Rare Book Monthly
Dealers of South Americana: An Interview with Alfredo & Gustavo Breitfeld
Item #54-Simon Bolivar’s letter to Sucre
Gustavo pauses, then continues: “But when you ask me this question, I think of what has been the biggest change in our business practices overall in the past 13 years or so. I would say this is by far the internet, and our ability to sell on it. We have a backstock of some 80,000 books, many of which are available over the internet. We try to have a strong presence in important international internet sites like ILAB, Abe.com, World Book Dealers.com. “ Antonio has returned during the last bits of this question and answer, and here he pays his son homage: “He [gesturing to Gustavo] is the one who invented our internet presence, who saw that it was impossible to sell without the incredible tool that is the internet.” I ask Gustavo in which ways they use the internet. “To sell different types of material, to get new customers from places where we would geographically be unable to get customers before. Mariana (his wife) now manages the internet part of our business, the everyday work.”
Besides selling over the internet, are there other ways they use the internet as a tool, I ask. “But of course,” Gustavo continues. “For research. We use AE a lot, as we don’t have Sabin or Maggs, for instance. For us it’s a Godsend.
You see, it takes us a whole year to do the buying, the research, then the writing in Spanish and the translations to English that make up our catalogue descriptions. We start preparing for our one annual catalogue about 3 or 4 months ahead of the fair. We two (Alfredo & Gustavo) are still the only people in our firm who do all this buying, research, and writing. We do have a few people who help out, mostly with conservational matters or doing data entry or catalogue design, but we do 100% of the book research and descriptions. You see, it’s very hard in our country to get people with the bibliographic and book history skills that we need. And it’s also very hard and very expensive to obtain the hardcover bibliographies that we need. That’s why AE has been such a Godsend to us. We use it daily, I’d say. At least. It’s saved us so much time, and so much money.”
I thank them for the compliment and return it, genuinely praising them to the hilt about the quality of their stock, their catalogues, their research, and their descriptions. Then I ask them what changes they have observed in the rare/antiquarian book trade in general over the past few years. But they want to talk even more about the internet and its influence on the book trade in general and on their firm in specific. Gustavo continues: “Remember, we were founded as a medical bookstore that then became a used book store that then became an antiquarian book store. The most dramatic changes in the book world overall have been technological. Our contact with the world now is accomplished by just pushing one button. This is extraordinary. In South America our company is the one antiquarian book firm that uses the internet most. We have an online database of 30,000 books, and over 80,000 books in stock. We are entering new books into our database all the time. And we sell so many on the internet.”
