Secondhand Wonderland: The World of the Used Book

Rates of Exchange: The Law of Conservation of Literature

[18 June 2008]

"What is a hardcore book buyer of simple means to do when faced with the discovery that books have effectively consumed all available space?" David Pullar explores the book culler's dilemma that is Cash vs. Store credit.

By David Pullar

Secondhand Wonderland: The World of the Used Book

Inner-city rents are becoming absurd and there’s only so much space that you can afford on a moderate income. Gentrification is wiping out the cheap neighborhoods and the old buildings are being replaced with new monstrosities filled with shoebox apartments. So what is a hardcore book buyer of simple means to do when faced with the discovery that books have effectively consumed all available space?

At this point, a look around the one-bedroom-and-a-bit becomes troubling. Bookshelves are arranged to leave no corner unused—with volumes at all possible angles, interlocked like jigsaw pieces. Openings behind couches and under desks are filled with piles of dust-accumulating pages. The kitchen is a repository for books that have nothing to do with cooking. Unless you count Like Water for Chocolate.

It is at this point that a trip to the secondhand bookstore becomes essential. No matter how sentimental you are about your private library, there are usually a handful of books you feel you could part with: presents from aunts and uncles and ex-girlfriends; books that appeared cool in your second year of college that now seem sophomoric. And this at least would allow you to free up the laundry basket for actual clothes.

But there remains one problem—the blessing and the curse of the secondhand book world—store credit. There is always that critical decision-making point when the store clerk calls you over after inspecting your rejects and says, “That will be $30 store credit or $20 cash.”

Naturally, they offer a differential rate, aimed at keeping you in the store and leaving you cashless. Secondhand stores work hard to turn over their books. You may get a kick out of collecting shelves and shelves of paperbacks, but the storeowners know that their books are only worth something when people are taking them out.

Fortunately for them, I have never yet taken the money and run. What book lover could? It’s simple mathematics—$20 that would be spent on books anyway (if not today, then next week) or $30 to spend right now. On books. Lightly-worn, pre-loved books that you have not yet read. It’s not uncommon to walk in with 10 books and walk out with five, depending on the rate of exchange.

Usually the offer (either credit or cash) is so derisory, that neither option seems appealing at first. Even books that have laid unread on shelves for years seem to be worth more than the stores will pay you. There’s something faintly insulting about handing over 10 or 15 books, the result of years of collecting, to be given a figure with only one zero.

This kind of bookstore operates on a tight margin. Your book may fetch $10 from another customer, but then again it may not. It might sit un-chosen and unloved for months or years. Some punk kid may slip it into their satchel and sneak out. From experience, most places will give you store credit of half what the books would sell for, and cash for a third. Presumably, someone has worked out that this is the right rate to keep the doors open and the books flowing.

Something like eBay is a logical response to this scenario. No real middleman, better prices, less risk. It’s become a popular technique for offloading unwanted merchandise of all kinds, even if it is time-consuming when you sell item-by-item.

Yet like a lot of new advances in capitalism, eBay doesn’t appear to have replaced the traditional secondhand industry. In the case of bookstores, it’s surely something to do with the atmosphere: the cramped, faintly-musty environment; the sense that you could find literally anything buried in all the disorder. There’s a very romantic essence to pre-loved bookstores.

And that serendipitous discovery doesn’t happen when you take the cash and walk out. You will spend the paltry sum on a taxi ride or two drinks in a bar. You won’t experience the pleasure of converting useless, unwanted books into fresh new finds. You may miss out on that elusive, dog-eared novel that would have changed your life if you had stayed.

There is even an additional challenge with store credit: how to maximize the budget you’ve been assigned. All sorts of sums and calculations come into play. If I have $30 credit and these two books are $9 and this one is $7, can I find one that costs $5? Books are chosen and discarded. The pile in your hands shrinks and rises until eventually you have the perfect combination.

Perhaps that is the mark of the true book obsessive: someone who can’t convert books into something as prosaic as legal tender. The fanatic is someone who feels a faint sense of betrayal at parting with a book, any book, and knows that that feeling can only be assuaged by walking out with more books. It sometimes feels like a physical law: the Law of Conservation of Literature.

Sadly, this attitude leaves the space problem largely unsolved. There must be something dispensable that can be sold instead. Like the bed.

 
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Secondhand Wonderland: The World of the Used Book

Comments

I’ve just returned from the annual AAUW book sale in my old hometown. The word “hometown” probab;y makes it sound like a burg about the size of Mayberry, but it’s actually grown from 22,000 when we moved there in 1971, to its current population of more than 160,000. So, this AAUW book sale is a big one—30,000 books to peruse when the doors opened at 5pm for us pre-sale book lovers.

