Here’s how David Mason, Toronto’s leading antiquarian book dealer, explains the title of this memoir: in the late 1950s, aged 19, he left Canada, eventually landing in Spain, where he found work as a bookbinder. The Spanish government commissioned a book “to present to His Holiness, and we bound it in full white morocco, a horror to work with. So easily marked is white morocco that we had to wash our hands every time we approached the book, just like surgeons, and our incessant smoking also had to be curtailed, for a falling ash could ruin a skin, just as any nick could result in a mark the equivalent of a tattoo.”

The quotation gives a fair indication of Mason’s conversational prose style: appealing and loose-jointed, if a bit repetitious sometimes (especially about matters worth repeating). Reading it is like listening to a friend, which is what Mason has been to many Toronto writers since opening his first shop in 1967.

Relatively little has been written about the out-of-print and antiquarian end of Canada’s book trade. The Pope’s Bookbinder eulogizes many of the field’s late-20th-century personalities. Mason is at his best revealing the mechanics of the trade: the closely guarded ins and outs of buying and selling, the world of auction rooms, and the delicate business of appraising donations to universities and libraries for tax purposes. He also goes into some detail about the strange little subculture of “book scouts,” who pick through lawn sales and charity shops for whatever they can sell to a dealer for slightly more than the pittance they paid for it.

This entire sector of the book world is full of arcane knowledge, esoteric tastes, and thin skins. One chapter tells of Mason’s decades-long feud with another dealer over the Canadian or “colonial” editions of foreign works, produced in the age before the free market in foreign sub-rights, when Canadian publishers would import unbound sheets of British or American titles and package them in their own binding under their own imprint.

Acquiring antiquarian books and releasing them into the wild for a price “is not really a job; it’s a vocation,” Mason writes. “For anyone who might not know the difference between a job and a vocation, a vocation is a job where you don’t earn enough to live on.”