Angle For Success

I wonder if anyone remembers my challenge awhile back to select a slow-moving title from your stock and try to create a little book magic with the time-honored bookseller superstition that if you touch it, change it, do something, (anything!) with it, you will sell it. I’d been on a bit of a roll with this and decided it was time to up the ante. So I selected Charles Thacher’s Angling Books; A Guide for Collectors which came out in 2006. At the time of issue I had had two copies and sold the first one handily for $200 in 2007. The second one, however, sat like it had been adhered to the shelf with Gorilla glue. If you want to refresh your memory of this check the archive for December and click Christmas Challenge.

I had checked prices once over the years and dropped it to $125, but that had been awhile, so it was time to get serious. Secretly I had hoped that taking its picture and talking about it here would be enough to convince the book gods to bless it with a pair of wings for flying out the door. But just in case, I also put my lucky stones on top with a stick of Indian incense. The end result was a very nice picture.

Soooooooo, I looked up the price again and – oh yeah --down, down, down we go! But I had very little invested in it, so I saw the $90 lowest price and dropped mine to $80. I’m not crazy about doing that and don’t usually, but I figured it was all for the good of the Great Experiment. The result, however, was a resounding silence. Okay then, on to Plan B. My youngest daughter, the marketing major with a minor in e-commerce, pushes me constantly to use social media outlets, so I facebooked, twittered, tweeted, and whistled Dixie. The result? Nada. Unless you count the two people who “Liked” it.

Finally, I made the decision Monday to haul it over to the antiques mall. I doubted very much it would sell there, but it was the only other thing I could think to do. DID it sell there? No, it did not, and I doubt it ever would have. It sold on Alibris Tuesday. Of course we all know that it shouldn’t have still BEEN on Alibris which is why I stormed around the kitchen for the duration of Eric’s breakfast filled with the righteous indignation of a woman who KNEW she’d marked it sold in her database and was marching upstairs right this minute to prove it. It was marked sold all right, but there’s a pesky little catch -- you still have to upload it so alibris knows to ditch it. Had I done that I’d have spared myself the angst of ignoring the order all day, fearful that with my luck it would have sold at the mall. But when I went over at 4:30 there it sat, the word Thacher so huge on the spine it beckoned me like a billboard.

The challenge began December 21st and it’s now February 15th, a total of 56 days, or almost two months. I suppose it could well be argued that there was no book magic involved, but I beg to differ, as less than 24 hours had passed from its departure to its sale. At any rate, I’m feeling lucky, so I’m going to give the process yet another try. This time it’s with a book called Hot Rolling of Steel (the sequel to Cold Rolling of Steel of course) by William L. Roberts which is coming up onto a year in my company. I chose it because its title contains the two things it needs to do –  warm up and roll outta here!