Hunting Through a Thousand Old Books with Just a List: An Isseido Newcomer at the Book Auctions, and on to the Jimbocho Oden Shop A-One | Jimbocho and Me #12

At an antiquarian book auction with well over a thousand lots on display, you track down your shop’s winning bids using nothing but the titles written on a “nuki” slip—that was one of the first jobs a new recruit at Isseido Bookstore learned in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ryosuke Sakota of Keyaki Shoten writes about those days, all the way to the oden shop “A-One,” where a senior colleague took him after closing time. (From “Jimbocho and Me” #12, Hon no Machi, May 2026 issue)

Searching a Thousand Lots with Only a “Nuki” Slip to Go On

It was Mr. Kitahara, the store manager, who went to bid at one of the trade auctions, the Wednesday Tokyo Shiryokai. My job was to go and collect the lots we had won. But since I hadn’t gone along to the bidding, I had no idea what books he had bid on. I would roam the auction hall relying on the titles written on the nuki, the slip listing our winning lots, but having only just joined the shop, I knew next to nothing about books, and from a title alone I couldn’t tell at all what kind of book it was. In those days (the late 1970s to early ’80s), the Tokyo Kosho Kaikan (Tokyo Antiquarian Booksellers’ Hall) was a four-story building, before it was rebuilt with the eight floors it has now, and the first and second floors were used for the auctions. Probably well over a thousand lots were laid out. Some were single volumes; others were bundles of a dozen or more books, with two or three bundles making up one lot. The nuki gave only a single title. When a lot contained several items, it read something like “XX and 5 others” or “YY and 3 other bundles.”

The first time I went to the auction to collect books, I was baffled; I didn’t even understand what that way of writing on the nuki meant. After asking around, I finally grasped it and began to search, but since I hadn’t been at the bidding, I had no idea where in the hall the books we’d won had been placed. I didn’t even know whether they were on the first floor or the second. The titles on the nuki were all I had to go on, and if I didn’t know the book, there was nothing for it but to check every lot, one by one, from one end to the other. It took an awfully long time. Mr. Kitahara seemed to understand this, and even when it took me more than an hour to get back to the shop, he never once complained.

Getting to Know How the Auction Works

As I went back again and again to collect books, I gradually came to understand how the auction worked. The Tokyo Shiryokai, as its name (“Tokyo Reference Materials Society”) suggests, is an auction that deals mainly in research materials: academic and specialist books, journals and reports in fields such as law and economics, religion and history, archaeology, and science and mathematics. Almost none of it is ever found on the shelves of an ordinary bookstore, so for me, who had joined Isseido Bookstore straight out of high school, it was all things I had never seen or heard of.

Materials like these came to the Tokyo Shiryokai from all over Japan. For the organizers, both the dealers who consigned goods and the dealers who came to bid were customers, so the lots had to be displayed in the hall in a way that made them easy to see and easy to find. Arranging them by genre as far as possible was where the organizers showed their skill. Items known to fetch high prices, or thought likely to, were placed on what was called the “final table,” the very last table to have its bids opened. Once I understood how the auction was run, finding our winning lots became much, much faster. Mr. Kitahara only bought the kinds of books Isseido Bookstore dealt in, so I no longer needed to search the tables with law, economics, science or engineering, which we didn’t handle. That alone saved a great deal of effort. I also got back to the shop with our lots much sooner, and Mr. Kitahara began to wear a look that said, “Well, well, this one’s getting the hang of it.” In other words, I had been recognized as becoming a proper member of the trade.

And So to “A-One”

Once you have learned the job like that, you start getting invitations after closing time. I think that is probably how Mr. Kitahara came to take me to “A-One.” From my side, an invitation meant a free meal and drinks, so all I had to do was tag along happily without thinking too hard about it. Unlike a noisy izakaya, it had a noren curtain hanging at the entrance like a small traditional restaurant, and a sign that read “Yakitori, Oden.” A cozy little—(to be continued)

(Ryosuke Sakota, Keyaki Shoten / “Jimbocho and Me” #12, Hon no Machi, May 2026 issue)

Ryosuke Sakota
Keyaki Shoten. After finishing high school, he joined Isseido Bookstore, a long-established antiquarian bookstore in Jimbocho. He is currently writing the series “Jimbocho and Me” for Hon no Machi.

▶Read on: The Oden Shop “A-One” (3): What Came Out When He Ordered “Yakitori for Two”

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This article was published in the May 2026 issue (Vol. 13) of Hon no Machi, the community salon magazine of Kanda, Ochanomizu and Jimbocho. The story continues in the next issue. You can read the full text, along with the other articles, in the PDF.

▶Read the May 2026 issue of Hon no Machi (PDF, in Japanese)

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