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.