“How much, thought I, has each of these volumes, now thrust aside with such indifference, cost some aching head – how many weary days! how many sleepless nights! How have their authors buried themselves in the solitude of cells and cloisters; shut themselves up from the face of man, and the still more blessed face of nature; and devoted themselves to painful research and intense reflection! And all for what? to occupy an inch of dusty shelf – to have the titles of their works read now and then in a future age, by some drowsy churchman, or casual straggler like myself; and in another age to be lost even to remembrance. Such is the amount of this boasted immortality. A mere temporary rumor, a local sound; like the tone of that bell which has just tolled among these towers, filling the ear for a moment – lingering transiently in echo – and then passing away, like a thing that was not!” – Washington Irving, from “The Mutability of Literature.”
One of my occupations during these days has been to purge the Richmond Hill house of excess books, those dusty denizens of the shelf that no one in my acquaintance will read again. I gathered fifteen boxes of such books over several days, enough to completely fill the bed of my pickup truck, and I set off for the Strand so that they could have the honor of the first cull.
The bookbuying business at the Strand is rather brutal and efficient, the bookshop’s equivalent of a slaughterhouse. You enter through a special door, and are herded into a special line. When your turn comes a young man who can still stoop and lift grabs your books and places them on a table. Another man, an older one (and deeply unhappy I may add), rifles through the books, rejecting some by sight, and others with the use of a supermarket scanner. If the scanner does not like the book, out it does. If it does, it will give a price (which you cannot see). When all is done, the man barks out a sum. It’s take it or leave it, and I imagine almost everyone takes it. A box of books takes less than a minute. One couple brought in several boxes of brand-new books, uncracked, mostly art books, several thousand dollars’ worth, and left with $175. You could tell they were stunned the number was so low, but they took it.
Only new books had any real chance. Imperfection meant rejection. Out of my pickup-load, I sold two books (perfection is not a specialty of mine), for $25, both of which were brand-new art books in their wrappers with a total cover price of $125. I then walked down the block to Alabaster Books and sold twelve more books, all good-title hardbacks (Nabokov, Fitzgerald, etc.) and in very good condition at 25 cents each, for a grand total of $28.00. The rest of the books, again, were rejected.
Of course I might have gotten better prices someplace else, where overhead is less of a concern, but it was an interesting experience. It amazes me that things like virtually new paperbacks which still sell at Barnes and Noble for $16.95, like the novel “Wicked” or a Joyce Carol Oates novel, can have no resell value at all – not even 25 cents. It’s like trying to sell last week’s newspaper.
But I did end up having some fun with the remainders. I went off for lunch uptown (paid for by the aforementioned art books) and selected some of my more marketable stock and set them on the corner of 84th and Lexington. When I emerged from lunch, all but two were gone (no one wanted The Perfect Storm, I guess). I filled the box again and set off to meet a friend. I returned three hours later to find an empty box – a 100% success rate (who, I wonder, took Celibacy: The Necessary Option?). So I filled the box again, and then deposited similar boxes on 92nd & 3rd and 95th & Lexington. The box on 92nd got some immediate nibbles, but as far as I could tell when I came back twenty minutes later the box was only rearranged, and no real hits. I am impressed at how much fun I found the whole enterprise. It was the kind of pleasure you get from setting out food for animals and finding, in the morning, that there is much more activity outside your house at night than you ever dreamed. But at that stage I had to return to Queens.
So the business of books made no good impression on me, but New Yorkers’ endless appetite for free things sent me home with a smile.
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