Canto XIX - The Hell of Biggles

For as long as I’ve worked with collectible books and book collectors, I’ve never been able to fathom why it is that people collect Biggles books (and other books written by “Capt.” W.E. Johns). I have a theory about it but – prima facie – it seems like the last thing that anyone with intelligence and a solid income would waste their time with.

Let’s be clear: I have a penchant for vintage literature of various kinds and I do see the value of collecting children’s books – they rarely survive the rigours of the nursery, so finding them in pristine condition is incredibly difficult – but with this range of books, I’m stumped.

First, although it’s true that these books are becoming increasingly harder to find, it’s not as if they’re especially scarce. They were pumped out in huge print-runs from the early 30s onwards, so finding them isn’t difficult. Of course, in the 1960s, the character fell into huge disfavour, with the series’ outmoded colonial attitudes, and so finding the books published from about 1957 to just before Johns’s death in 1968 is a different matter altogether; nevertheless, with original printings, re-printings and licensed reproductions (mainly by Oxford University Press, but also in many other languages – other than French; they knew better!), these books are by no means scarce.

My instincts give me intimations as to why Biggles is such a common collecting obsession: it’s because it’s a stereotypical collecting type. Just like, in fiction, posh characters (Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey springs to mind) tend to fiddle about with their incunabula, people who decide that they’re going to begin collecting books think, “what should I collect? I know – Biggles”. And that’s as far as it goes.

The character of Biggles has been a source of ridicule since the series loss of popularity in the 60s, with all the usual tawdry jokes about what was actually going on between him and Ginger and Algy, but even this doesn’t seem to put off potential collectors. It’s obvious from even the lightest skim of the material that the purpose of Biggles and his Air Detectives is to be counted as the morally upright targets of the depredations of Them (“Them” being everybody not covered by the armour of Englishness and Empire). Thus, we see Ginger being horsewhipped by Turks, and Biggles being clubbed by Zulus, along with any number of other loathsome racial stereotypes. The obvious whiff of homoeroticism that all this tacitly approved rough trade generates is obviously what Ian Fleming picked up upon too, and is the source of the “I know – I’ll let myself get captured by the baddies in order to learn their dastardly plan” manoeuvres that Bond comes up with. Biggles is, in short, Bond-lite.

And along with this both series have acquired a frisson of the illicit; like collecting them is doing something ‘naughty’. This might stand up in the case of Bond, or with Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu books, but with Biggles? Meh.

I theorise that those who decide to collect Biggles reach a point – usually after their first major purchase – when they realise all of the above and start to have misgivings about what it is that they’re actually doing. At that point however, they’ve taken a major step and, as Macbeth notes, “should they wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er”. The redeeming feature of Biggles books is that – compared to Bond novels – they’re much cheaper: a first edition of Casino Royale in good nick can be worth thousands; Biggles books rarely top the $500 mark.

From my perspective as a bookseller I feel torn – I don’t want Biggles books in my shop; if you’ve ever seen Biggles in Australia (1955), you’ll know why. However, I want to make a living and people are seemingly willing to slap down moderate sums for these reads. So, what do I do? Of course I’ll acquire them when I find them, but I’ll also be looking askance at the people who come in to buy them: unless they’re the type who has bought in wholesale to everything that Biggles represents, I might be able to turn them onto some other – less grubby – collecting sphere.

Canto XVIII - The Black Showroom

The Internet has had a vast impact upon the way that we do business. With Amazon encroaching from all sides, it seems that for the majority of us nowadays, our first impulse when it comes to shopping, is not to head down to the local mercantile district, but to let our fingers do the walking by way of Google or similar. On the one hand, there is convenience in so doing: with a few minute’s quiet clicking, the onerous task of buying gifts for Christmas – for example – can be over in an afternoon. On the other hand, there is an enormous unspoken effect upon our social activities and, indeed, our social contracts.

