Oedipus & the Sphinx - 2

And again, this is true.

Seriously, you can't make this stuff up...

Merry Christmas!

Canto XI - The River Lethe

Okay. Here comes a customer: they look slightly dazed but happy, as if they’re in the aftermath of some light head trauma. They wander up to the front counter with that “Oh how sweet: a place that sells books!” look on their face, and they turn to address you. You can expect that they will be looking for:

A) Your assistance in finding a gift for someone you've never even met;

B) A book about which they've forgotten every pertinent detail;

C) A book on a topic that they've heard someone talking about, but about which they have no clue; or

D) Something that doesn't even exist. 

We’ve covered “A” and “B” in previous posts, but the other options raise new wrinkles in dealing with the lightly insane, ie. people who buy books (that “s” in “insane” is strictly optional, by the way. Use it; drop it; as you see fit).

Option “C” occurs whenever the punter has had a thrilling session with a companion or acquaintance wherein a topic of seeming import has arisen. They will hurry away to your shop afterwards and – using the mere skerricks of information that they’ve retained – try to purchase suitable reading matter in order to appear fully conversant at the next encounter.

“I want a book all about a famous German philosopher of the 17^th Century,” they’ll say, to which you will reply - with some justification I might note – “which one?”

Reeling off a list of names will serve no purpose because, of the minimal gleanings the customer has remembered from the discussion, details like names, dates and titles will not number amongst them. Instead, words like “sublime”, or “excellent”, or phrases like “very deep”, or “truly insightful”, will have stuck and this is what the cretin has summoned forth for you to work with.

With perseverance and great restraint you will finally pin down the likely work to be Immanuel Kant’s A Critique of Pure Reason, written by him in the 1700s; however, when you airily note that he was actually Prussian, the sale will stop dead in its tracks. What little information they have is unshakable in its Truth: they may have heard “17^th Century” and not “1700s” but that’s all that they’ll give you. If you’re lucky they will walk out the door with an “adorable” copy of Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare instead, as recompense for having wasted your life, but don’t count on it.

Option “D” is quite similar, but it derives from the sinister quagmire that is talk radio. Whilst driving, or gardening, or lacquering the cat, the punter will have heard a reference to something that appeals to them – a forthcoming TV show, or a movie that’s being made, or a work upon which a writer is currently making progress. Inevitably, they will walk immediately down to your store and ask for it. I once had a customer ask me for the “new Monty Python DVD” moments after they heard an interview with Terry Jones and Eric Idle, in which the two of them vaguely mused that another Python film wasn’t out of the question. And who copped flak for gently talking the customer off this particular ledge? You guessed it.

Sometimes it’s just that the topic about which they’ve come to you in search of enlightenment is so obscure that no-one has written anything about it: “the Cicada life-cycle in New South Wales’s Blue Mountains”, “Brazing in the early Sydney Colony”, “Railway Upholstery in the British Indian Holdings”. Your gentle suggestion that perhaps the customer is the person who should be turning the sod on this particular field is always met with a derisive sniff.

The customer’s preconceptions get in the way with this line of inquiry also. I was once asked for a book on the medical and household uses of garden weeds in Australia. Now, we have a bunch of books that discuss this topic – everything from treating medical infirmities to dyeing, with only the plants ready-to-hand in your backyard. But no: the punter wanted a book about using “weeds”, not “plants”. After trying to point out that the word “weed” is simply gardener’s jargon for a plant not where it ought to be, I got the derisive sniff and a look that indicated that I was some kind of mental deficient. What can you do?

Bad as all this is, there are many times that it gets worse. By starting their inquiry without accurate information, credible details, or any type of basic research, and then - after discovering that you’re unable to provide them with what they want - treating you like you’re some kind of failure, they ask if there’s anything close to what they’re after. Something in the ballpark, as it were. With an Herculean effort you provide a solid fall-back option, and place it in front of them for their consideration. That’s when they drop the other shoe:

They’ve also forgotten their glasses.

