And Sometimes You Lose ...

As the old saying goes, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Yesterday was a losing day at the book sale, though rather impresssively so, if that counts for anything. It’s too bad too, as my friend Cheryl had never been to a library sale, and had to have been grandly underwhelmed by this one. Not only did we buy so little we carried it out by hand, but there wasn’t even any drama and trauma such as I’ve reported in the past to liven things up. The sole high note was lunch at a Chinese restaurant across the street from the library with my bookseller friend Paul.

This is usually a decent sale, but something went way off the rails last night. As always, I buy mostly from the specials, but this time they offered nothing but trash -- Harvard classics, stray volumes of sets, cheap editions by unknown authors etc. etc. and all priced to the rafters. They announced that they researched everything and marked it at twenty per cent of the online value. What they forgot to say was that it was twenty per cent of the HIGHEST online value. I have many times bought books here in the $50-200 per item range without regret, but this time I was the personification of buyers’ resistance. You won’t believe it, but my entire take was one cookbook for myself, two books for the antiques mall, and a small cache of board books and chapter books for my grandsons. I can only remember one other time in fifteen years leaving a sale with nothing for online inventory, but there you have it. Needless to say, I am not anticipating their fall sale.

The crowd seemed good though and the scanners scanned their hearts out. Enough boxes of low-end items got hauled out of there to make me think that e-books must not be taking too much of a bite out that market yet. But I have a hunch that one tactic that had seemed promising to the Friends previously may well have fizzled. A couple sales ago they came up with the novel idea of boxing excess books by category and selling them sight unseen for a flat price (I think it was $15 a box). Back then it was Vegas night at the church social, but yesterday very few sellers seemed willing to gamble. Clearly the odds had favored the house and their money had turned into a donation rather than an investment.

As we were leaving with our meager bags of books  one of the sale volunteers who had been at the Akron antiquarian book fair earlier this month commented on what nice books we have. I thanked him, but got to thinking about it last night and realized that very few of them were acquired at FOL sales. The lion’s share  had come from private collections with estate sales and auctions accounting for most of the rest. I would say that less than twenty per cent derived from FOL sales, but most of which did had come from THIS particular sale! It makes me wonder if the high prices were a direct result of the poor donations. When you are trying to raise money for a cause you have no choice but to maximize the potential of what you have. The “best” book offered was an admittedly hard to find Scribner’s children’s book from 1929 in nice condition but lacking its jacket and priced at $75. One copy appears online from a Canadian seller for $150, but I harbor serious doubts about it. I will spend if I believe a book is worth it, but I have no regrets about turning this one down.

So all told, it was an odd way to spend an afternoon and evening. I am not kidding when I tell you that we left here at noon and did not return until 8 p.m. But disappointing as it was, I somehow managed to have a good time. Paul is great company, the hunan chicken was amazingly good, and Cheryl and I could talk about the price of grapes and be entertained. So no complaints, or at least not many, from this quarter.