Two Booksellers and A Truck

As I write this my garage is packed with plastic bins of books, all bought last Monday from a semi-truck. I promised I’d tell the story of how they got there, so here goes. It’s not especially dramatic, but then again I never in fifteen and three-quarter years in the business bought books from a truck, so there IS at least a novelty factor. Of course the day we made the deal was probably the “noveltiest”. Retrieval day a week later not so much. It’s January in northeastern Ohio which means the air felt like the breath of a Nordic war god huffing and puffing to blow down Britain. By the time we transferred 85 plastic bins of books from the semi-truck to our own truck my toes felt (and looked)like ten frozen grapes. I’m not complaining. Well, maybe I’m complaining a little after climbing four giant ice-slicked steps into the semi, especially given the fact that the second to the last step required a gargantuan two-foot haul to the top!I think I’m entitled to at least a small whine over that. I'm not exactly an Amazonian woman.

But getting back to the beginning – a couple weeks ago an attorney came into our store and inquired as to whether we would be interested in a semi-truck full of books. Eric is game for anything. He’d retrieve books from a donkey cart stuck in a Central American rain forest. So of course he told her we’d love to see them. I, on the other hand, responded with a mixture of excitement and skepticism. Before you tell me it’s not possible to be both excited and negative at the same time, I assure you I wasn’t. I see-sawed back and forth between the two emotions for three days. Depending on who I was talking to it sounded either fun and fabulous or stupid and a waste of time. Interestingly enough, It didn’t turn out to be either.

I don’t know what it is about us. Whenever there are a lot of books ranging in condition and subject from superb to landfill located in a less than charming location the Universe sends them to us stamped Express Mail. This is the fourth time I can think of that we encountered a hoarder situation, but I’ve also probably repressed a couple minor ones. Anyway, the previous owner had the semi-truck in the backyard so when the house got too crowded with the various other things he collected he stored the books in plastic tubs, stashed them in the truck, and there they stayed until he died. His interests were pretty varied, but if pinned to the wall I’d say the primary ones were these: art glass lamps, collectible canes, music and musical instruments, horses, horse racing, book collecting, gambling, guns, antique and vintage cars, home building and, oddly enough, interior design

.The good thing about all of this was the fact that the very best books – and there actually were some – had managed to escape confinement in the truck, though the truck itself was less problem than the way it had been packed. Several good titles landed in the dumpster because their owner had stood them upright in the bin and crammed many more upright at a diagonal around them. Several ended up so warped you could have used them to carry in kindling. Fortunately, we had access to a large on-site dumpster which the attorney understood we would need, but this also meant that every bin had to be opened, winnowed, and repacked. We went from 130 bins down to 84 in five hours.As you can see form the photo above, we have them home and neatly stacked. I’ve already been through not quite half (there are some more down at other the end of the garage by the doors too). But I’m in this operation deep enough now to know that despite the junk and the low end stuff I would never buy individually we will still do fine. Primarily this is because we have a unique three-tiered situation which makes such buys work for us. The best items (which right now amount to just two bins) will go online. The next tier will go to the mall and the rest to the store. I wished on an entire constellation of stars that every book in every box or bin would end up being mine so I can breathe easier for a few months about inventory. But clearly it’s not going to happen.

In order to get the goodies, however few in number, I apparently need to WORK.

P.S. Blogger is still not acepting pictures normally. I had to WORK to get his one here and was reluctant to push my luck with more. So if, and when, it gets fixed I'll show you some of the good books.

Old School Booksellers Still Talking .... PART II

It’s been a crazy week, as we bought  somewhere in the neighborhood of 40-60 tubs of books off a semi-truck. I know – it sounds pretty wacky – but I’ll explain it the next time I post. Meanwhile, back in Sheila Markham’s absorbing book A Book of Booksellers; Conversations with the Antiquarian Book Trade I managed to cull yet more interesting comments from booksellers past and present (mostly past). I loved this book which is why I roared through it as fast as  I did, but what you’re getting here is only a microcosm of the wisdom it holds – a handful of crumbs instead of the whole bag of Doritos.

Peter Miller is a man after my own heart. When he said “The look of a bookshop is very important to me. And over the years I’ve got Spelman’s the way I like it –an open fire, pictures on the walls,  and the books standing up like little soldiers”  my heart did a somersault. Oh, how I would love a fireplace in my booth at the antiques mall, but lacking one, I’m still all fuss and feathers every week when I go there with fresh stock. My antiques dealer friend Darwin teasingly asked me once, “Tess, are you a booth decorator, or a bookseller?” The answer is I’m both. I want the books to be irresistible in both appearance and content, but I also want the space to dust off the reader’s worries, mop up the stress,  and provide a tiny oasis of beauty in our upside-down world.

If there were a vote for most fun seller in this book Michael Hollander wins with a Grand Slam.  Here’s his take on book fairs: “Somehow we’ve got to get a new generation of collectors, and publicity is the obvious key. The traditional means of mass communication is of course television, but who can afford it? So you have to think of ways of making news. How about getting a book dealer to immolate himself outside the British Library on the eve of a bookfair? I’m sure I could select a candidate.”

Wednesay evening will find me in Akron at a committee meeting for the 2013 Akron Antiquarian fair, so believe it when I say  this one resonated big time. Notice the reference to television in the quote instead of social media. Clearly, aging collectors were a big problem even then, which of course means that the heat’s REALLY on now! We have two basic choices --  think outside the box or pull a rabbit FROM the box. Either way, it ain’t easy, but if we want the show to go on we better build a better fair this year than the better fair we built last year. Like it or not, it’s not enough to haul in the books and prop open the door anymore. These days it takes a  trick monkey and a soundtrack.

The more I get to know booksellers the more obvious it becomes that there’s more than one way to sell books though. John Walwyn-Jones expressed this truth best with this line, “If I have any strength, I think it’s my ability to look at a book and find new angles of interest. There are 101 ways to sell a book.” Doesn’t that just beg to be a book title – 101 Ways to Sell a Book? The key words in John’s quote are “look at a book.” Not glance at a book, but LOOK at a book. I fancy myself pretty good at that too, but it does take time.

Of course just like the myriad ways of selling a single book there’s myriad ways of selling ALL books --  retail, wholesale, online, in stores, at fairs, at flea markets, by catalog, on the street, by appointment, by whimsy, or some combination thereof. And that doesn’t even count the various techniques, including my favorite – value added. I’ve mentioned this before, but since I effectively  did it over Christmas I’ll mention it again. I had an antiquarian title called Nostrums and Quackeries about the patent medicine scams of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. I also had a stack of trade cards of the period advertising these various snake oils. So I picked out a couple cards for companies mentioned in the book, laid them in, and – voila! – a book that was good got better because it now contained a tangibile REAL value that illustrates and informs  the text.