One way that these egregious effects have started to manifest is in the heinous activity of “showrooming”. This is where a punter goes into a retail establishment and proceeds to identify products that they would like to purchase. They then use their telephone to find out where the same item can be purchased at possibly a cheaper price, then they order it online. Once they’ve finished, with a cheery wave to the shop proprietor, they exit the establishment filled with retail satisfaction. And how much money has the shop made in this transaction? Absolutely zero (or, negatively, less than that, when you factor in the potential shop-soiling of the product which may have just taken place). Some people think that rorting the system like this is just smart shopping; arseholes always like to smugly congratulate their own perceived ingenuity.

In our case, since we sell secondhand, out-of-print books, it doesn’t have quite the same impact but, with venues like ABEBooks and EBay, increasingly it is going to start to hurt. People have been talking for awhile now about the death of books as a viable commodity; I think people should worry more about their book shops.

When you look at a prospective purchase online, you’re not really seeing what it is that you’re about to by. It’s a reference; a guide. In a very real sense, when people buy things like this, it’s not like finding the object in a shop, picking it up, looking it over and then haggling over the price: there’s no physical, sensory connexion to it. You might as well be snaffling some bit of treasure in a video game for all that it has any impact upon your life. Consequently, anything you purchase online is also emotionally de-valued; it means less to you because you haven’t worked for it. It’s like picking up Pokémon creatures, for all the effect it has upon your reality. Here’s an instance to support what I’m saying:

This last week we encountered a further refinement of the showrooming technique which has left us goggling. We had for sale a few weeks ago, a signed, first edition of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, a little edgeworn but in very good nick. A customer from overseas ordered it from us through ABEBooks and we duly sent it off. Imagine our chagrin when later, we received a request (through ABE) from the customer for it to be returned and refunded. The reason stated was that the book was “not as described”.

Now, we are particularly diligent in describing our books: if we say that it’s a little bit worn, then that’s exactly how you’ll discover it to be. Any marks inside the book, old price tags, bookplates, marginalia, tears, stains, whatever – if you find it in one of our books, you’ll also find it in our description of same. So we contacted the punter and asked him what the problem was. He replied by email to the effect that he had bought several copies of the same first edition, signed book online, had had them delivered, then sent back all the ones which he considered “inferior”. We were gobsmacked. And I’ll tell you why:

All of us who sell books online through either ABE or Amazon (it’s all basically just Amazon but ABEBooks at least tries to pretend that it’s run by human beings), have a rating that we accrue through the work we do finding, selling and shipping books to customers across the planet. If our rating drops below a certain limit, we can be punished for it, or even barred from the system entirely. When someone returns a book that we’ve sent them, it drops our rating. And it’s worse than that:

When a punter rejects a book, they are asked to supply a reason why. They are given four options from which to choose, including “book not as described”. There is no option five: “I bought a bunch of these books and kept the best one – the others can go back at the seller’s expense”. ABEBooks (and its parent company Amazon) almost always decides in favour of the customer on most issues; when we complained to ABE about this person, we were pretty much expecting that we would be the ones out of pocket after their arbitration. Fortunately, we had the customer’s email to back us up and, although we lost the cost of the book, the punter is now obliged to send the book back at their own expense (whether or not they do this is something which we’re still waiting to discover. He might just decide to have a Kite Runner bonfire and be done with it). For him these unwanted books have ceased to be funny icons on his computer screen and are now quite heavy, quite individual real-world items with which he has saddled himself.

Bricks and mortar stores are not online merchants (although there is some overlap). You can’t just assume that it’s all just one big homogeneous cloud of consumerism and treat us as if we’re robots. We need to eat too. The way things are going, there will most likely come a day when you can’t pop down to your bookstore to browse; buy fresh flowers from the local florist; get a cup of coffee and a roll from the local baker; or even prop up the bar at the local pub: we will all be expected to purchase stuff using our ‘phones with only staged photos of what we’re trying to buy as a reference and then sit in our rooms until the drone zings by to drop it off. If it comes late, or is not as described, we will squeal like babies denied the teat until the provider rules that we should be compensated in some fashion at the expense and detriment of those facilitating the delivery (until, of course, those people are replaced with robots). That may seem like some peoples’ idea of convenience; for me it’s just Hell.

