New Homes For Book Orphans

My youngest daughter Caitie firmly believes that when something good is happening, but is not definitively resolved, you are wise to shut up and not jinx it with endless blather. Her mother sort of believes it too, but apparently not enough to actually do it. Based on this past week I am here to tentatively suggest that fall may have officially rode in on a speedy horse rounding up people in the mood to buy books. Both online sales and antiques mall sales have been quite robust which is partly why I failed to keep my blogging streak going yesterday.

When I look back at a week’s sales I always like to see what people bought as much as what they spent. As a bookseller I am as in love with the “product” as I am with the jingling of the cash register. I don’t sell widgets and I am not in the business of shipping rectangular objects from hither to yon, so it endlessly fascinates me to look at the list. Hopelessly corny as it probably is, I sometimes think of my inventory as an orphanage of small souls in need of homes, so when one gets adopted it’s always cause for rejoicing, however insignificant the price. Yes I know -- I do complain when all the sales come off the “bad” server and consist of only low-end old stuff that’s been kicking around for more than a decade, but even as I whine I’m sort of tickled anyway.

I haven’t really talked about the weekly sold list, but I woke up this morning thinking it was Saturday and my friend Nancy and I were off to the library to sign the petition to repeal the Ohio governor’s legislation that compromises voting rights for a large segment of the population. I knew there were no sales to go to because I’d checked the paper, but I still thought it was Saturday which is odd because Eric just left yesterday for Indiana. Sometimes if he’s gone and I spend too much time holed up in my office working (I’ve been known to go twelve hours at a stretch) I get a little hermitlike and lose track of the day. Fortunately, I logged onto the computer before I made the coffee, saw the date, and snapped back to reality.

But thinking about Nancy reminded me of two years ago when I tore my rotator cuff by climbing up the basement stairs the day before the Case Western Reserve book sale and somehow entangling my foot in the leg of my capri-length pajamas. Eric had to leave for a trip within a week of this debilitating injury, so I was planning to shut down until Nancy offered to wrap and ship for me. Now get this – Nancy works a 40 hour week and still offered to do this every other night for two weeks. Am I lucky, or what? I truly think, and not just because of this, that Nancy is the finest human being I have ever met. Like clockwork she showed up, cheerful and diligent, and turned out packages as meticulous as those I wrap myself. But the thing I loved most was her delight in what people bought and her amazement at some of the titles awaiting her ministrations. I remember especially a stack of twelve Chemical Abstracts journals published in the 1920’s by the American Chemical Association. Her amazement still makes me laugh – maybe because I’m still pretty amazed myself.

Well, that was a lot of words to get to the point, wasn’t it? Anyway, I thought maybe, book lovers that you are, you would find it fun to sneak a peak at my weekly list. Actually there are two lists – one for online and one for the mall. I won’t enumerate everything, but instead just share some highlights from each.

Online the mood was rather “weaponish” this week with sales for Firearms Investigation Identification and Evidence; Illustrated British Firearms Patents; Remington Autoloading & Pump-Action Rifles: A History of the Centerfire Models 760, 740, 742, 7400 & 7600; Fur Trade Cutlery; The Knife In Homespun America; and A.H. Fox, The Finest Gun in the World. The latter was my first sale from the books I bought from my online customer. Other topics included thatching roofs, building model planes, political buttons, collecting medicine bottles, the history of the United States Navy in two volumes, Border Settlers of Northern Virginia, narrow gauge railroads, the splashy 1926 United States Steel 25th Anniversary retrospective I mentioned earlier that I'd quoted to a customer; and a very cool booklet on short selling from 1931 by Richard Whitney the disgraced and jailed president of the New York Stock Exchange. It even included his card laid-in.  

The antiques mall proved much more eclectic as is often the case. Amongst the claimed books there were a signed first edition by Alistair Cook (best known at our house as Alistair Cookie a la Sesame Street); The Globe Illustrated Shakespeare (Shakespeare rocks at the antiques mall); a book on crowd psychology; an ENORMOUS Currier & Ives calendar from 1968 (think elephant folio); Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; several issues of Ohio Practical Farmer from 1888; a book about Ohio interurbans; a book about Cleveland churches; and Alan Nevins’ eight volume series on the Civil War.

What any of this means in terms of trends is anybody's guess. In fact, I doubt it means a darn thing except that we sell what we have. Other than Leaves of Grass, none of the above are books I would read myself. And yet I love every last one of them and hope they all found good homes where they will be appreciated for a very long time.