As much as I enjoy stuff like the above though, longevity in the trade is my biggest goal. So when Charles Traylen  said, “As for the future, I’ll go on bookselling ‘til I drop” my respnse was immediate and heartfelt.

Me too, Charles.

Me too.

 (Sorry for the lack of photos. Blogger has a known problem at this time. The browse button is missing on the  page for uploading pictures. Fortunately, this post doesn't really have to have one. but if it gets fixed I'll add one.)

Old School Booksellers Speak

I can’t believe how quickly I am tearing through my eighteen new Christmas books. So far I’ve read The End of Your Life Book Club which is truly wonderful, a novel called The Color of Tea, which is just okay, and Red House: Being a Mostly Accurate Account of New England’s Oldest Lived-in House which I could not put down given my abiding love for old houses. Now I am reading A Book of Booksellers, Conversations with the Antiquarian Book Trade by Sheila Markham. I started it last night and am already on page 103. I didn’t realize when I asked for it for Christmas that it was primarily about the British trade, but the oversight hasn’t diluted my enthusiasm an iota. The book is a compendium of interviews with various dealers, some of whom have since died. The interviews are rather old anyway, as some of these people died in the 90’s and the book came out in 2007. What I’m enjoying most is hearing these seasoned sellers say the very things I’m thinking right now even though time and inequitable experience divide us.

 As you know, I  gnash and rend endlessly over the difficulty of finding books for stock. Turns out I’m not alone, as evidenced  by this quote from Peter Eaton, “I was talking to the librarian of Rochdale, where they had a statue of Hitler in the town square and people used to throw books at Hitler for a waste paper drive. The librarian picked out one or two incunabula like that. There were a lot of pickings in those days.”

Simon Gough also shared my feelings about booksellers when right out of the chute he declared , “All booksellers are lunatics.” Of course we are – why else would educated people stand in lines turning their toes purple in  sub-zero temperatures to buy other people’s stuff in hopes of finding a treasure amongst the weeds when they could have a “REAL” job with  health insurance and paid vacation? I prefer, however, to think  our lunacy is ignited by our white-hot passion for books and the pleasure they bring to life.

Another sentiment I think today’s booksellers would give a nod to is Sam Fogg’s assertion – “I enjoy being my own man.” Amen to that! I enjoy being my own woman too. I love the solitude of bookselling, the autonomy, the scholarship, even the tightrope on which it forces us to dance. We’re  it – masters of our own destiny. It’s scary I suppose, but not really to me. I love sorting it all out, figuring out what to do next, reinventing myself. -- all of it except the dreaded Ohio sales tax! But even that is nothing more than the price I pay for the best job in the world. (I know – I complain bitterly  twice a year about having to send it electronically and of course I'll l be doing so again in a couple weeks!)

I’m not sure when exactly Anthony Rota made his comment, but it certainly has a déjà vu quality: “With the recession and so much redundancy  there will be more small firms starting up – maybe collectors selling their books, either from choice or necessity -- the tendency for one-man firms will certainly continue …”  Sound familiar? Absolutely! When the recession hit hard in 2008 the number of amateur sellers wielding scanners exploded. Many have come and gone since then , but some have also hung on and new ones keep joining  the ranks, though likely in smaller numbers. I wonder what Rota thinks about bookselling in Great Britain thse days and if it’s the same as the cattle call which has become the Great American Library Sale with  it’s armies of  galloping scanners!

A comment that’s  pretty funny and one that I agree with on the days that my computer is throwing temper tantrums was made by Eric Korn who said,  “I’m reluctant to see computers  in a prominent position in a bookshop. It’s rather like turkeys cultivating cranberries.” Ah, yes, but those turkeys have an amazing ability to cultivate book sales, do they not?

And then there’s Sally Edgecombe, a woman after my own heart. There were not many women IN the book trade back then and those who were had to jockey to keep their heads above the roiling sea of testosterone. But Sally said this, “Apart from the customers, I suppose my other great love is  buying. It’s rather like gambling and I find it very exciting!” Oh yeah, Sally – sing it girl!

How many times have I hovered over a book waiting to see if my internal "bookdar" would shove me to the check-out line or back to square one? And  how many times did it fail to kick in either way and leave me with only my own wits to make a decision?  As every bookseller knows it’s in this gray field  of consciousness that good books are lost and duds are carted home. But oh, the thrill of it all! Just last week I sold a book I might have  told you about -- A Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods and the History of Silk, Cotton, Linen, Wool and Other Fibrous Substances Including a Full Explanation of the Modern Processes of Spinning, Dyeing and Weaving, 1892. Try as I might, the arrow on my internal guage didn’t budge much either way. I was standing in front of a cabinet next to the door in cramped quarters three feet from the check-out line and people going in and out and all I had was a mild hunch that it might be worthy. It was – to the tune of $150.

I used the term “old school” in the title and throughout this post on purpose. It’s faintly derogatory when used by someone who believes that “that was then and this is now.” Of course that WAS then and this IS now, but here’s the thing – the past can inform the present if we listen. I will be sharing more old school booksellers' comments as I wend my way through the pages of Shelia Markham’s delightful book. I look forward to it.

A New Year In the Book Biz

 

I’m happy to report that I’m in a much better frame of mind since I last wrote. Christmas snuck up on me December 29^th when our house filled to the rafters with family and friends. Because both of our daughters live out of state we had to delay the family celebration this year to accommodate work schedules. As you know, after Newtown I thought for sure the Christmas spirit had eluded me this year, but  miraculously it hadn’t. In fact, when it finally showed up it brought with it a bit of wisdom. Christmas, I learned,  is not about the date on the calendar. Christmas is when people you love gather under your roof watching football, eating endless cookies, sharing dinner, opening presents, chasing kids and laughing as though all’s right with the world – which in such sublime moments it IS.

Of course with Christmas delayed this year New Year’s practically collided with it. We stayed home New Year’s Eve, had a nice dinner, and read our new Christmas books. I got an astounding eighteen – yeah, really -- EIGHTEEN books, a handful of which are in the photo above along with the Pomegranate and Green Tea  given to me by my  oldest grandson who just turned nine and is a gift giver of the highest order. I even woke up long enough to watch the ball drop in Times Square.