Make use of your local shops. The longer you do so, the longer they will be there. Because we all know that, once they’re gone, you will be the first to complain about their absence.

*****
Post Script: I just watched a report on the television news - apparently the flood of online purchasing that took place over this last Christmas has had such a debilitating effect upon the local economy that it was worthy of being reported. Our intrepid journalist asked a representative of the Retail Trades Association what the effect of this trend would have upon bricks-and-mortar businesses? His response was that we would need to stock fewer commodities and "do something different". I'm sorry? What does that involve exactly? Hiring jugglers? Sheesh!

Canto XVII – The Dark Grandstand

I was reminded recently of another perversion that takes place in bookshops (and other emporia, no doubt) and, although I have already touched upon it previously, I thought it should have its own moment to shine. Or leer. Whatever.

It takes place like this: there you are going about your day – filling customer orders; re-stocking; cataloguing like the wind – when a fellow (and it’s generally a fellow) breezes through the door looking smugly self-satisfied and as if suddenly surprised to find himself in a bookshop – a BOOKSHOP! – despite the sign above the door outside. He will make some general introductory remarks regarding how books smell, how many of them there are, and whether they might be in some kind of order? Then he will leap straight to the real reason that he has deigned to darken your door.

Might you have in stock, he will say, a particular book I’ve been looking for? He will offer the handy morsel that it’s very difficult to obtain and that it’s unlikely to be simply languishing on a bookshelf in your – your! - store. Usually there will be an accompanying observation that they’re probably just wasting their time even asking…

‘Yes,’ you say. ‘Over there in the military section, third shelf.’

Instantly, the world-weary smarminess drops away. The punter will blench, their eyes widening and their Adam’s apple will suddenly go into a series of spasms as if it’s developed an intense need to high jump their collar.

‘Really?’ they gulp.

‘Really,’ you say. And then you tell them the price. And often, because it is such a hard book to locate, that price will be high.

‘Oh! Right,’ they mumble. ‘Look, I’ve left my wallet in my car – I’ll just pop out and get it…’

And you’ll never see them again.

(The best times are when all this palaver post-dates the gratuitous displaying of said wallet, in order to prove that they are, in fact, a Player of some note.)

It makes me wonder about several points. Do these guys keep lists of rare books in their heads to trot out for just this purpose? Is there research involved? Do they keep track of where and when they’ve attempted this ploy and the times it has failed, in order to never face the ridicule of having to enter those bookshops ever again? And how insecure must they be to even attempt this kind of stupidity?

It seems to be a little-known fact that our job is to find books for people, no matter how obscure or hard to pin down. I would have thought that was obvious.

I was talking with a former colleague the other day and she reminded me that there’s another version of this game that’s, if anything, even more poisonous. In this iteration, the book, or books, in question are not that hard to find; the focus is upon the perceived level of ability of the staff member due to the subject matter in question and the gender of the employee.

‘Look,’ the punter will say, ‘you’d better go and get the manager for this one, sweetheart: I’m looking for a book on the SS.’

‘Leibstandarte? Totenkopf? Prinz Eugen?’ the staff member will offer.

‘Um… what?’ is the typical response

Deep sigh from the staff-member.

‘Which division?’ she will ask, enunciating clearly; ‘was it a tank unit you were after?’

‘Um… I’m not sure…’

‘Perhaps a nice general history will get you started…’

At which point the punter will mutter something about their lunch-break being over and having to get back to the coalface.

(The other thing which people – surprisingly - seem to be a little unsure about, is whether people in bookshops know anything about what it is they’re selling.)

This little big-noting game is a relatively common occurrence in my world and in those of my colleagues. There was a time - back in the 80s when the mantra “The Customer Is Always Right” was in vogue - when there was no defence against it; in the days when, if your boss pissed you off, you could pop down to the nearest shop and vent your spleen against some nameless peon who had no other option but to sit there and take it. Nowadays, we live by other truisms, and we don’t play games anymore. Instead, we will make you regret even trying it.

