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.