Monday, May 15, 2006
Booksale etiquette revisited
At the booksale, by the way, I saw a person hunkered in the corner with a stack of books, and she was calling in ISBN numbers on her cell phone. I'd heard about this, and someone commented with irritation about this phenomenon on this blog a few months back, but I'd never seen it myself. So I walked by to take a closer look, and I saw her putting books I assumed were discards in a pile behind her. Of course I spotted one I really wanted to read, Jason Epstein's Book Business: Publishing, Past, Present, and Future (Norton 2001), so I lingered, and when her connection cut out, I said, "Excuse me, are those your discards? There's a book I'd really like to have..." and she said, "Take it! I'm not going to buy it." So I walked away with a benign, even friendly attitude towards her. She didn't have a mountain of books, just a box or two. It's strange how this business is evolving - I wonder where it's going to end up. I hope I'm still around to find out, with my little bricks-and-mortar shop.
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It's kind of like panning for gold. Those folks dip their pans and scoop up all they can, and then sift through it looking for one or two pieces that they feel certain they can cash in. Book lovers, on the other hand, look in the pan and find endless beauty in many different pieces, though they may not have any monetary value on the open market, they still are valuable in ways the gold digger can't understand.
Nice analogy. I like all the little rocks in the pan too, granite, shale, quartz, not just the gold. The sturdy penguin paperbacks and the rare first editions.
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