Canto XVI - The Dubious Pediment of Price Re-Calculation

Much of what happens at this blog is about the incredible stupidity of the customers and clients of booksellers; however, don’t let that lead you to think that booksellers are all salt-of-the-earth, straight-shooters. No. Not by a long shot. In the last week I ran into a bookselling practise that is highly annoying, not to say illegal, and so I thought I’d bring it to your attention.

Let me explain by telling you of the time I first encountered this sin. I was in the new Sydney-central bookshop of a long-time bookdealer, who I will not name due to the fact that I would get into a lot of trouble, but whose actions, which I’m about to disclose, would surprise no-one who had dealt with her in the past, eminent ABA and ANZAAB member though she be. I found a book in her shop that I wanted to purchase: it was clearly priced at $12 and in nice condition and I thought it would make a nice addition to my collection. I took it to the front counter and signalled the drone there of my intention to purchase.

Suddenly, the proprietor of the store swooped over and snatched the book from my hands. She flicked through it and then announced: “I’m sorry – this volume has been withdrawn from sale”, before marching off to her back office. The drone just shrugged, indicating not only that he could do nothing on my behalf, but that this was a common occurrence.

Seriously miffed, I re-pocketed my wallet and headed for the door. As I made my exit the shop-owner appeared beside me and casually waved the book at me in a manner that suggested I had just put her to some inconvenience. “You can buy it now if you want,” she declared.

In response I simply stared at her, in as cold a fashion as I could muster up, and closed the door firmly in her face.

Some of you might not be getting the sub-text of what was happening here, so let me fill you in. Having seen my interest and clocked the monetary value of this potential transaction, the ‘bookdealer’ took the book away so that she could rummage about a little on teh interwebz and make sure that she wasn’t losing out on the deal. Having reassured herself that the price she’d decided to sell the book for was fair and accurate, she then ungraciously decided that I could go ahead and reward her impolitic behaviour by throwing $12 her way. Let me just say this – it’s illegal to operate this way. If you are going to sell a book, you are required to do your research before you price it and put it out for sale. You are not allowed to stop the transaction mid-sale and alter the terms of the deal.

Now, everyone makes mistakes. The world of books is wide-ranging and multifarious; we dealers are trying to anticipate the tastes and requirements of every kind of reader from Austen fans to World War Two history buffs. No-one can cover all the bases with total accuracy, and occasionally a book worth hundreds can be let go for a pittance – it happens all the time and to the best of us. I recall the first UK edition of William Burrough’s The Naked Lunch - signed by Burroughs and dedicated to Jasper Johns at the venue of the book’s launch which Johns had organised - which I found at a fellow-dealer’s shop. They had it priced at $5. After a quick consultation, that book is now being sold on commission for them by the store where I work for $500. These slip-ups happen all the time and the lucky punter who wins out in the deal will ever-after recall the transaction as a high point in their collecting career.

So let me tell you about last week. I had to get some new tyres for my car and, while at the dealership, I noticed that there was a little antique shop next-door. I made a decision to return and check them out. As I walked in, I was amazed to see books everywhere and my eyes lit upon about half-a-dozen volumes in the first few minutes which were highly desirable. I opened one of them and found an enigma: there was no price. Nothing written in the book; no sticker on the covers. I looked around for some kind of notice which would explain their pricing strategy and saw only a sign which read: “Any prices inside the books are not necessarily the asking price of the establishment”. Those of you up on your retail law, will know that this is illegal – goods for sale should be priced; if there are numerous price tags on an item, the lowest one prevails.

I swanned around the rest of the shop: everything else in the place, from antique ceiling mouldings, to secondhand coats was clearly priced and labelled. Even the vinyl records were clearly labelled: LPs $10; singles $5. It was just the books. Inevitably, I found something which I just had to have – a rare edition of a book on H.P. Lovecraft by the Borgo Press. Anticipating a repeat of the scenario which I’d experienced as outlined above, I signalled my intention to buy to the twenty-something drone at the front desk. What happened next surprised me:

“Oh, this is Lovecraft,” said the cipher, “Rex must have missed it while he was looking around. I’m afraid I can’t sell it to you.”

