Back With New Books!

It feels like eons since I’ve talked to you, but it’s been a loooooooong week. I’m not completely well – I still have a cough that would send you scurrying across the street to avoid me, but I’m definitely back in the game. I woke Saturday morning feeling much better and thought I’d write a post until it occurred to me that when you spend an entire  week parked on the couch you don’t  have too many conversational gambits up your sleeve. So I spent all day Saturday in the garage instead working my way through a collection Eric bought while I lay in a Thera-Flu stupor. I did poke around a little bit the evening he bought it, but was too sick to really care. So it was great fun to have 37 boxes waiting to be scavenged.

What’s interesting about this collection is that the former owner was once a NOBS member and a bookseller who sold at the Akron fair where I will be in just two weeks. She’s in her 80’s now and is moving to an independent retirement place. She knows a lot of the people who are still around and are on the committee with me, so I’m not sure why she didn’t call one of them. Actually she didn’t even call us – her neighbors, who are long-time customers of our store, did. Eric said she knew all about the “race to the bottom” and the constant undercutting of prices by amateur sellers online, so her expectations were very realistic. In fact, she and Eric agreed right out of the chute on the amount  it would take to seal the deal.

Adding to the pleasure was the fact that everything had been shelved in her family room so no mustiness and no dust bunnies the size of Third World countries. What surprised me though was the condition which ranged from fine to fair even though she’d  purposely kept only these books because they were the best of her stock at the time she quit. The penciled prices inside mostly reflected a long-gone world, but in some instances the books had risen in value. Sadly though, I had to reject several very good ones due to egregious faults that I couldn’t imagine being acceptable even then. But Eric said they WERE acceptable. He knows this because the day after he bought the books an elderly picker who has stopped in the store at least twice a month for decades breezed in and announced that he’d heard we bought her books. Small world this Ohio book scene, huh?

Anyway, the picker said that with no internet to give you world-wide access to dealers you took what you could find because you might never see a copy again. According to him, if collectors wanted the book badly enough they’d pay sky-high prices for the privilege of claiming it, faults and all. I can’t even imagine this, but I know it’s true. Back then everything was rarer and today almost nothing is!

Even so, this buy was truly a Hail Mary save for us because it was evident before I got sick that we were going to be displaying a lot of books face-out due to an extreme lack of inventory. Needless to say, I am not listing any of these online until after the fair, as I doubt very much that another collection is going to form in a cloud and descend gently into our driveway between now and then.  As it stands, I’m taking the set of of Emerson's letters shown above (aren't they beautiful? I LOVE the inked top edges in a matching rose!) and maybe fifty individual titles to the fair from this new collection. I also sequestered another fifty titles for the mall in addition to twenty I took over there already. Speaking of the mall, this second half of the month is definitely lively, which is good because this month will be my worst EVER online due to the fact that I’m reluctant to upload right now. But it’s okay – I really don’t even care.

Here are some random pictures of fun finds from the 37 boxes. I have one book I love best, but I’m holding that one back for its own post, so check out these and you’ll get the gist of the collection. Clearly, the kid books rocked!