New Year’s Day, however,  found us at an auction with the deepest pocketed people in three counties. Everything I wanted passed me by, including a turn-of-the-century game so fabulous that the thick edges of the folding board looked like the spine of a fine book when closed. It had the spinner, the pieces, the original box and even the directions which were pristine. I bid to $130, but it sold at $275. The next thing I tried for was a short stack of early Harley motorcycle magazines from the 20’s and 30’s. I went to $250, but THEY went to somebody else for an eye-popping $650! Our antiques dealer friend Darwin was there and invited us to mend our wounds over dinner that evening, so I made some homemade gingerbread and we headed to Akron for pork and sauerkraut with wine and my dessert. Whatever red wine it was he had I strongly recommend  as an antidote to both pricey auctions and fiscal cliffs! (Turns out it was Spellbound, Petite Sirah 2010, California)

Another cool thing that happened over the holidays  is a trade I made with my friend Cheryl with whom I reconnected  last year (or was it the year before?). Cheryl and I were friends back in the 70’s, but lost track of each other when I moved to Medina. We reconnected decades later in the parking lot at Buehler’s grocery store at River Styx in Medina .Cheryl can sew anything – I mean the woman could make a tuxedo for a gorilla -- but instead she is making fun aprons and pillows which she sells on etsy. Cheryl made a transfer of my website’s logo seen at  www.garrisonhousebooks.com and – voila! – my girl in the red chair was immortalized on a pillow. In exchange I gave her  a book -- The Sewing Book; Containing Complete Instructions in Sewing and Simple Garment-Making  for Children in the Primary and Grammar Grades, published by Butterick in 1913. Because the drawings of the kids in their spiffy outfits are in the public domain  she can now resurrect them with a modern spin. To read her take on what happened in our crazy trade go to her blog http://csturgeo.blogspot.com/

 

Today I’m back to work and glad for it. This was not the best year I’ve had as a bookseller, but it was still  a good one with online sales chugging right along without ebay and alibris both of whom  I shed ( sort of like a snake’s skin )– ebay in 2010 and alibris in the summer of 2012. In fact, I had a better Christmas this year than I did last. The antiques mall performed well too over the Christmas holiday and it, too, exceeded last year. So I’m charged up and ready to move into my 16^th year of  bookselling. I am always tempted to make resolutions, but they have a sneaky way of both inflating and spawning even more resolutions which I also inflate. I can't just say I will increase my inventory. No, I have to vow to  buy collections so dazzling they’d blind the average seller. Nor can I say that I will sell more books in the New Year. Nope. I've gotta sell 'em  at a clip that would scare amazon.  I can't even promise to write more frequently on my blog. Somehow it always turns into "I will  effortlessly turn out a blog post A DAY so captivating  that my followers will be numbered in legions.” And there goes any semblance of a lasting New Year's resolution!

So this year I’m not making any resolutions. I’m just going to work hard, learn more than I know now, and gratefully do what I love best – which is exactly what I've done ever since I entered the book biz.

 

Searching for Christmas

Where, I wonder, is Christmas? Somehow it’s gone, though it never really kicked in for me this year.The fact that I was late to catch the holiday spirit isn’t particularly significant in itself because every year I am a dervish in high-spin, trying to balance work and the responsibilities of “making” Christmas for my family. But this year is different.This year Newtown happened.

Last Sunday after four days of self-imposed confinement  Eric coerced me into joining the real world for the second time since the slaughter of the lambs, first to go to the Medina Flea Market and then Christmas shopping and to dinner at Macaroni Grill. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that it perked me up some. But the other half of the truth is this -- I didn’t stay perked for long and I am not perky now. There aren’t enough sandbags in all of Connecticut to keep the anguish of Newtown inside its borders. And that’s how it should be. It’s our job to feel the pain of the parents, the terror of the children, the anguish of forever. It’s more than our job actually. It’s our privilege, our gift, our hope for the world. I suppose it's true that sorrow cannot  be measured on a scale, but the one thing I know for sure is that it’s a shared weight.

On our way out of town on Sunday afternoon a billboard caught my eye. It was planted in the yard of the Seventh Day Adventist Church on Rte 18 and on it were two stark words, white against mournful black-- "Jesus wept."  YES! Oh, yes. Yes.The word resonated, reverberated, richoted throughout my being. Of course He did. God would weep. How could He not when such an obscenity struck the most innocent and vulnerable amongst us? And yet ever since Newtown, in the name of God, some have argued that what happened there was retribution, the wrath of a God of mighty and fearsome vengeance. I know I should dig deep and find some kind of forgiveness for that, but I think my forgiveness bin is pretty much empty right now. It takes an incredible hardness of heart, a pomposity, a shameful showmanship to argue that God would strike down babies for the “sins of the fathers.” I don’t care if these self-proclaimed messengers  disagree with me on evolution, gay marriage, or anything else. But don’t, please DON’T, tell me that God (whom I do believe in, by the way) would  ever entertain such a revolting thought. To say so is blasphemy. Pure and simple.

For the record, I do know something about what it feels like when Evil finds your child. We were lucky the day Evil came calling if there is anything lucky about having your child abducted by a gunman. It happened to one of our daughters when she was in college. Somehow, against all odds, she broke free of him even though he forced her into her car in the blackness of night and made her drive to an ATM while he held a gun to the back of her head. By the time we knew it had happened it was over. But relief was short-lived because Evil always leaves a calling card. Always. For us it was  a heavy gunnysack marked with two words scary enough to turn your hair as white as the deadly oleander.  I suppose it could be argued that we  didn’t HAVE to unleash “What if”. But of course we did – many times. We did it then. We did it later. And I did it again  after Newtown.  But never, ever, not for one single second, then or now, did we blame God for the acts of a madman.

Still, and all, Christmas eludes us this year. We decorated our tree, but not in velvet splendor like last year. This tree is traditional, plain, festooned  with a  paper star, a bread dough replica of our oldest daughter when she was little, two little photos of two little girls, a shiny green globe held on by a diaper pin, a Hallmark ornament that says Baby’s First Christmas, and a white plastic heart ornament bought for me by my oldest grandson at the Santa Shop at school.

Will Christmas come this year? If so, when? How? Will it come in a rush of noise and excitement when our house fills to the rafters with family? Or will it come in the strains of a carol, or  a sky full of stars?  Will it come at all? I don’t know. I think it will.

I hope.