Annoyed, I declared that Rex’s oversight was surely to my advantage and asked again - how much?

“Sorry,” was the response, “this is Rex’s book.” And it vanished into a desk drawer.

Seriously annoyed, I asked him to outline the store policy regarding their book stock. The non-answer I received was as vague and equivocal as I could have expected. I mentioned this incident to a colleague shortly afterwards and learned that they’d been served the same heap of crap: they’d asked to buy an incomplete limited edition set of Burton’s The Arabian Nights and a price had been agreed upon. Suddenly one of the proprietor’s friends had piped up from behind a nearby computer saying “Dude! Those books’re worth thousands!”, and the deal stopped dead in its tracks. Now the price agreed upon by my friend was entirely fair – the set was worn and – significantly – missing two volumes; these sets are numbered, so losing a volume catastrophically causes the value to plummet. However, when these millennial “booksellers” jump online and look up something on ABEBooks, they see only dollar signs: they have no idea about accurate pricing and assessing book descriptions, and no notion at all about the damage that bookjackers cause in the rare book market. These kids mistakenly think that they’re sitting on a gold mine while making up prices on the spot via the Internet. Illegally.

That set of The Arabian Nights is still there by the way; it was one of the books that I’d clocked as I walked in. All the other good books are still there too, and it’s easy to see why – no punter is going to lay down their hard-earned on something that has no up-front price, in a deal that might change drastically in a heartbeat. So if you’re in Katoomba getting your tyres rotated at the K-Mart Tyre and Auto Service on Bathurst Road, and you see the quaint old building next door with the sign out the front saying “Antiques”, don’t be fooled – avoid it like the plague that it is.

How to Clean a Book...

Having purchased books from a punter (or having had them dumped anonymously upon us), the task of cleaning them is the next phase. “Cleaning” in this case is a catch-all term which covers a range of activity, including evaluation and repair. Customers rarely see what happens between books arriving at the shop and then being picked up off the shelf, so this will be a little insight into the working life of booksellers. Most of the time we try to be like ducks – calm composure on the surface and furious activity below the water. Here then, are a couple of likely candidates for addition to our stock which will be our subjects for the current exercise:

These two volumes have been randomly selected from a boxload of battered tomes which was offloaded on us by someone moving house. At first glance, there’s little of promise: the Forsyth has some cachet, but it’s a later offering and his earlier stuff is much more sought-after. The hardcover volume is less promising still, but good horror is hard to find so an inspection is warranted. Let’s start with the Forsyth:

Straight away, there’s something dodgy going on: it’s easy to see that the text block (the body of the book) doesn’t lie compactly together. At the very least, these trade-format potboilers should retain a nice tight shape; here there’s an issue.

Investigating, it’s soon discovered that several of the pages are loose. In fact, a single page towards the back of the book has come free and half of one gathering from near the top of the text block. This means that we are now faced with the prospect of repair as well as cleaning. The loose gathering is an easy mend with some glue; the single page is a tricky fix. We have to begin weighing up whether or not this is going to be worth the effort.

There’s also a chip to the head of the spine; this can be fixed with a touch of glue as well, so we’ll do it all in one session.

Gluing is pretty easy; the biggest issue is not getting glue everywhere and inadvertently sticking the book together.

Once the glue is dry – usually after being left overnight – the book is ready to be cleaned. First, it gets a brushing: using a good brush – a shaving brush or heavy paintbrush works well – we brush any loose dust off the covers, text block edges and from the gutters inside the covers. While doing this we check for any items stuck between the pages, old bookmarks and less welcome items: occasionally you can get lucky and find cash; not often, but it happens. As well, we inspect for underlining, marginalia and inscriptions, such as the previous owners’ names: all these things will affect the price we place on the book.