(Focus, people! For Christ’s sake: focus!)

Canto X - The Glassy Plain

Recently I attended an examination of a private collection of books with a view to making purchases for the shop. The seller had an impressive array of titles – mainly history and large art books – some of which attract very healthy prices in the secondhand market. Along with these were a very nice range of classic literature titles, hardcovers dating from the 30s and 40s which are excellent for padding out the classics department. As it turned out, despite the presence of over 50 boxes of these offerings, we walked away with very little.

Why? Almost every single book was covered in adhesive plastic.

There are some who think that adhesive plastic – most often marketed under the brand name ConTact® – is a boon to collectors, and to libraries, where books are worked hard for their contents, this may be the case. However here’s a definition for you:

*****

damage /’dæmıdzh (noun): 1. Injury or harm which impairs value or usefulness; 2. (in bibliophily) anything which removes a book from its original state.

*****

People who sell books for their value as objects – not simply for their contents – regard adhesively plasticized volumes as irreparably damaged, and of little worth. Simply put, as far as book collectors go, ConTact® is the work of the Devil. If, for example, you ordered a book online from a secondhand or antiquarian bookdealer and it showed up covered in the demon plastic, you would be well within your rights to demand your money back – unless their description of the book explicitly stated the presence of the hellish material. Some dealers don’t care about ConTact®; some care so little that they forget to mention it, considering the stuff a useful addition to the book’s structure and integrity. These are not dealers with whom you should do business.

When dealing with rare books, the term “Fine” (or the hideous misnomer, “Mint”) declares that the book is new and unused – in the exact state which you would expect if you bought it off the shelf in a new bookstore. In secondhand and rare bookdealing, if a book isn’t “Fine”, the reasons why it isn’t must be explicitly stated; otherwise, someone’s trying to sell you a pup. Anything done to a book to “protect” it, or repair it, is classed as “damage” in the trade and it should be noted in the book’s description.

Non-adhesive plastic is available and widely used, even by those who eschew ConTact® in all its Satanic forms. It is a worthy addition to a book’s integrity and will extend its life, or the life of its dustwrapper; however, it too, must be noted in the description.

Remember: adhesive plastic is for school books and library books (which is why the term “Ex-Library” is considered so poisonous in the book trade). Don’t stick it on your precious collectibles! Let them breathe!

Canto IX - The Impasse

There is one eternal truism that takes place in the world of selling books – and, I assume, other areas of retail activity also – that is as annoying as it is unavoidable: wherever you need to work in the shop, on a matter of highest priority, that is where the largest, most obtuse and slab-like customer will choose to stand.

Imagine it: you’ve just cleared a window display and have assembled the new books to be moved into that space. When you arrive at the now-empty window, there will be someone standing there – most likely with a backpack, or with many bags of shopping – idly flipping through some book that they’ve just randomly pulled off a shelf. So, unwilling to disturb this punter in the process of making a sale, you dump your armful of books and decide to give them a few moments.

When you return, they’ve not only cozied themselves into the area in which you need to work, but they’ve also begun to set down roots, arranging their impedimenta comfortably around them and burying their nose deeper into the volume that’s caught their attention. So, grinding your teeth, you disappear once more into the bowels of the shop, pretending to ignore the passing parade of people who might be lured into the premises but for the lack of a cheery and engaging window display to hook them in.

You give the browser a few more minutes of your time, but really, there’s only so many times in a fifteen-minute period that you can realistically check your e-mails or shuffle the stationery at the front desk. So, girding your loins, you approach the customer once more.

By now, they’ve started to meld into the furniture, bleeding into the carpet tiles and sending vines and runners out over the entire shop. You notice that they’re seriously reading the tome, licking their fingers as they turn pages and shoving fingers into the Notes section at the back to cross-reference the citations.

“Hi!” you say brightly. “Great book, huh?”

