Monday, October 18, 2010

Describing A Passion


The art of book description is fast dying, growing so spare that my dear friend Sunday Morning Joe once told me that pretty soon my job will be so easy that all I will have to key-in is "Book. Green." I laughed at the time, but he is absolutely right. He was actually rather prescient, as he said this to me  a few years ago and it’s spiraled drastically downward since then. In the Golden Age of bookselling sellers produced catalogues – and some still do. A catalogue requires thought and an appreciation for that which is described. A catalogue is a showcase and, if it’s good enough, eventually becomes a collectible in its own right. I have never produced one, so I am not arguing that it’s a necessity, but I do believe that if a book is worth listing it’s worth at least a couple lines of description. The assumption  that the buyer magically knows what the book is about is not necessarily viable. Certainly some books are searched by title, but many, many are impulse purchases discovered as one would unearth a treasure in a dusty corner of a hidey-hole bookstore.

It's amazing how many sellers waste so much space in their database descriptions announcing, as McDonald's did for hamburgers, how many books they have sold to how many millions of "satisfied customers." Frankly, as a buyer, I am not  interested in self-aggrandizement. I want to know about the BOOK. Like it or not, we sellers aren't the stars of the show, though we do play a nice supporting role as acquirers, curators, describers, wrappers, shippers, and note writers. But the star is the book and, as in both Hollywood and on Broadway, the star gets top billing.

I just acquired a lovely eight volume set, The Memoirs of  Jacques Casa Nova De Seingalt (1940) -- here we go with those sets again, but I sold a set of Stoddard's Library on Thursday and had the space -- which consists of eight pristine volumes in two sturdy, but worn slipcases. I logged onto ABE Books to check the price du jour (these days books prices rise and fall like the fate of pork bellies) and discovered only two competitors. The second one, SugarTreeBooks of Orefield, Pennsylvania had a set with exactly the slipcase deficits I have, but the way the owner described it made me laugh out loud at the clever marriage of truth and charm. Check this:

"Slipcases have moderate edge wear, having performed their duty splendidly and having sacrificed their own health for the good of the whole." 

Never mind that these books were more expensive than the ones listed above them -- I was charmed. I would bet a first edition Hemingway that this is a seller who  loves  his or her books. What a rarity it is these days to find sellers who take delight in both their work AND their books. Far too many consider books to be rectangular money-makers to be shipped from Point A to Point B with as little work or study as possible. If that makes me sound my age, then call me "old school" and I'll thank you for the compliment. I didn't enter this business solely for the money. Of course the money pays the bills and is crucial to the overall picture, but it's NOT the sole reason I did it. I could have sold any number of things if I wanted to sell something, but I chose books because books have sustained me, pleased me, and utterly  bewitched me since childhood. They are worth my time, my effort, and my constant, underlying worry for their future. So when I see a seller write something like that my heart soars like a kite across an El Greco blue sky.

I love small sellers, small businesses in general. I would rather buy everything from books to coffee mugs from a hard-working individual store owner who is crazy in love with what he or she does and shows it in every aspect of the transaction than I would from a megalister. Sadly, the people with passion are being shoved out of the marketplace in our Big Box world, so when we serendipitously chance upon one we should not only rejoice, but support them whenever possible. And if we are sellers ourselves we should aspire to join their ranks if we haven't already.

Bookselling is not a dispassionate thing. It's intimate. It's emotional. It's love, worry, tears, sweat -- the good, the bad, the ugly and the exalted.

If it were anything less, what would be the point?



3 comments:

Saturday Evening Post said...

I feel a deep, overwhelming, biological, urge to order a book from SugarTreeBooks. I wonder if they have a green one.......

tess said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
tess said...

Due to terrible typing, I am trying a second time!

Whether you buy a green book (I'm sure Sugar Tree has a couple kicking around), or not, you have provided the best laugh of the day. Or is it the only one? Either way, you are very funny!