Once that’s done we wipe the covers with a cleaning agent. We use eucalyptus oil, but there are other options too: occasionally just a lightly water-moistened tissue is sufficient. This is the usual result:

How clean do you think your books are now?

In the final analysis, the book looks much better than it did when we first took it in. Still it’s got a lot of spottiness to its pages, along with the rest of the damage (which, even with the best gluing in the world, is not a permanent fix). At best, this book will go out to the “Specials” table in front of the shop with a nominal $5 sticker attached. That’s not bad for a book which cost us nothing, but it’s still a considerable investment in time and effort, especially when you consider that it came in a box with another 40 or 50 volumes.

Let’s turn to the hardcover…

First thing to notice is that this is a library book. That means that we’ll expect to see a bunch of pencil marks, labels and ink stamps on the inside and outside of the volume. If we’re lucky, some of those stamps will be “Cancelled” stamps, indicating that the book was retired from the stacks and sold off at a library sale. In this instance, that’s precisely the case: if the book wasn’t cancelled, the onus falls on us to contact the library and return it to them. A lot of bookdealers don’t follow these things up, it’s true, but some of us prefer not to traffic in stolen goods.

First piece of business is to remove the old plastic wrap from the dustwrapper. That plastic will have kept the ‘wrapper relatively clean, but it’s probably some cheap stuff that will exude vapours over time and affect the boards and paper, so off it comes. This is where we hit a snag: some enthusiastic librarian has taped the plastic directly onto the dustwrapper, and then taped the ‘wrapper onto the boards – there’s an especially dark and burn-y place in Hell for this sinner. For now, we’ll have to break out the scalpel and try to remove all that tape without messing up the fabric of the book too much.

Once the plastic’s off, you can see how much crud was caked onto it.

The dustwrapper gets a quick dusting off and is checked for rips and tears. That ugly library sticker to the front panel is a bit of an eyesore, but trying to remove it will probably create an even more unsightly mess. We’ll just leave it for now.

Now we can see that the book is really quite the worse for wear. The binding is rolled, meaning that it no longer lies flat in a tight pile with the boards exactly parallel to each other. In extreme cases, the damage extends to the endpapers, which are essential for holding the text block inside the casing and we can see that this has happened here. Once again, we’re faced with having to repair the book.

(For those who are interested, bindings get rolled when you place a book face down and opened, rather than using a bookmark like a normal person.)

For now, we go through the book brushing off dust and checking for other types of wear and abuse, also noting how extensive the library marking has been: if it’s relatively light, this can be noted in a description and a few extra dollars added to the price. In this instance, I find one of my favourite bits of damage: the boot mark to the endpaper, showing that someone left this book opened up on the floor at some point, allowing some troglodyte to walk on it.

It is the evil nature of tape to leave horrible stains to the cloth which comprises the boards. Cloth cannot be cleaned using eucalyptus oil and a damp rag is also relatively useless. There is a purpose-made cleaning solution designed to thwart tape and other marks, but it’s horribly expensive and often hard to find. If this was a better book, I’d think about using it, but not on this occasion.

Now we glue the endpapers back into place and leave the book overnight to dry.

*****

Next day, we give the dustwrapper a once-over with eucalyptus oil and remove the last of the scunge. The plastic helped a little in keeping the book clean, but not that much.

At this stage we could go the extra mile and put the dustwrapper in some fresh polypropylene wrap, but we’re not going to do that: this book is too damaged even for the “Specials” table; sadly, it’s going straight into the recycling bin. Obviously, in the normal run of things, I wouldn’t have wasted as much time on this book as I have, but this exercise is just for demonstration purposes.

*****

And that’s about it. It might not look too involved, but keep in mind that we mostly deal with stacks of books, not just one or two. For these two volunteers, this is the end of the road; for other books which we’re going to try and sell off the shelves, the next step is to describe the books in a database catalogue, photograph them and then upload these details to the internet. With all this work for a very modest return, you can start to see why sometimes bookshop staff can seem a little testy…

Canto XV - The Scrapyard of Book Purchase

Being in the second-hand book business, it’s our job to engage with people who bring in books to us for the purpose of exchanging them for money. Invariably, they think that the books that they have to offer us are worth their weight in gold; also as invariably, we anticipate that most of the books that they have will be rubbish and that we will pay about 20¢ per volume for anything that they have which is worth our while. The final result is often somewhere between the two points of view, but slanted extremely strongly in our favour.