Not all of us are book lovers, though and it’s the reason I doj’t enjoy these sales as much as Iused to. The quiet of book browsing is now broken by the constant, soft beeps of handheld scanners that the book dealers now carry with them. They scan UPC codes without even looking at the book title—just pull the book up enough for the scanner’s LED to read the code, slide it back in—unless, of course, the scanner emits a different sound, a kind of “boodly-oop” or one, that sounded like a man with a high voice gargling. Then, the dealer might look at the book more carefully; most don’t, just toss it into the box or bag at their feet.

Once they’ve perused all the tables, or the ones identified as holding books in which they specialize, they haul what now amounts to several boxes or bags of books to what they apparently believe to be “their” sorting spot. Often it’s out of the way, often it’s right in the middle of the aisle—so they don’t have to lean over too far to discard the books they’ve decided they don’t really want. Of course, these books aren’t being returned to their [proper section, and of course they’re piled precariously on the corner of the table, to ensure that one, some other shopper is bound to come buy and knock them all down; and two, that other shoppers are inconvenienced by having to somehow move this pile of books elsewhere so as to shop for the books underneath.

The book sales now charge an entrance fee to the holders of those scanners. They admonish these people not to hoard books, though their requests, and the signs posted throughout the sale area to the same effect, are ignored. I saw two 30-something men in a far corner at the end of the hallway where books were displayed (this sale is held in a hgh school) who had a large pile of books—covered by a blanket, seemingly in the middle of an area marked with a few scattered books to subtly delineate their “territory” . They had as many books set aside as some sales have in their entire inventory.

People of all ages and character appearance carry these scanners: teens; elderly women; brawny older men in suspenders; skinny middle-age men in shorts; three generations, all female, from the same family.

MOst of these people don’t care if you’re carefully looking over th4e row of books they’re working behind you. They’ll elbow their way around you, or reach right in front of you to grab something they think may be… I don’t know. I’m never sure just what they’re looking for. Do they have requests from buyers, online or otherwise? Do they know they can sell certain titles on ebay for a few bucks more than the 75 cents to $2.50 they pay for them here? Are they looking to stock their second-hand bookstores or weekend garage sales?

The answers to those questions would merely satisfy mild curiosity. My more urgent and immediate concern is, that the hoarders and scanners have made booksales not so much fun anymore. I’m torn, actually. On the one hand, I’m annoyed by their rudeness and their complete disregard for us other shoppers. I’m annoyed by their beeping wireless devices and by their snatching books out of our hands, by hoarding hundreds of them at a time and then discarding them anyplace they feeel like it.

On the other hand, though, I’m buoyed by the fact that there are still so many people—they and their customers—who want books that badly, who are willing to be, perhaps uncharacteristically, rude and pushy to get the books they seek.

Book publishers and bookstores that sell new books aren’t faring so well these days, and until the economy turns around, will continue to suffer declining profits and sales. The used book trade is keeping plenty of people busy gathering, buying, acquiring, and reselling books of all genres, shapes, sizes, topics, condition, value and desires.

Comment by Jules from Chciago — June 18, 2008 @ 9:10 pm

What I actually meant to write before I started thinking about my book sale experince of earlier today….I was planning on saying I bought two more large bagfuls of books that I don’t need nor have room for.

I, too was faced with the same dilemma as the writer of the above article. Not in an apartment, but in a house that is home to five people, four cats, a turtle and 3,000 books—but was built as a summer cottage for a family of three or four and possibly a couple dozen books, given the lack of closets and walls available for shelving.

Once I moved in with my new husband, it became immediately evident that my sons or my books would have to be stored off-premise… and I knew the boys needed a fully-stocked refrigerator nearby 24/7 and probably expected in-house facilities.

So, my husband lined the dining room with low shelves. When those filled, we moved our clothes up to the attic and moved a 4-foot-wide bookshelf into the tiny closet. Once that filled up, I talked my youngest son into storing away most of the stuffed animals he had on the shelves that are suspended from the ceiling along two walls of his room; my books staked out a new claim in new territory.

Then, we bought two CD/DVD shelves at IKEA to hang on a wall, and I moved my smaller books onto those. That didn’t help much, so it was back to IKEA for a giant display shelf unit, 6 cubes high by 3 cubes wide and deep enough to hold books TWO deep. Even so, it was only a matter of several weeks before it, too, was filled.

My husband decided we were running out of places for these piecemeal solutions, and refinanced the house so we could turn the attic into a second floor living area. That’s right—we’re adding a second story to our house to house my books.

The 22x18 family room will be lined with bookshelves, and I will have my own reading nook. Once the family room is filled, along with the shelves that will be purchased for the bedroom (I have to have a decent-size bedside stand for current reading materials!), the only place to go is down—to a basement library.

Comment by Jules from Chicago — June 18, 2008 @ 9:44 pm

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