They lift their head and peer at you blearily, with a faint air of annoyance at your temerity in dragging them back from some reverie. “Oh. Hmmm...” they will say and try to dive back in once more.

But you’re not having any of it. Phrases like “Buy it or Beat it!” come to mind and hover about your lips, or the old stand-by: “Buddy, it ain’t a library!” However, you’re mindful that a sale might still come from this.

“Would you like me to wrap that for you, so you can take it home and really get into it?” you try, with a fixed smile. That’s when they drop the clanger:

“Oh, no: I’m just waiting for my bus...”

‘Unceremoniously Ejected’ is the polite version of ‘Being Tossed Out On Your Arse’. You will probably never see that particular customer again but, in the short term, you will feel so much better...

Oedipus & the Sphinx...

I’ve been wrestling with this notion for awhile and trying to put it into some sort of context which would make sense. I guess the best way to explain it is to describe the incident which happened recently at the shop which brought the annoyance into sudden focus.

Picture the scene: I’m at work doing the things I need to do. A dapper, older fellow comes in looking self-satisfied and smirky (I was getting a bad vibe off him right from the outset). Standing there, hands in pockets, bouncing on the balls of his feet, he says:

“You won’t have this, but I’m going to ask anyway – do you have a copy of Rabelais?”

Well, just that week, we had taken possession of a nice old set of Rabelais’ Complete Works in two quarto volumes, translated by Urquhart and Motteux and illustrated by Papé, in an early edition, unusual for still having the dustwrappers. I duly produced them and allowed the customer to peruse.

“Right,” he said, fumbling for his wallet, “I need a copy to demonstrate a few things to my students, so I’ll just take the one volume – that should be enough.”

Imagine his annoyance when I told him that it’s a single work in two volumes – he would need to take both, or none at all.

“But I don’t need both! And lugging two books is just awkward!”

I steadily explained: it’s not two books; it’s one book in two volumes. Take one from the other and you are left with something of no value to anyone.

“Well,” he said, “I shan’t be buying it from you then.” And he left in a huff.

Now, I’m making both of us sound more unreasonable than we actually were in this exchange, but the essence is there. After he left, I had a bit of an epiphany.

It’s this: academics suck. They – intrinsically – value the contents of books, instead of the books themselves. They will dog-ear pages, inscribe marginal notes and underline, and stuff a book with all kinds of bookmarks from chocolate bar wrappers to those god-awful plastic flags that poke out from the text block and are a bitch to remove. In short, in career terms, they and I exist as polar opposites.

(It’s not that I disregard a book’s contents at all, if that’s what you’re thinking. I just think of the contents – which may be a swiggable wine, or a fine vintage, depending – as being carried in an exquisite container, one that should be of as much account as that which it carries. As Omar Khayyam says:

“...Why ne’er a peevish Boy,

Would break the Bowl from which he drank in Joy;

Shall He that made the Vessel in pure Love

And Fancy, in an after Rage destroy!”)

Academics become lost in their own little worlds, which narrow immeasurably down to what they study, who they work with (and the politics that go with it) and the materials they need to go about their business. At some point they assume de facto ownership of all works which impinge upon their area of speciality and get bewildered when they find a book – a book! – which is outside their price range, or is not in a format that they’d prefer.

“But,” they splutter, “it’s just a copy of Plato! Why is it $100?!” And I explain exactly why and they still treat me as though I’m a parent in a candy store, telling them that they can look but don’t touch.

I get it. Academia is increasingly cutthroat; there are too many people on the planet and they all have to have degrees to get on in life. Defending your academic patch is a full-time job before you even start writing your thesis. Most people in the world are content to just go to university, snag that bit of paper and the sprinkle of letters after their name, and get on with things; those who stay in academia become the very little rulers of tiny little castles. And they develop an ENORMOUS sense of entitlement to go along with it.