 

Good Gifts

 

I’ve been feeling a bit downhearted about my blog due to all the technical  problems with blogger these days. As you may know, the last paragraph of my most recent post turned blue and was virtually invisible unless you clicked the mouse to highlight it. No sooner did that pop up than I got a message from a reader saying that my Halloween post  (Lighter and Brighter) was  one long paragraph. I went over to have a look  and sure enough – it had morphed into a giant rectangle of words. I fixed it with the one and only html command I know and it was fine when I clicked off, but it didn’t stay that way. Fifteen minutes later  the same reader contacted me again to report that it now had paragraphs, but ended abruptly in mid-sentence and appeared to have parts missing. It did, and for all I know, still does.

I can’t bear to look at it or at any of the others, so I have no idea how much havoc it caused. But here’s the thing. I was wrapping books this morning and it occurred to me that more than usual are Christmas gifts this holiday. I did not put much stock in the Christmas season this year when it comes to people buying used and/or antiquarian books as gifts, so this was rather an interesting  observation. Immediately I wanted to run upstairs and talk to you about it. But of course  the only way I could  do that is to let go of my miserable blogger problems and  have a little faith.

So here’s me.

Having a little (micro little) faith.

A couple years ago I tore my rotator cuff when I tangled my foot in the leg of my capri- length pjs while running up the stairs. To keep from falling DOWN the stairs I grabbed the wall with one hand and – OUCH! Pain so intense I shook like an aspen in a hurricane. To make it worse Eric had to leave for a business trip two days later, so it looked like I’d have to close down the business until he got back. But my friend Nancy offered to wrap orders every night after work and take the books to the post office in the morning. I know, it sounds like I’m digressing here, but hang on – I really DO have a point. While I will never forget Nancy’s kindness in doing this for me, what I’ll remember most keenly is her pure delight in the books.  She truly loved seeing what people bought. Wow – a book about Lionel trains! Who knew? And 12 issues of a 1920’a magazine called Chemical Abstracts? Why would someone want that? How did they know it even existed? I had no idea, but watching her reaction to each item awakened a new delight in ME.

This morning  as I tied a silver ribbon around a handsome little antiquarian title from 1854 called John Penry The Pilgrim Martyr 1559-1593,  I remembered Nancy and the chemical magazines and suddenly realized what a gift it is to be able to provide someone with THEIR perfect gift. To tell the truth, I never heard of John Penry, but I’m glad he called out to me from a table nestled in a bay window of  a pretty old house in west Akron. That late summer estate sale, which I probably complained about, produced this scarce book someone badly wanted.

I love being a bookseller. I truly do. And I hope that I will be one for the rest of my life. Sometimes it takes a small book, a piece of silver ribbon, and a memory to remind you that doing what you love is a HUGE gift in itself.

And so here I am. Still.

Picture This!

 

The best laid plans – get interrupted. I know this to be true because every single day this week I tried to write a post and every day something happened to prevent it. The big something, which should have been a little something, was the demise of my camera. These days you don’t get cameras fixed –you get them replaced. I guess I could live with that if only the replacements WORKED. But in a span of 24 hours I bought two digital cameras – a Fuji and a Nikon – and had to haul both of them back to their respective stores (note that was plural) due to defects. I liked the Nikon Coolpix though because I had one before and liked IT, so I ended up giving that model a second go. Maybe the fact that it was purple had a teeny-tiny something to do with it, but mostly it was because it seemed familiar and therefore friendly. In fact, I would have bet my last memory card that I’d be snapping pictures like Ansel Adams in an hour tops. It didn’t happen.

The problems were myriad, so I will boil them down to a.) the lack of technological talent of  the user and b.) the overabundance of tech-talk by the writers of the annoying manual that accompanied it. I finally got it up and running, found the flash setting and the setting that sizes the pictures – all that important stuff – and zoomed confidently in on books I’d listed the previous day. But did they fly into cyberspace on the wings of angels? No, they did not.

It turned out that my new anti-virus program – the computer geniuses in Brunswick jettisoned Norton due to problems it’s having in its new incarnation – in favor of a product made by a company here in Medina. So far it seems good enough, but it did get a tad overzealous and decided that my new camera was up to nefarious things, hence why no pictures could be uploaded. I called the geniuses and  they fixed it, but  by then the day was over. Which brings me to yesterday.

Yesterday was filled with meetings. I thought I’d pretty much left those behind when I quit my sales and marketing job at the nursing home twenty-some years ago. But it’s time again to start working on the 2013 Akron Antiquarian Book Fair, so I had two meetings in one day. The first one was fun because it was just me and Andrea, but the second one was serious business. Actually I don’t even mind these kind of meetings. It’s just that I desperately needed to make up for lost camera time. As always, I love the book fair, so working on it is normally a great pleasure. Last year we introduced speakers to the itinerary which proved to be a big hit, so this year we’ve lined up four more, plus the possibility of a VERY cool display. I can’t say what this is yet because it’s really a long shot, but if it works out it will be fabulous. If it doesn’t there’s always  back-up plans.

Thinking about the fair though makes me anxious because I have bought very little since the collection I told you about in my last post. I’ve only been to one sale –  that small rural one I’ve mentioned several times that I like because it’s quiet and they don’t allow scanning which also means that I don’t have to fight the crowds. Mostly I don’t get much, but this time I found one humdinger of a book –New York's China Town; An Historical Presentation of  Its People and Places, published by Bohemia Press in 1892. This one’s got it all – photos, drawings, and a lively text which covers, among other things, governance, the Chinese restaurants and laundries, the seclusion of women, family life, music, opium smoking (includes a detailed drawing of the apparatus), playing fan-tan, Chinese lotteries, prostitution, slave girls, Chinese funerals, and Chinese cemeteries.

 

It just goes to show you -- you can find anything anywhere. Especially when you aren't beleaguered by broken cameras.



 

 

Life Lesson Relearned

Awhile back – seems like eons – I wrote about the collection which contained a first edition of Florence Nightingale’s nursing book which we bought but were unable to collect due to the fall-out from Hurricane Sandy in Ohio. When last I mentioned it we were supposed to pick up the books on a specific date, but couldn’t due to the fact that the owner’s condo was without power for more than a week. We finally got them a week ago today, but the outcome was not exactly what we expected.

As you may recall, I mentioned that when the offer was accepted a few books were taken off the table, including the glorious Audubon elpephant folio published by Abbeville, as well as a few lesser books. I already have this Audubon, so I wasn’t too disappointed, though I would liked to have had a second one. I also remember writing in another post (at least I think it was another one) that the excessive lag time could possibly change the deal yet again. Well, guess what? That’s exactly what happened. The owner had plenty of time to rethink the sale and rethink it he did. A few more books were now off the table, he announced, whereupon my heart thudded to the floor.

Goodbye, Florence. Goodbye, goodbye…..

