“I was fifty-two when I first set foot inside a bookshop,” said Sonny Ideker with a twinkle in his eyes. You look around at the leather-bound books that adorn the shelves from roof to bottom, and then back at him in disbelief. The moment you enter his antiquarian bookshop situated inside City Antiques in Roswell, Atlanta, you are transported into a world that could very well be a few centuries old.
Sonny grew up in rural Kansas. “I was never good at studies,” he continues. “We now know it as dyslexia. My parents were normal folks, and we didn’t even have any books at home except maybe a copy of the Bible.” After college, where he didn’t do too well, Sonny joined the Air Force, it was the time of Vietnam war. He spent the next twenty years in the force, first as a navigator and then as a pilot, across Korea, Hawaii, Spain and Germany. After retiring in 1988, he joined Delta Airlines first as a flight engineer and then a pilot for international flights. He along with his family, moved to Atlanta.
His wife was an interior designer, and it was a question from her that set him on this unique journey. “Do you see old leather-bound books in shops when you travel abroad?” she once asked. For her upscale customers, books were a matter of pride as well as a sophisticated design element. He used to frequent Brighton, England at that time. The first shop that he came across there was Colin Page Antiquarian Book store. Sonny didn’t anything about books, their authors, the content or the genre. However, the owners of Colin Page were extremely helpful and introduced him to other booksellers in England. Being dyslexic, he could not find himself reading any of those books, instead he grew increasingly interested in its lineage - the materials they were made from, the kind of binding, its provenance, and so forth. His contacts expanded to other parts of Europe like Amsterdam, Germany and recently to Italy. In fact, he had just come back after a fruitful trip there.
After retiring from Delta in 2005, he began buying and selling books at antique stores and book fairs across the world. After a few years of ‘travelling book fairs’ as he calls it, he settled down in his current store that now houses close to 4000 books, some of them as old as from the 14th and 15th centuries. The collection ranges from delicate miniature books to huge tomes. There are cautionary notices everywhere, “Please Do Not Handle! Ask for Assistance!” As you gingerly look around, you find him explaining the details of a book to a ten-year-old boy as if he was his most prized customer. The excited boy and his father leave the shop with a promise to come back and he turns to me, “Can I ask where are you from?” On the mention of India, he leads to me a shelf containing a set of books on the country and adds, “Your ambassador Mrs. Rao was my customer.”
He shows me a huge book press from Belgium,
then takes a leather book from the shelf , flips the edge of the pages and explains what a fore edge painting is. A scene painted on the edges of the book pages, these are visible only when the edges are fanned. A legend has it that a duchess and a friend of Charles II of England would borrow books from him, and conveniently forget to return them. So the king, along with the court painter Sir Peter Lely and the court book binder Samuel Mearne devised a way to identify his books - to paint a hidden image on the edges of the pages. The next time the king visited the duchess, he saw a familiar title on her shelf. On questioning, the duchess protested and the king took out his trump card - a painting of the royal coat of arms on the edges.
His love for these treasured books is so obvious, he takes one book after another from the shelves and cannot stop talking about the peculiarities of each - a 16th century book on physiology, another one on a lengthy commentary on the four gospels. He encourages you to touch and feel the pages, made of vellum , different kinds of cloth and covers made from pig skin.
The collection in the shop includes a first edition ‘Gone With The Wind’ signed by Margaret Mitchell priced at $5000, the First Collected Works of Winston Churchill that will cost you around $9000, a book on “True Womanhood’ published in 1825 and written by a Monsignor, no less, Charles Knight Imperial edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare from the 19th century, Latin books from 15th and 16th centuries and many more.
“What kind of people buy these books from you? I couldn’t resist asking.
“Maybe a girl who moved here from India a few years ago?” the twinkle in his eyes had turned mischievous now.
This is a conversation that will continue.
What a beautiful account, Bindu!
Enchanting, both the store and the story!