This often reveals itself by the fact that somewhere in the conversation, the academic will try and steer things to their particular bailiwick and then try to accuse you of not knowing anything. Anything at all. I’ve met academics outside of work and they always want to know what I do, right off the bat; afterwards they sneer and affect great world-weariness as they start to tell me of the difficulties they have with their students, or their magnum opus, or their wrestling with the works of Foucault or Barthes. It’s exactly the same kind of boring tripe that unloads in front of you when someone tries to tell you about the dream they had last night; or the acid trip they took last week. There are two smells that occasionally waft off people which guarantee that they will be regarded as utter turds – desperation and self-aggrandisement.

Just to hammer this home (and, dangerously, to dabble on the fringes of self-aggrandisement myself), my Wednesday night pub trivia team is composed only of booksellers: none of us are career academics, or particularly beholden to academia. Most of the other teams are composed of tertiary level students, or academics, past and present. We win every Wednesday. Every. Wednesday. Sometimes only a couple of us can show up: we still win. Sometimes only one of us can make it: we still win. We’re kind of wondering how long the pub will continue running this gig actually, because a $50 bar tab each week certainly mounts up. And each of us has an anecdote about how some jumped-up, single-focus, book-banger told us that we are “just booksellers and couldn’t possibly be expected to understand, blah, blah, blah...”

And so, I’ve come to think of this arrangement that I have with academics as akin, or symbolised by, the relationship Oedipus had with the Sphinx. The Academic is Oedipus – wrong-headed, wrong-footed, head full of expectations and the answers to obscure riddles; on the other hand, I am the Sphinx. I have the accumulated wisdom of the ages at my fingertips: if you want access, you jump through MY hoops.

And say “please”.

Canto VIII - The Well-packed Plateau of the Shelf-Stuffers

It is a central plank of various theories of physics that matter cannot co-exist in the exact same space. That is, two objects cannot occupy the same physical point in the universe. This being said, browsers in bookshops never seem to stop trying to test or de-bunk this theory.

Bookshelves are made for books. Some are adjustable in order to accommodate various different sizes of tome, from sextodecimo up to folio; others are of fixed dimensions. Nevertheless, some people always try to put more books on a shelf than the shelf can physically hold. And after attempting to do this, these people applaud themselves for having stuffed more bound paper than ever into the space provided.

They’re missing the point: a stuffed shelf is not to be lauded; clean, unbroken books are the point here. That’s what the shelf is for. Focus on the books people, not the furniture.

When a bookshelf is overstuffed it becomes a deadly book trap. The next person to haul a volume off the shelf will likely do one of several things: tear the dustwrapper; rip the spine-head; tear the hinges; or crack the spine. As well, the book gets crushed: the spine is put under extreme pressure from either side and it will crumple, leading to warping of the boards or rolling of the text block.

On top of this, books in a bunch create their own micro-climate. They breathe and de-humidify the air around them and they share microbes and bacteria (much like people do in a group – don’t get sniffy). Leather keeps its condition longer; paper stops becoming brittle: in short, it’s good to keep books together. They like it.

But there can be too much of a good thing. Take this test: approach your bookshelf and extend a finger to the head of the spine of a random book; now pull back gently rocking the book out on its spine heel a short way; then let go. If your book falls neatly back into place, then your shelves are fine; if it remains in position, or you cannot actually pull it out without some degree of force, then your shelves are over-stocked and you need to make some room.

Whenever people come into the shop where I work in order to sell books, I can tell at once the state of their bookshelves at home: everything they have to offer is torn, chipped, rolled, and bent. I’ve even worked in bookshops where the instructions from on high were to stuff as many units into the shelves as possible, because we could then pounce on someone tearing a squeezed book and force them to buy it (not many of us working there chose to enact this regulation, it has to be said). I’m no saint either: before I started to look at books as objects rather than just sources of information I used to cram volumes myself. Nowadays, I use the ‘tilt test’ outlined above.