But no! Florence sat just as prettily on the table as she had before and somehow the Audubon had magically rejoined her. What was taken away now was a two volume natural history set titled Zoonomia, written by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin. I didn’t realize how much I wanted these books until they were gone, but it was okay. I got a lot of good stuff, I told myself, so there was nothing to whine about. And truly, there wasn’t.  Not only did I get the Audubon back, but I also got to test the veracity of my own conviction about people not selling their books until they’re truly ready to do it. Little did I know then how many more times I would be tested before the evening was over.

The original plan was that we would pay individually for the special books and anything else selected we would combine as a unit. I was pretty jazzed about it because I always need stuff for the mall and there were lots of books from which to choose. Or at least there were for a few minutes. No sooner did we seal the deal on the remaining books I’d made the offer on when the owner announced that he didn’t want to sell anything from the wall of bookcases in the living room after all. Nothing! That left just three partially full cases in the den. These contained the older titles, but most of what was left was either common and/or cheap editions. Book by book I went through them and in the end gathered half a dozen titles plus a sleeper I’d missed the first time around – a large medical book on war injuries replete with full-page  x-rays dating from the infancy of x-ray technology. Of  course I was prepared to offer more for that one, but it bit the dust faster than you can say radiology. An art book did too.

WHAM! Out of nowhere  a tremendous wave of disappointment and frustration slammed over me. It wasn’t just for the x-ray book, or the art book, or all the books in the living room. It was the Zoonomia and everything else we didn’t get. I know, I know. Very, very venal and VERY after the fact. But there you have it. I am not  the Mother Theresa of books after all.And yet, having admitted this, I did manage to get a grip and even ask myself a few questions while I closed the sale of the new additions.  Did I really WANT him to live with empty bookshelves? Did I expect him to urge me to pack up his  lifetime of treasures and bear them away? Of course I didn’t. If some upstart bookseller packed up the books in my living room I’d have a meltdown of such massive proportions it would involve  scratching, screaming, and  men in white coats. So then. Memo to self: GET OVER IT!

I did. Get over it I mean. In a world in which the physical book waves in the air like a white flag of surrender I should be happy – I AM happy  -- to meet someone who shares my love of books and doesn’t want to live with empty shelves any more than I do. Once I hit the cold air, had a glance at the moon, and reconsidered all the good stuff I did get it dissipated. By the time I got home I was glad that he’d kept them.

I may not be the Mother Theresa of books, but I really do believe people should part with their collections only when they’re ready. I guess sometimes I just need to relearn it.

The Paper Trail

Life has been in hyper-drive for me these days as much as I try to slam on the brakes. One of the things I did last week though was actually book-related – we went to the annual book sale in Dayton. This one comes with considerable expense since we need to book a hotel, but it normally pays off big-time in both fun and profit. It paid off this time too in high hilarity, but in profit? Eh, not so much. Here’s the ugly truth--were it not for the facts that we have an antiques mall booth and a store and I am insanely in love with paper, we would have chalked this sale up as an expensive disaster. Not only were the books in the “specials room” not special, but neither were the silent auction books. I bid desultorily on three and got none of them in spite of the fact that they were the poorest offerings EVER. Two years ago I bid on two and got two and they were OUTSTANDING. Last year I bid on three that were good and got one of them. So what is it saying about the fact that I bid three times on iffy books I almost hoped I wouldn’t win and got none of them? I don’t know for sure, but I wonder if maybe, like me, everyone else was trying to salvage the sale too.

One area I did do well in was children’s books, but they were practically all for a donation to the community center Christmas program. I bought a huge boxful for $50, all like new. Other than that it was a stray book here and a stray book there, none selling at more than $45. I took my time, didn’t panic, looked at everything twice in every genre ( it’s a huge sale too), but ended up buying less books overall than usual. On my second pass through the sale I crawled around on the floor and pulled out a box that was way in the back under the kids’ books, but didn’t seem to be for children. From there came the two art catalogs shown above, one on Korean ceramics and the other on furniture from the Georgia Piedmont pre-1830. Neither went to three figures, but they both bested every book I got. The second I picked up each of them my internal radar screeched like a magpie, loud enough to incite a change in my game plan. Right then and there I decided to give up on the books and follow the paper trail instead.

This actually turned out to be great fun, sort of like a secret game that I was the only one playing. Paper turned up everywhere, but not right out in the open. There’d be a whole box here and there, always requiring much crawling and pulling, but also lots of goodies in between the books, and even IN the books. I bought one book just to get the item inside it! Among my finds were a stand-out fashion catalog from 1961 with awesome color pictures on heavy paper and big in size, plus programs, booklets, and more unusual art catalogs.  In the end, I left the sale reasonably content, if not exactly tap dancing across the parking lot. I even know HOW to tap dance if the occasion called for it, but believe me this wasn’t worthy of a single time step.

Sooooooo – what happens when your favorite book sale disappoints that badly? Do you call it an anomaly and go back next year, or do you regretfully cross it off the list? Right now I can’t say for sure, but what I can say is this. I’m mighty glad that I am not relying on traditional book sales to grow my inventory these days..

Lighter and Brighter!

As you know, I’ve been cranked up like a tin Lizzie for the past two months. I probably still am, but this morning I feel lighter than a dirigible. We settled up with the contractor on Friday and he put the finishing touches on the house on Saturday, so I am officially here, blissfully, mercifully, ALONE. It feels so great I can hardly sit still to work which I desperately need to do, as we spent the weekend in Michigan with our grandchildren. That, too, was good for my soul though – we went to our oldest grandson’s soccer game (where he scored two goals and made several assists), enjoyed a hilarious lunch at a Japanese hibachi restaurant, carved pumpkins and gave them dental implants with marshmallows, baked Halloween cupcakes and watched The Avengers which the two little guys acted out for us just in case Gran and Papa were too dim to understand the action on the screen. I laughed a lot and temporarily forgot everything that seems to loom so large.

A couple weeks ago at one of the book sales ( the FOL where I hardly bought a thing for the business) I did manage to get both kids a ton of books. We sat on the floor and I doled them out one at a time. If you saw the three year-old’s unbridled glee at the sight of eight Sesame Street board books you would never again doubt the future of books in the Age of Apple. He squealed, he screamed the names of the characters, and literally whirled and twirled just as I do when my joy runneth over. Though he’s not one to sit down and listen to a story as his older brother did – and oh, how I miss that – he loves to show me what’s happening in the pictures. He also hugs the books to his chest like stuffed animals and tells me “I’m reading now!”

