As a cigar smolders between his fingers, Philip McComish unfurls a two-foot long, yellowed paper.
On one side is a U.S. map, coast to coast. Railroad lines crisscross the country, but the tracks in Kansas are highlighted.
“This was a promotional put-up with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad,” McComish said. “They’re promoting sale of lands in Kansas.”
He flips the paper over.
“This is what’s remarkable: The entire thing is in Swedish.
“I suspect it was probably printed in Sweden by the railroad to lure Swedes to come to Kansas. … This is Kansas history in the raw.”
This type of history spills out of Watermark West Rare Books. Alongside maps, McComish stocks hundred-year-old tomes about the American West, movie posters from the 1950s, and even a 1960s rendering of an imagined future for downtown Wichita – all of which can be seen by appointment.
Since it opened in 1985, the store has been a constant on the corner of First and Broadway downtown. It’s consistency, though, belies some turmoil within.
The advent of the internet upended the antiquarian book business, and McComish said private collectors are increasingly uncommon. In November, the store was burgled and then had a rock thrown through its window. McComish said the thieves left the books but took a bag of cash, cigars and the ceramic bust of a gorilla head he’d acquired at a garage sale.
Through it all, the store is hanging on.
“But only because … I usually do not have all these lights on,” McComish said. “In the winter, the thermostat is way down, and I’m in long underwear and other clothes.
“But, you know, you control the things you can control.”
Luckily, Watermark West has been adapting since it began.
The beginnings
The store was founded by Bruce Jacobs, who also created the independent Watermark Books in east Wichita. The two shops shared the downtown location until 1994, when Watermark Books moved.
In the 1980s and ’90s, McComish built his inventory by buying entire collections of books from people or their estates after they passed away. He’d pick out the most valuable pieces, resell them at book fairs around the country and mail out catalogues to buyers.
Then the internet arrived. By the mid-90s, eBay and book-selling websites had become popular.
The tools helped McComish get his books out to a worldwide audience. But it also brought a downside.
“It revealed that many, many, many books that we in the trade thought were rare, or at least scarce, turned out to be neither,” McComish said.
Prices, especially for classic literature, dipped. McComish switched the store’s focus to Western Americana books – but demand for that, too, started to evaporate.
Celia Hack
/
KMUW
A pivot
In the early 2000s, he made a major business decision. Along with books, he began collecting ephemera – basically, anything small and flat printed on paper, like booklets, maps, brochures or advertisements. He focused on items related to Kansas or the American West.
“I was never going to find an unrecorded Hemingway, but multiple times a year I will find an utterly unknown piece of Western Americana,” McComish said.
He found the items by trawling eBay.
“I work that thing like a milk cow,” McComish said.
The items were cheap – partially because McComish was essentially plucking history from a haystack. Many of the pieces were put on eBay by residents cleaning out or decluttering relatives’ basements or garages.
“Back then, eBay was beneath a lot of rare book dealers,” McComish said. “It was just seen as a giant garage sale, which is exactly what it was. … But for me, it was a gold mine. And I think for history, it was a gold mine.”
Susan Benne is the executive director of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America. She said selling and collecting ephemera has grown in popularity in the last 20 years. Benne, for example, collects printed snapshots of people doing yoga.
“A really great thing about ephemera is it’s a lot more unique and accessible than some other areas of collecting or previous areas of collecting,” Benne said. “ …The material might range from a few dollars to, you know, tens of thousands of dollars, depending on what it is.”
Celia Hack
/
KMUW
Changing demand
In recent years, McComish said finding buyers for his products is a major challenge.
“Private collectors are a dying breed,” McComish said. “Most of the ones that I know of are at least in their 70s and sometimes in their 80s and 90s, and they’re just – there are no new ones coming along.”
Benne, however, said on the national level, she’s observed the organization’s rare book fairs are starting to draw younger and more diverse crowds.
“It used to skew largely white, largely male, largely a little bit older… ,” Benne said. “That’s the way it used to be more like 20 years ago, 15 years ago.
“Now, when you walk into one of our fairs, there’s greater diversity in terms of ethnicity, in terms of age, in terms of gender identity.”
Institutional collectors – mainly universities and libraries in Kansas and on the East Coast – are McComish’s other major clients. He said demand has dipped there, too. Budget challenges can put a lid on buying or lead institutions to purchase cheaper digitized, scanned versions of materials instead of the hard copy.
The loss of a key staff member can also stymy collections efforts. At Wichita State University, the research and operations manager for the library’s special collections department, Mary Nelson, passed away this summer.
Brent Mai is the dean of WSU’s libraries. He said the special collections library is on a hiatus from buying historical materials from collectors since Nelson died.
“She knew the collection really well,” Mai said. “So, when something popped up that was rare, she would say, ‘Well, we don’t have that.’ Those of us that are still here now can’t answer that off the top of our head.”
Mai said he hopes the special collections department will soon resume buying historical books and ephemera.
McComish is 72. He said he’s not sure of Watermark West’s future. In the meantime, he’ll keep ensuring the past isn’t lost to history – or the dumpster.
“Lord only knows how much wonderful, wonderful stuff has gone that way,” he said.
“Somebody said … ‘Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’
“And to remember it, you’ve got to have the documentation, this firsthand stuff, the firsthand history.”
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