbing memoir might be summed up by a button I recently acquired: 'Life? Of course I have a life. It's a life filled with books'... Early on in this rambling, easygoing account of his career, Mason mentions three outstanding classics of that tiny subgenre: Charles Everitt's The Adventures of a Treasure Hunter, David Randall's Dukedom Large Enough and David Magee's Infinite Riches. The Pope's Bookbinder belongs on the same shelf." - The Washington Post

"Appealing and loose-jointed...Reading [The Pope's Bookbinder ] is like listening to a friend." - Quill & Quire

A witty raconteur and compulsive gossip, Mason has written a book that will delight anyone who loves literary scuttlebutt. - The Globe and Mail

"[David] Mason catalogs for posterity a time when books were sold by hand, sought on foot, and priced accordingly...in what may be one of the last great booksellers' accounts." - San Francisco Book Review

"Riveting and valuable. No less than a life seen through the lens of a love of books and literature, Toronto antiquarian Mason's memoir provides eloquent proof that Gutenberg's descendants are not ready to give up the good fight. Bibliophiles - you know who you are, folks - will find bottomless solace in these pages." - Montreal Gazette

"You quickly get a sense of Mason's personality-gruff and opinionated-but his passion and his expertise are also evident, and before long you realize that here is someone who has truly found his calling: a happy man, despite the meagre financial rewards. The Pope's Bookbinder reads like a message in a bottle: a transmission from another shore, a vanished time." - Geist

"Plain-spoken, sometimes gruff, but always unafraid ... the book stands as a monument to what are, or perhaps were, the last great days of traditional shop-based bookselling, a world in which booksellers still educated each other, a world in which the expertise and traditions were handed on, a world in which bookshops brought new collectors into being with beguiling talk and modest initial purchases. It's a way of life already disappearing: the parting question is, 'And what will happen to the education of new collectors when there are no used bookstores? Who will teach them what theyneed to know?' - it's a question we have to answer."-Laurence Worms - Antiquarian Booksellers' Association newsletter