As an example, a fellow came into the shop once with a range of books which he’d thoughtfully thrown into two supermarket shopping bags. Upon inspection, they proved to be some old text books for those inclined towards learning shorthand, several dictionaries, some old “Women’s Weekly" magazines from the 1980s and a slew of random paperbacks that hadn’t been treated with respect.

‘How much will you give me for the lot?’ he demanded straight off.

I waved an admonishing finger. ‘Steady on,’ I said, ‘first, you’ve thrown all of these into shopping bags and tied them up tight, so now they’ve all been bent. Second, you’ve got text books here and we don’t do text books: they date too easily…”

(This is true, and increasingly so, since most instructional manuals are now going online.)

‘…Third, we don’t take dictionaries, for the same reason…’

(Again: true. Dictionaries are ubiquitous, they date and punters only want new editions, or special editions, so your Oxford Concise, or your Macquarie Compact, are of no use to us whatsoever.)

‘Magazines? Seriously?’

(In the trade, these items are referred to as “ephemera” a label which covers such things as menus, cruise tickets, posters and magazines, including every instance that Scully showed up on the cover of “Rolling Stone” - I have my copies tucked away securely… Most booksellers don’t deal in ephemera; finding those who do is like finding horse feathers.)

‘Okay,’ says the punter at this point, ‘what’s wrong with that? Huh?’

‘A biography of Tina Turner with the back cover torn off. Where do I start?’

Obviously, this guy got turned away with nothing to show for his time and effort. Look, we understand that throwing a bunch of books together, jumping into the car and beetling down to our place takes time and effort; but what people don’t get is that, once we have your books, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that happens to them, stuff that I get paid to do, and which my employers expect to see a reasonable return on. Reasonable. Not exorbitant. Like all businesses we try to minimise our costs and maximise our returns, so before you throw all your books in the back of the ute and drive around to our shop in the pouring rain, expecting to collect an easy three-figure return on your enthusiasm, petrol usage and having to dislodge the kelpie for a half-hour (I shit you not: this has happened), bear the following points in mind:

When we take charge of your unwanted books, we have to clean them. You might think this is unnecessary – obviously you’re a hygienic sort of person – but I dare you to do this: take a tissue moistened with a small amount of eucalyptus oil and swipe it over the covers of a book that you like and which you read regularly – it will turn black in moments. Each time you pick up a book, the oils from your fingers get deposited on its covers. After awhile, that greenish-coloured book you like so much will be revealed to be light blue after a quick cleaning. And that’s just the covers. In cleaning books I’ve found cookies, jam doughnuts, toilet paper, cigarettes and even grasshoppers, smashed between the pages. You can be as “Lady Cottingley” as you like with your own books, you heathen, but at least express some kind of shame when your evil practises are revealed at the point when someone else tries to clean your filthy, filthy books.

And no, if I can’t separate the pages of your copy of The Story of O by Pauline Réage, I absolutely will not be paying you any money for it.

After cleaning, the book needs to be given a place on our database, so that we can sell it; therefore it needs to be catalogued. This is done by describing the book in the patois of booksellers. We use a bunch of cute terms – octavo; diced Russian; foxed – which mean nothing to you uninitiated types, but which absolutely cover our butts if you buy our product and then decide that you don’t like what you’ve received. Forget it sweetheart: “shaken and rolled” means it’s falling apart, right there in our description. No court in any land is going to refund your money.

If we spend the time cataloguing your book, we’re probably going to take photos of it to post online at places like ABEBooks, or Books & Collectibles. Book photography is pretty boring – there’s only so many ways that you can shoot a block of paper and make it look interesting. On top of that, you need to make the book look appealing as well as showing the deficiencies of this particular copy. If your description says that the spine is sunned but your photo doesn’t show it, five’ll get you ten, every interested punter will e-mail you asking for a shot of the spine damage. That’s extra work you can do without. So every book gets its close-up.