I, too, am reading now and, oh, how good that feels after a draught that lasted all summer and most of the fall. Of course I did read a handful of books during that period, but didn’t really like any of them which makes me wonder now if the books were really that poor, or if my “terrible, awful, no-good , very bad” attitude had something to do with it. Right now I am reading a book written in the 40’s, a YA coming of age story, called I Capture the Castle. There’s a movie of it out there somewhere, but unlike Cassandra, the main character in the book, Netflix appears to have problems with capturing. But that’s okay – the book is so detailed, quirky, and fun that it, too, has “restoreth my soul”. What’s not to love about a book which begins with the line, “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink”!

(Somehow the rest of this post disappeared. A resder told me that it had reformatted itself so there was no paragraphing. I fixed that and then discovered this morning that the rest is gone. I apoligize, but I can't fix it because I wrote it on here and don't have a copy.)

Letting Go

We got the books I bid on last week and I am very pleased even though the owner did decide to pull three of them. Two are inconsequential and one is the Audubon elephant folio. Though I would have loved to have had it, I already have a copy which is why I was able to include a photo of it in my last post. It wasn’t price that caused it to be taken off the table, but something every bit as fierce and urgent -- the true biliophile’s strong desire to hang on to a treasured title, if only for a little while longer. I had a feeling this might happen, but I thought the vulnerable title was the Florence Nightingale book, again not because of price, but because of how much its owner loved it. The moment he chose it from the shelf and handed it to me – a plain brown book of small stature and humble binding – I knew he loved it best. He told me with great relish the story of how he bought it many years ago in a bookshop in London, but it’s the reverent way he handled it that clearly, and touchingly, defined its status.

Very rarely have I ever bought anything but workaday books from an elderly seller. Generally the books’owner has moved to a nursing home or has died and it’s the heirs who wish to liquidate the collection. What made this transaction special is the fact that the owner’s daughter, while present and proactive, understood that her father’s keen mind was as able as it had ever been to assess the situation, the numbers, and his own feelings and reach an independent decision. As I believe I told you, my last job(20 years ago) was director of sales and marketing for a senior living complex. It was a decidedly odd job for me, but one which taught me enough to later guide my father through the care system and to understand a crucial life lesson. Even when the mind is sharp advanced age and/or physical fragility has an insidious way of diminishing a person, not only in the eyes of strangers, but in those of caregivers and family members too. I love that this didn’t happen here, but of course because it didn't I run the risk of yet another change of mind before our November 2nd appointment to seal the transaction.

Just an hour before I got the good news yesterday I went to see another collection not far from where I live. This one seemed a very different scenario from the one above though. Not only was this collector no longer living, but unlike the careful handling the above collection had been given this stuff had moldered in a damp cellar for years before it was recently transferred to a bone dry basement in an upscale modern home. The books also lacked the importance of the first collection, though there were any number of fine antiques (referred to as “smalls” in the trade) that would have been wonderful had it not been for their unfortunate storage. The thing I most wanted and couldn't buy was a very early 18th century game in its original box with hand colored cards all seemingly intact – and, sadly, all blooming with black mold.

It took awhile, but eventually it became obvious that there was a commonality between between my two recent buying situations after all. Both sellers were engaged in an intense struggle to let go. Though the woman who was selling the basement stuff claimed both on the phone and in person that her father's belongings all needed to be cleared out promptly, every time we made a fair offer – on sleigh bells, a diary, and a miraculously unscathed scrapbook kept by a student at an Ohio college in the early 19th century – she’d literally pull it off the table.

"Oh, no, I might want that."

"Maybe I should give that to the college sometime."

"I don't know. I think my brother might like it."

Everything in me knew it wasn't about the money. The push/pull that sent her flying in one direction only to yank her back again had little to do with financial gain. It was a bubbling mulligan stew of history, nostalgia, the loss of a parent, the importance of family, and the lure of the past. I suppose some would argue that she shouldn’t have called me if she didn’t really want to sell. But here’s the thing.

She didn’t know she didn’t until the moment she couldnt.

Bidding On Books

It’s been an interesting book week with two major book sales and the viewing of a very nice collection. Both sales were way down in terms of both quantity and quality, but I know I made out fine at the first one. The second is still up for grabs, as I haven’t yet had time to do the research. Everything is still packed up due to the ongoing saga of dust, noise, and general mayhem. But I don’t want to talk about the book sales OR the mayhem. What’s on my mind today is the collection and the overall problem of bidding on books in today’s pork belly market.

There was a day not all that long ago when we would view a collection and be able to evaluate it just by looking at it and feel fairly confident that we could submit an honest offer and still make money. Today even when we spot books we’ve had before – which in this case included the beautiful Norton Shakespeare First Folio in the slipcase and the glorious Audubon elephant folio in the slipcase published by Abbeville – we’re as skittish as a cat in a car. I explained to the owner the current market and its vagaries and asked if he would mind if we did some research before making a bid. He agreed with no hesitation and I spent all day Tuesday researching ten very nice books, one of which particularly worried me. This wasn’t because it was an iffy title – it’s because it was an excellent one. We are talking here about a first edition of Florence Nightingale’s nursing book, a small, slim, plain-Jane brown volume I wanted so badly I had to bite my tongue until it bled to keep from blurting out a number than might haunt me like one of those nightmares that play out in your sleep a couple times a year.

So how exactly do you arrive at a figure for something so rare and iconic, yet of relatively limited appeal? If you read the ABE books website it will offer this advice:

Do you have an old book and would like know its value? You might think it’s a rare and valuable book but don’t know where to find its value? One very simple method of finding an approximate value of a book is to search for similar copies on AbeBooks.com and see what prices are being asked.<P>

At first glance this actually sounds reasonable and might even BE reasonable sometimes, but we all know that prices on the internet by and large are not based on much more than what the seller thinks he or she might get, or in some cases just WANTS to get. I’ve seen the same exact book range literally from $500 down to a dollar -- ONE DOLLAR – an object lesson if ever there were one in how the internet has skewed pricing. Even when there are only three listings the possibility exists that the first person priced it to the rafters and the other two followed suit, or the other way around. When we are talking books as expensive as the Nightingale much more work must be done. I would strongly suggest that if you have not already done so you join the Heritage auction site where you can research past book auctions to see what price the market set for a like copy of the book you have. But of course “like” is the operative word. It must be apples to apples with no equivocating – same binding, same publisher, same condition, same editon. Heritage does not sell books exclusively – it’s a site for collectibles of numerous types -- but the books CAN be quite excellent (or not). Another good resource is the ABAA site. Just following these two can be an education in itself. To register with Heritage use this link lihttps://historical.ha.com/common/regist er.php. ABAA (Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America)can be found at www.abaa.com

Of course there are reference books (NOT price guides) that can help with your offer also, but even they aren't the final word. Once you find a comparable that seems right you still have to factor in several important things – the probability of a reasonably fast sale, your ability to attract the right buyer on the venues you have available to you, the instability of the marketplace, and your ability to showcase a special title. Consequently, I did not make my bid for the Nightingale (or any) based on the highest prices I found. At these price points I have no choice but to proceed with a healthy dose of caution. Does this mean I might not get the books? You bet it does, but I don’t want to tie up four-figure money for something that might come back to bite me. So I wound up taking a middle of the road stance with enough wiggle room to go up some if needed. Building in flexibility is a crucial component to the offer process. Remember, these are the owner’s treasures. It stands to reason that he or she wants a chance to be proactive in reaching the final price.

