As usual, there’s been too much running around and not
enough time for anything else. I had planned to post Friday after the estate
sale we went to, but came home so demoralized I couldn’t bear to bore you with
the awfulness of it. In a nutshell, this particular company has been raising
their prices on books exponentially right at the moment when the future of the printed book hangs in the balance. It’s
interesting to me how all these years when books were a hot commodity I could
pick them up at this company’s estates for $2-4 a volume and now when prices
are tumbling for most titles they think they’ve joined the revolution!
To give you an idea of how truly bad this has gotten they
had a mind boggling array of early hard cover Grace Livingston Hill and Emily Loring
titles priced at $10 each. You can buy these for peanuts online ( though why
would you want to?) and even less at sales where they pop up as frequently as
dandelions. They also had a copy of an Akron title -- A Centennial
History of Akron 1825-1925 – which I’ve sold three times over the years at $45,
$40 and (most recently) $35. Theirs? A ridiculously optimistic $45! I think
perhaps what bothers me most is that every time they run an ad they brag about
their “always reasonable” prices. I used to really like this sale, but I think
I’m about done with it. I know I’ve said that before, but truly this is getting
outlandish.
We had also planned to go to a second sale Friday night, a
fancy one with wine and food, but I couldn’t
muster up any enthusiasm after wasting three hours in the morning. So guess what
happens Satuday afternoon? I hear from my antiques dealer friend Darwin who tells me
he bought five books on Oriental rugs for his own reference library only to
find that one about Caucasian rugs, for which he paid $6, lists online in the $200-300
range. I’m happy for him, but it’s possible that he just got lucky. Still, it I
did make me wonder what else I missed. By the time we showed up on Sunday there
was very little left. I bought three workaday titles for $2 each and will
probably sell them in in the $20-25 range, so no big excitement.
I did, however, snag a gorgeous table for the antiques
mall (see above). I got a tremendous deal on it and knew I could easily triple
my money at the mall, but now I don’t
want to sell it. We took it home, put it in our formal living room “just to see”
and immediately roots sprung out of its legs and through the wood floor into the basement ceiling where
they knotted themselves into an impenetrable snarl. So I guess that pretty much
killed that idea. I did get an ugly chair, much like the other ugly chairs I
sold in my booth (no, Saturday Evening Post, NOT the green ones), which is good
because it gives people somewhere to sit to check out the lower shelves. Because
of their extreme beauty, the GREEN chairs had been cordoned off – no sitting
allowed.
So there was my weekend, a rather strange one which made me think again
of Linda, my bookseller friend who temporarily dropped out to have a knee
replacement and never came back. Linda loved the estates and bought a good deal
of her inventory there. Today you’re lucky to find an estate sale that
advertises books at all and when you do
you have to brace yourself before you can
even think about entering the fray. If estate
sales were my primary source I’d sell maybe two books a month at this rate.
It probably seems to you that I'm awash in books anyway given the collections we bought recently,
but I have been listing pretty steadily, so lately a sense of panic overcomes
me when I see the pile in the office diminishing even AFTER the books I got with
Cheryl last week. Remember, too, that the one collection we got was comprised totally of Ohio titles which will sell in their own (sloooow) sweet time. Everything in me screams that the sale I told you about in Cincinnati
will not be the golden event of two years ago, but I’m desperate enough to pay
it no mind. I’m over the part about finding the rare magazines there, so it's not that. I know
that was a fluke never to be repeated, but I’m worried enough about summer’s
slower acquisition rate to book a hotel anyway.
