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. 

Canto XIII – The Impenetrable Thicket of Wilful Ignorance

The other day – as has been reported in the media – we had so much rain, after many super-hot days and so little precipitation, that communities flooded and the power went out. The causes of this are various and multifarious, stemming from our current government’s inability to take its eyes off the bottom line and their cronies’ shifting moods and to spend money on new and effective infrastructure rather than propping-up the old stuff that, despite becoming ever more ineffective still manages to line said cronies’ pockets with filthy lucre. Coupled with the half-arsed rort that is the “new vision” of the National Broadband Network (NBN), a patchworked and jury-rigged system many times slower than the service previously provided by individual internet service providers, nowadays when we lose power, we also lose all internet and telephone services. Double-whammy – huzzah!

In days of yore, if the lights went out, we were still able to run EFTPOS sales at our shop, since the machine we use switches from mains supply to cellular in emergencies (and allows us to take the device to off-site venues in order to sell stock). In the current situation, even this option is taken from us. Nice, guys: can’t wait to see what you do with the economy.

Anyway, as I say, the other day the heavens opened and the lights went out; not just in our shop but all through the mercantile district of our small town. To add insult to injury, the residential parts of town only a block away were unaffected. In disgust, my boss threw up his hands and went home, telling me that, if the power didn’t come on after an hour, I should shut the place down and go home. I settled in and waited.

You might wonder what it would take for a person to leave home in a thundering downpour, drive along unlit roads and highways without any traffic lights, onto a main street lined with darkened shop windows to check out the local bookstore. I was pretty sure that my hour-long wait to an early knock-off was going to be uneventful, but I underestimated the tenacity of the book-buyer. As it was, during that time I had three customers.

The first dragged his sorry, mouth-breathing carcase through the shop door only minutes after the boss made his exit.

‘G’day,’ I said. ‘We have no power or lights so browsing will be a tad difficult. However, if you know what you want and can pay in cash, I’m happy to help.’

By way of reply, he winced and nodded his head sharply to indicate comprehension. Then he zipped off into the midnight-black bowels of the store.

Some minutes later, another, older, fellow came in, pausing first at the door to ask if we were indeed open. I told him yes and gave him the spiel outlined above.

‘Great!’ he said. ‘I saw that book about Lego in the window on the weekend and I came back to see if it was still here. I thought for sure someone else would get it first!’

Assuring me that he had the cash, I made change and bagged the book while we bantered about how much his grandson would enjoy it after seeing the “Lego Movie”. He was out in short order and I wrote up the details of the sale to be run through the system when the power returned.

I had, at this point, almost forgotten the previous punter when suddenly his voice rang out from the darkness:

‘Hey! How ‘bout a little light back here?’

I shook my head. Groping back to where this idiot was lurking, I tried again to explain the current situation.

‘Mate.’ I said. ‘There’s a blackout happening. No lights. No power. Cash sales only.’

By way of reply, he winced and shook his head once again, just like before, then stuck his nose in the bookshelves once more. I shook my head and went back to closing.

The third customer also paused at the door wondering if indeed we were open for business. Assuring her that, yes, we were, but under certain limitations, she revealed that she was someone for whom we’d tracked down a copy of a particular book and whom we’d rung that morning to say that it had arrived. She had shown up as promised and – wonder of wonders! – she could pay in cash. We conducted our business, exchanged pleasantries, and she was on her way. I went outside to bring in our store sign prior to locking up and leaving. As I came back in the following words drifted out from the back of the store:

‘Hey, it’s really dark. Can I get some light?’

Now, I didn’t just pop my cork at this juncture, as you might expect. I quickly ran though in my mind all the elements of the interaction I’d had with this fellow. He’d seemed to comprehend everything I’d said; he wasn’t wearing hearing aids; he’d seemed a little dull, but not overly slow. I wasn’t in the mood for mollycoddling so I fired at him point-blank:

‘Buddy, what part of “no lights; no power” do you not understand?’

‘Oh, I get it,’ he said, ‘it’s just that I can’t see the books.’

‘Well, get this: we’re closed. Bye!’

Look, I understand: there’s a pleasure to be found in reading and most folks don’t like their pleasures cut short. There are some readers however who will staunchly Deny Reality in pursuit of their single-minded goal. In an earlier post, I displayed that picture of the three guys in the bombed-out bookshop – people who decide those three are “cool” and cheer them on, are usually the same people who, like this idiot, will resolutely stand in a pitch-black bookstore, trying to read books that they can’t see, and call for a light that isn’t forthcoming. You can bet that I keep a weather-eye on these types and make sure they don’t ruin my day...

Oedipus and the Sphinx - 3

(I can't take credit for this - someone sent it to me and it was too good not to share!)

Orwell's Tuppence-worth...

It's nice to know that there's a confederacy of booksellers out there with shared life-experience. If, at any time, you think that you're going mad and this stuff can't really be happening to you, here's George Orwell's essay of book-selling reminiscences to reassure you that we've all been there...

Telephone Conversation...

Canto XII - The Moody Fens of Incoherence...

There is a presumption that is visited upon every person who walks into a bookshop – that they can read. Having passed through the portal, no-one is going to assume that you are here to stare at the bindings or that you wish to immerse yourself in the spectacle that is a minor sort of financial activity taking place before you. No, having set foot in a bookstore, it will be assumed that you are here to find something to read; that you in fact have some kind of facility with the language.

(Here, I take no issue with those people who don’t speak English but who enjoy reading in their own tongue, and enter a bookshop on the off-chance that there is something waiting inside for them in their own vernacular. I feel your pain.)

I’m fully aware that to assume things is to make an “ASS” of “U” and “ME”, but on the whole, walking into a bookshop to conduct business raises at least a reasonable level of expectation about the customer’s literacy and their ability to communicate. How then, to explain this:

A customer walks in and sees a copy of The Little Prince displayed for sale. Picking it up she says:

“How old is this?”

Gently taking the book from her I check the publication details and reply:

“It’s a recent edition, produced in 2005.”

A look of annoyance creases her features.

“No,” she says, miffed, “I mean, how old is it?”

Returning the book to her, I mentally switch gears.

“I understand,” I say, “it was written by Antoine de Saint-Exupery in 1943. It’s a tried and true classic.”

The customer slams the book on the counter top.

“No!” she growls, “I don’t care about that. I want to know the age of it!”

Realisation dawns.

“I see,” I say; “you’re asking, for which age group is it appropriate.”

“Obviously!” she fumes.

“No – not obviously” passes through my brain, “given that you are a gibbering moron I shouldn’t expect you to communicate in anything other than a slack-jawed yowl; but if you are going to mangle the language of Shakespeare, please at least try to grunt coherently next time you attempt to make a purchase.” However, this is what comes out of my mouth:

“My mistake. It’s one of those books enjoyed by people of any age, particularly the young. Would you like to buy it?”

“Oh, alright,” she says ungraciously, “I suppose so...”

Like she’s doing me a favour, after making her look good. Sheesh!