Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Searching for Book Sales

Well, it looks like I’m still a bookseller in search of a book sale. My Michgian back-up plan crashed and burned because I remembered the dates wrong. I saw the ad a couple weeks ago, but of course then it was far in the future so I didn’t make notes. When I went back to check this morning my heart sank to my feet. It’s TOMORROW, the day Eric returns from the wilds of Indiana. We can’t even go on the first day which is Thursday (tomorrow night’s the preview) because it’s at nine a.m. which means we’d have to be in line hours earlier and it’s a three hour drive from here. If we could go up the night before it would be great because we could also do the preview, but there’s no way Eric will be up for that after a five hour trip home in a huge truck.

The interesting thing about this sale is it comes equipped with a wrinkle I’ve never seen before. On preview night all books are priced fifty per cent more than they will be the following morning. At first glance you fly back in horror, but here’s the thing. The ad said that on the regular day prices would range from a dollar to ten dollars. So, okay, a $10 book on opening day is a $15 book at the preview. If it’s the right book, who cares? Around here the FOL sales are so inflated they should pass out complimentary vials of smelling salts for when you fall to the floor in a dead faint which is practically guaranteed to happen. It’s nothing to see books priced at $50-$100. Sometimes I even buy them, which probably just encourages them, but I’ve done okay with it and am not complaining about the good stuff. It’s when they get full of themselves over books that are not worth it, or are in deplorable condition, that I get a little cranky.

Condition means nothing to FOL pricers. They “look it up” (oh, how I hate that phrase) compare apples to breadfruit, and then cheerfully pencil in the biggest price they can find. A lot of them then run a print-out which used to be a joke because all you had to do was look at the number of the listing to calculate how many above it were cheaper and also the date at the top which gave away the fact that they’d looked it up LAST YEAR. Ah, but now they are smarter – all numbers and dates are – you guessed it – gone! So it’s still a joke, just a smarter one.

Of course the reason FOLs exist is not to make booksellers wealthy (THERE’S an oxymoron, huh?), but to raise money for the library. I’m definitely all for that and really don’t even get too worked up over the mile-high prices (unless I fall for a bogus one and get burned!). If they get their asking price God bless ‘em. My big complaint centers on allowing the sales to be pre-picked by “volunteers” who are actually dealers whose motives have about as much to do with philanthropy as roller skates have to do with chickens. But it’s a beautiful sunny day and I’m in no mood for a rant of that ilk, so enough said about the whole thing.

Oh! Here’s something fun. Yesterday I sold the BEST dictionary at the antiques mall. If you have not seen the Webster’s from the 30’s that’s a foot thick you haven’t seen a dictionary. This is truly the mother of all dictionaries. It’s been there since November and has been looked at a lot. I know this because nobody seems able to put it back on the shelf, so it usually remains on the floor in front of the shelf. I don’t know what the going price is online these days and don’t much care. I got $70 for it and that was fine by me. I also have a very fine two volume replacement dictionary from the 40’s with gorgeous green marbled edges and color plates I’ll be dragging over Thursday.

Speaking of the mall, a potentially interesting deal got tossed in the works. One of the mall employees wants to get rid of a lot of his own books and would very much like a firearms book we have on display. He was hoping we could swap all of his for the one of ours. The book he wants is $65 though, so it’s not as peachy as it sounds at first glance. Still, you never know. He called yesterday to say he’d left a partial list of what he has in the cabinet under one of the bookcases where I keep extra tickets and my cleaning supplies (one of the responsibilities of selling at the mall is cleaning your own booth), so I will check it out when we’re there. The good news is we’ll be going to an FOL sale near where he lives in a week, so if we can connect it won’t even be an extra trip.

I’m actually anxious to get to the mall because I spent the morning readying some very nice books. In addition to the two volume dictionary, I have a three volume Palfrey’s History of New England (1859); Siebert’s seminal The Underground Railroad; From Slavery to Freedom, first edition, 1899; and the ten volume set of Stoddard's Lectures plus four supplements. I'm telling you, if you can't afford a vacation just book an armchair trip with old Stoddard and you'll not only see the world, but  have a blast doing it. Fabulous pictures and readable prose -- when it comes to vintage travel Stoddard's THE MAN.  Last, but not least, I have a  charming 1883 guide to raising canaries and cage birds illustrated with bright, colorful chromolithographs. The fun part is it’s so earnestly written that the author actually provides the music and lyrics for songs to teach your bird! Anybody up for a rousing Fatinitza March and Chorus? No? Well, anyway and I’ve got a bunch of other stuff too, but those are the goodies.



So on that note (ha-ha) I’m off to accomplish something which probably means snapping endless pictures. The good news is if I do it enough I may gain a back-up skill in case the books go belly-up. But let's not talk about that. EVER.

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