After that, the book goes on the shelf. This isn’t the end: that book is now taking up prime real estate - every month that goes by, if it hasn’t been sold, it becomes an albatross weighing the business down.

What I’m saying is, if your books aren’t show-ponies, we don’t want them. We get books dumped on us, left at the front door overnight like babies in cardboard boxes: once I opened up the shop vaguely worried by the silhouette of the person standing rigidly on the other side of the front door; turns out, it was a stack of twenty year’s worth of “Plastic Surgery Digest”, which I duly carried through the store to the recycling bin out the back. No. Just no.

As a final point, think of this: if you’re trying to sell us your books and you don’t like what you hear in terms of how much we’re going to give you in exchange, maybe that book is still valuable to you in a non-monetary kind of way. You might discover that that old beat-up copy of Catch-22 which kept you distracted on the flight back from London five years ago has a lot of sentimental value attached to it and maybe that’s what you’re fighting for. Take it back; read it again – we don’t like chucking books in the bin, especially the ones that you’re attached to.

Canto XIV - The Great Divide of "Worthy" Literature

The literary world is hung up upon the notion of what, having gone into print, is “worthy” and what is not. This is a peculiarity of only the English-speaking literary world since other parts of the planet do not waste time on the issue; however there is an ongoing debate about what is “good” and what is “bad”.

To manage this qualitative division, the publishing and bookselling world has created an arbitrary distinction in the field of literature; specifically, it speaks of “literature” and its opposite number, “genre fiction”. This might work well for bookshops who try to keep their stock organised, but it’s simply an elite way of looking at writing and of trying to add snob value to something that doesn’t require it. Reading, and writing, are skills available to everyone in most Western, first world societies; perhaps you missed it but there was a great struggle to ensure that literacy was available to all, and the occasional bickering about national educational ability in various parliaments is the ongoing result of this concern, not just something to fill in governmental “dead air”.

Those who disparage genre fiction are snobs. No such distinction is made in Germany, or France, or any other European country; it’s only the UK, Australia and the US who make the distinction. Seriously, most Europeans consider The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie as one of the best reads of all time and I, for one, can’t fault their taste. Literature snobs, on the other hand, don’t stoop to the reading of crime fiction. The ease with which genre fiction is packaged into smaller pigeonholes is held up as a tacit indicator of the bovine nature of the science fiction, the romance, or the historical fiction readers. The snobs feel that genre fictioneers need some type of cattle corral to keep them on track in the spooky world of the bookstore.

There’s little that can be done about it. Literature types want ‘their’ book material to be shared only by like-minded bigots. They want ‘their’ prizes and ‘their’ festivals to be exclusive chardonnay-sipping affairs where the blue-collar knuckle-draggers pass by gape-mouthed on the outside of the party window. Stephen King rails interminably against these elitists, however he makes the error of embracing the red-neck label as a rallying flag for readers to mass around. Sadly for Mr. King, most readers don’t think of themselves as part of a clique-y elite.

But what the literarians forget about these categories is that they work against their snobbery, too. You don’t like our Philip K. Dick? Well, we’ll take your Margaret Atwood and your Anthony Burgess – The Handmaid’s Tale and A Clockwork Orange are both fine sci-fi works. You like to laugh at our horror novels? Well, we won’t see you laughing at our Joyce Carol Oates, or our Donna Tartt. You scorn our Daphne du Maurier, we’ll take your Kate Grenville, and your Hilary Mantel while we’re at it. And then there’s Tolkien…

As I said, the distinctions are nebulous and arbitrary, and are simply a way of disparaging readers rather than writers. Yes, there are bad books out there (50 Shades of Grey, anyone?) but these are soon tested by the readership and dispensed with as the lesser works that they turn out to be, as has happened throughout the English publishing history. Books should not be judged by their covers... and neither should their readers.