Do your books a favour: let them breathe a little.

Canto VII - The Shady Vale of the Bookjackers...

“Bookjacking” is a term that most people will never have heard of, and that’s okay because it’s a very recent phenomenon. Most people however, who have an interest in books or who have bought books online, will have encountered them.

To begin with, I’m not talking about single-entity online booksellers such as the Book Depository or any particular bookshop’s purpose-built website; I’m talking about those web-based gathering houses which take everybody’s online presence and shows you who’s got the book you want for the price you’re willing to pay – places like ABEBooks, or Amazon, or Alibris, or AddAll, or Books & Collectibles. In and of themselves, these providers aren’t shady operators, but it’s at their sites that the bookjackers – like nasty little burrowing parasites – have made their home.

Bookjackers in short are online scammers. Here’s how it works. Say ABE has a book listed by a bookseller for $25 and this book is the only one listed at that site. The Bookjacker’s software identifies this title and then posts it, at a greatly inflated price – say, $80 to $100 – at Amazon or one of the other gathering sites. Soon other bookjackers follow suit, and suddenly a $25 book is being sold for stupid amounts of money at multiple sites. When an unknowing punter takes the bait, the ‘jacker buys the book from the original lister and forwards it on (maybe!) while pocketing the difference. Recent times have seen print-on-demand titles for $30 being re-sold for over a million dollars, simply because the ‘jacking process is automated and gets a little buggy when not monitored by human agents.

How do you spot a bookjacker? Shop around. If a book looks a little iffy wherever you find it, look on another site and see what it’s doing there. Look out for generic descriptions – “may have a dustwrapper if originally issued with one”, “may have minor wear and scratches”, “hundreds of satisfied customers!” – these encouraging pseudo-endorsements are designed to suck you in. To be really sure, contact the bookseller – the main benefit of these gathering sites is that they allow you to gain direct access the retailer so that you can ask about your purchase: no bookjacker is going to want to get chummy over a book that they don’t actually own.

The final check is the price. If the book you want can be found at another site with a price tag at least 50% lower than anywhere else, you’ve probably found the poor little tome that’s been ‘jacked.

Be assured that the big websites are doing what they can to identify and purge the thieves. In the meantime, many solo operators are banding together to “name and shame” the troublemakers. Here’s a list that’s a work in progress (and probably going to get much longer):

academic_book_guy

ADONAI BOOKS

amctj

anstinbooks

Any Book

BookGroveMedia

Book Deals

Book Smart

Booked Again

Books_Care

BookSleuth

BRILANTI BOOKS

Brooke Books

Castle Rock
Cloud 9 Books 
Colibris

CONTINENTAL MEDIA & BEYOND

Crashing Rocks

DailyDeal USA

East West Academic Books

elitedigital
Ergodebooks

ExtremelyReliable

fast-track-books

FishandSave

forest_of_wisdom
GlassFrogBooks
HPB - Blue
HPB - Diamond
HPB - Ruby  

International Books

jason_kurt

joypros

kime_enterprises

KingsRidgeMedia

lana's Shop

lance books

Lost Books

metropole_press

Migna Book Store

Murray Media

MyGrandmasGoodies

myrockland

nearfine-us

NOHINSA BOOKS

nuggetbooks33

OTTAPLACKAL BOOKS

Park Place Products

planet_books

profnath

Quality7

relationship

shopbychoice

soundtrack

southlandplace

Summit Read

technobookshop

the_book_community

thebookgrove

TOTAL BOOKS

TSCBOOKS

Vault Media

UCAEDU70

US_Bookseller

Vault Media

Woody's Books

worldreaders

Wisepenny Books

And rest assured that, if this is going on with booksellers, it’s happening with places like E-Bay and Etsy and with other types of collectibles like vinyl records and DVDs. Teh Interwebz can be a wonderful place; just remember that there are a lot of dickheads out there...