Late Tuesday afternoon I put the final touch on a lengthy book by book overview of the market and its range with stated sources and attached a list with my offer for each title. Yesterday morning I dropped it in the mail with the sense of a job well done. But before you surmise that it was strictly a hard, cold, cerebral business decision let me assure you that it was not. Unlike some dealers, my emotions still color how I handle these situations. I do what I need to do to stay afloat, but not without considerable angst. The bottom line is I love the books. I want them badly and hope fervently that I get them.

If I don’t I’ll be very disappointed – not just because of the money, but for the loss of the beautiful books themselves. For me it always comes down to that visceral desire to handle them, work with them, find homes for them. Once I fall in love it's hard to walk away.

Of Time and the Bookseller

I know I already told you this, but I’ve been building stress like a high-rise tower, one brick at a time, ever since July. But now as book sale season kicks into high gear and work on the porch (finally!) commences there may be a pause – not a dramatic one, but maybe a small quiet space to regroup as we head deeper into fall. I missed so much this summer. We hardly went anywhere or did anything. I sat out on my porch exactly twice before the screens came tumbling down and had dinner on the patio a paltry once and that’s only because Darwin came for the Fourth of July. But the thing I miss more than porch sitting, summer fun, and dining outdoors is reading. I sorely miss reading.When I was a kid I’d check out the allowed four books a week from the library every Saturday and tear through them by Thursday. Later, I’d rip through a couple adult books a week and at times even more than that. But ever since work began on the house I have read only six books in three months and two were over the last two weeks! No wonder I’ve been edgy and snappy – a life without reading is NOT a life well spent.I can’t blame it all on the house, though that was definitely the biggest contributor. Moving into the second booth at the antiques mall and trying to keep it continuously stocked added significant anxiety too. I know it sounds easy -- just buy some stuff and haul it over there -- but I’m here to tell you that it’s most emphatically NOT that simple. In order to float this expensive boat I need more than books and there opens up an entire new thing to focus on. When I launched in September with the second space I had the combined area tricked out to the nines, but by the end of the month I’d sold every single non-book item I had! Seriously – every single one. That includes two Danish modern tables, a Danish modern chest, two Hudson’s Bay blankets, a 20” antique slide rule, the Lincoln bookends, and a celluloid photograph album that contained a music box. Of course September totally rocked financially, but now it’s October and October is NOT rocking. It’s okay, but let’s put it this way -- I‘d better start channeling my inner antiques dealer ASAP. I tried all weekend to do just that, but came up empty. The one thing I liked – a vintage Japanese screen that could be hung on the wall -- is impossible to display for the simple reason that I have NO wall space!As I peruse what I just wrote I’m amazed at the first paragraph and the notion that there might be some relief from the racetrack I call my life these days. Yes, the house may very likely get done soon, but we are off today to see a collection of books in North Royalton and later in the week will attend two crucially important book sales, plus any estate sales that pop up -- and this on top of two major book sales attended last week, plus the one estate sale yesterday. There are still a couple more the following week and in November we’ll be heading off to my favorite sale in Dayton which requires an overnight stay.Then of course there’s been the stress of the mess! Remember when Eric did the Magical Makeover of my office and I swore on a set of Kipling that I would never, ever, ever, EVER let my office be anything but a page out of a decorating magazine? Yeah. Well, take a look now.

If Martha Stewart laid her critical blue gaze on THAT (which is only one section of a greater problem) she’d have a spell of the vapors! Of course the mess adds greatly to my overall dis-ease, but even my time for listing has been compromised. So the books run rampant and will probably run even “rampanter” yet. What you see here doesn’t even include the leaning stacks all over the “ell” of my wrapping bench, the shelves beneath it, AND several of the shelves temporarily left empty after the Great Purge of old stock.I really didn’t mean this post to be a downer and/or a rant, but now I feel like it is. It’s not that I’m looking for sympathy because, believe it or not, I have enjoyed much of this stuff even as I have melted into a puddle of despair over other parts. The real reason I’m sharing all this is because I miss you guys in the same way I miss reading. Several times I tried to write, but each time I quit because I felt whiny and boring. Which of course I AM! But maybe it’s okay if you see that right now so you know that:I am not giving up on the blog.I am not all written out.I still love doing this.And I appreciate you all very much.

The Difference of a Day

I‘m sorry I’m so slow to post these days. It finally occurred to me yesterday that I’ve slammed into a brick wall as far as the house is concerned. Since July 3rd I’ve joked and whined about the dust, noise, and inconvenience, but yesterday I realized that I’m really not laughing anymore. I’m edgy, jittery, behind on everything , and hostile around the periphery of my entire being which I think may be declaring a revolution soon if something doesn’t give. Yesterday after a couple of hours of intense cleaning Eric and I poured a glass of wine, ignited the fireplace, and agreed that we have to give WBC an end-date or we’ll still be in shambles by the holidays. We decided on October 31st, which from this vantage point seems like eons from now, but may not seem that way to WBC. All I know is I cannot do this anymore. I really, truly, honestly CANNOT DO THIS ANYMORE.

That being said, we did hit two estate sales over the weekend, one on Saturday and the other on Sunday. The Saturday one started on Friday, but I didn’t recognize the town name and thought it was much farther than it was, though God knows it’s far enough. My antiques dealer friend Darwin nudged me on Facebook later that afternoon asking why I skipped a sale boasting a 50 year collection of Civil War books. So bright and early the next morning we braved the long and winding road even though I felt sure that the books had been snapped up faster than bacon strips tossed at a junkyard dog. Had things been normal I would likely have been right. But things were not even close to normal. In fact, they were so BIZARRE that I’ve never in all these years of estate sale going experienced anything even remotely like them.

