Thursday, June 10, 2010

Post-Its -- Notes From A Book Collection


There's nothing like buying a large collection of books to rev up the internal engine. For weeks after we've boxed and trucked it home I'm up before the crack of dawn to get the orders wrapped so I can poke around in the boxes and play with the books. Collections tend to contain a motley mix of the good, the VERY good, the bad, and the downright ugly, largely because we make it a rule not to cherry pick and leave the previous owner with a bunch of duds that can't be sold. We offer one price for the lot and deal with it as it comes. Sure, it's a lot of work -- imagine the summer we had 35,000 volumes! -- but it's good work, fun work, work that's not really work at all, though I'm sure if he were looking over my shoulder Eric would have something to say about THAT. The division of labor around here goes something like this -- I'm The Decider and he's the Book Mover.

Anyway, our current collection was bought in April after the antiquarian show in Akron where we, along with all the other dealers, were approached by a man needing to sell his mother's books. He'd moved them from Connecticut, but was now himself moving out of state and having nightmares at the thought of hauling them a second time. It's a relatively small collection of 2000 volumes, give or take, mostly focused on early American history, New England history, and genealogy. What keeps it interesting is the occasional surprise -- an old blacksmith's ledger from the
1850's, an autograph album with tinted photos of teenagers from Chester, Connecticut in the 1870's, made all the more fascinating by the addition of pictures and signatures of young Chinese men living in China!

Like all collections, this one is not without its quirks. I actually found it sort of charming that two whole boxes contained nothing but commmon books by Kenneth Roberts, six or seven of each title, a testament to the collector's admiration for her favorite author. Fortunately, there was one rare title in the mix -- but of course there was only one copy of it -- which we already sold to an antiquarian dealer in Germany. We also have lots of customers at the store who can't get enough of Roberts, so it's easy to be magnanimous about the excess.

What I am NOT finding charming, however, is the quirk pictured in the photo to the left. Don't for a minute think it's photo-op I set up, or a nuisance confined to a few books. I swear on a stack of Harvard Classics that absolutely every single one of the 2000 books is stuffed with slips of paper and post-it notes. Every. Single. One.

Don't get me wrong -- I am very grateful to have this collection, but I'm struggling to find an upside to the post-it notes. The best I can do is this. By buying these wonderful books I learned something very important which I will pass along. Post-it notes are not always compatible with certain kinds of paper. The only salvation is the hair dryer to slowly loosen them without damaging the pages. Very soon I'll be at Target shopping for a new hair dryer though. Our old Conair burned out this morning.

4 comments:

LazyMF said...

Great blog. Keep it up.

dawt said...

I'm happy to see you've revived your blog, Tess, yay for book blogs! I used to hang out at Bookthink and sure do miss everyone, I'll have to remedy that. I still get Craig's newsletter and decided last-minute to check the discussion board after reading his latest article. I'm so glad I did because I wouldn't have found your blog.

Thank you for starting the blog discussion, now I'm off to check out Moonwishes Reads and look forward to reading more from you!

~Dorothy

dawt said...

Oops, I meant to actually comment on this post as well, silly me.

I once purchased quite a few books from a woman's estate who stuffed her books with clippings, notes, photographs, letters, whatever she seemed to gather while reading a particular book with subject matters ranging from dogs to otters to people.

I understand the damage those Post-it notes and other ephemera can do, but I made the decision to sell her books as-is. Turns out I was able to garner quite a bit more by keeping it all intact, people found the extra fodder intriguing. You know that old saying about someone else's junk being another's treasure. ;-)

tess said...

Thanks everyone! It's great to be back after such a long time.

I would have loved it if these books had been stuffed with ephemera. You must have a field day with that! Sadly, mine offer nothing but blank strips of paper, pesky post-its and notes handwritten from the books. Sigh.

Oh, yes, please come back!