At two minutes to showtime we WERE the line. But an elderly woman came to the door and said she would open only when it was exactly ten o’clock. It was a little weird, especially seeing as how no one had asked her for a two minute advantage over the people who weren’t there, but whatever. Inside an army of worker bees – far more than needed for a small ranch house – took their posts like sentinels while the elderly lady held court in front of the bookcase giving us the hard sell and telling the workers what to do. At first I thought she owned the estate company, but, no, she owned the STUFF! The books, she informed us, had belonged to her husband who had collected them for decades and were very valuable. I think this may be a time when a picture would do more justice to that statement than I ever could. The three volume set below was priced at $200. It dates from 1999 and we have three of them in the basement.

She also had an antique flask for holding gunpowder. Eric gave it a look and passed on it, which launched her into a spiel about how its rareness justified the $365 price tag. Had it been original that would have been true, but Eric has an original in the museum at the store and used to order the one she had from the manufacturer who reproduced it sometime in the 70’s. The NINETEEEN 70’s. Of course, being Eric, he would never say that to her even if she claimed that a Wal-Mart wine glass was the Holy Grail.

Meanwhile, I had mercifully escaped to the kitchen where every available surface was covered with flats of paper. As I started looking through them one of the workers said, “We only had people glance at this stuff yesterday.It’s almost all there.” Surprise, surprise! It was rare too! I did, however, find maybe a dozen small things of fair consequence that she must not have liked and asked the worker in the kitchen to write them up. The very nice worker said she’d take them out to the check-out when she was done and I could get them there. So I looked around a little longer, met up with Eric, and we decided to check out. Immediately the elderly lady zipped across the room and demanded that our items be added up again. The check-out woman told her that the kitchen woman had done it whereupon she called the kitchen woman to come back out and justify it. She did – and she was right too. Holy cow, no WONDER estate sales don’t normally allow the seller to hang around!

Believe it or not, even after all that, we braved the cold and drear to go to another sale on Sunday even though it was the third and final day and located more toward Cleveland than to our beloved Akron. I had spotted a beautiful art deco cedar chest on their website which I wanted to get to replace some of the sold furnuiture at the mall, but I pretty much figured it wasn’t going to happen. Only it DID happen and and I got it for a reasonable, if not especially mind-blowing, price.I also got five unadvertised books and two pieces of ephemera. AND every single worker, plus the owner, thanked me for friending them on Facebook.

After that it felt so good to be back in the real world that we went to Panera for lunch to celebrate. Then we polished up the cedar chest, hauled it over the antiques mall, and went back home to clean our dusty house.

Again.

A Bookseller's Fantasy Sale

If I could create the world’s best book sale I would paint it all in bright colors with broad strokes using a giant paint brush and messy gallons of paint with drips cascading down the sides of the cans. It would be big too, this sale – lots of space and lots of books all piled up everywhere in crooked stacks on miles of tables and underneath in boxes so heavy you’d need two hands and the strength of King-Kong to pull them out. No one would be obnoxious, or step on your feet with ten pound sneakers and all of the buyers would be freshly showered. I'm not sure how this part would work, but somehow the sale would crackle with energy and still emanate a zenlike peace to soothe our nerdy bookseller souls. Oh – and the books would be priced low too – mostly a dollar, but no more than $10 for the best – and there would be more than enough books to go around so that everyone gets what they want. At my fantasy sale no one is left out, not even the scanners. Wow! Could it be that I’m turning into a nicer, gentler bookseller? Maybe. But it might also be that I’m feeling benevolent after having GONE to my fantasy sale yesterday.

The real thing looked a lot like the above, except for maybe the rain and the darkness of the building in which it was held. But think about it – when does real life ever give you every single picky little thing you imagine? Not often. And sometimes it even gives you something BETTER than you imagined. So let’s look at all the good stuff here. The crowd was great, and happily, readers outnumbered sellers two to one. Scanner people were evident too, but their magic wands likely didn’t get a heavy-duty workout because old books trumped new ones by a margin wider than a football field.(Okay, so much for the everybody gets what they want thing.) But the room WAS cavernous and there WERE lots of books and also a happy peppering of old-school book dealers to talk to. But, best of all, a sale that used to be noted for its pie-in the-sky price tags, magically morphed into the dollar store minus all the cheap Chinese doo-dads. Seriously, books were priced anywhere from a dollar (pamphlets and art catalogs fifty cents) to no more than $10. And even the $10 ones were rare – I spotted only one!

So what gives with this? I don’t know, but I suspect that there was a huge donation from one person involved, as many books centered around medieval and renaissance topics across all genres, including magazines.Either it was an estate or else the inventory of a former bookseller. I am leaning hard toward the latter because I bought some magazines on medieval history and the name of a certain bookseller I was crazy about, but who sadly died a couple years ago, is on the mailing labels. I suppose in the big picture it doesn’t matter either way whether or not they were his, except that it DOES matter -- to me anyway. This dealer was the first one of the “real booksellers” to treat me like I had a brain in my head and might actually turn out to be a “real bookseller” myself some day. Since that finally happened I would consider it an honor to sell his books which is why I’m so fervently hoping that these are them.

Will I ever know? Maybe. Or maybe not. Tomorrow is half price day and the tables will likely be picked over like a turkey carcass the day after Thanksgiving, but I'm going back anyway. To buy books, yes, but also to find out if my theory is right. He lived in the town where the sale was held and ran a store not far from thre, so I think the odds are about fifty-fifty.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking, so let’s lose the sentimentality and cut to the chase. Were the books valuable? Yes. No. That is to say, it was a mixed bag on two different planes. I got a few high two-figures ones on Mennonite history, several exceptional pamphlets and art catalogs, a two year consecutive run of an uncommon magazine, and a fair number of books priced at $25-45 each, all online stock. I also got a plethora of books for the antiques mall which,oddly, are the ones I love best. Something tells me my bookseller friend may have owned most of those and quite likely some of the others too. I’d heard that his son is selling his former stock online, but I also know that some of it has been around for awhile and likely suffered the slings and arrows of wannabe sellers which means that they very well might have been donated to the sale. But there’s no point in speculation. I’ll either find out, or I won’t.

The important thing is that the new season got off to a rip-roaring start (if you don’t count the FOL sale the previous night) which we won’t. For me the official launch was yesterday and all it lacked was a bottle of champagne, a couple crystal glasses and a few rays of sunshine.

Oh yeah -- and enough high-ranking books on amazon so the scanners get to be happy too.
P.S. Isn't the new photo at the top FABULOUS? I wish I could say I took it, but I did not. It was sent by a reader to whom I am grateful, as it's exactly what I was thinking when I wrote the above.