Where do the books that surface into the used book market come from? Some rise from the lowest realms, picked from dumpsters or eviction piles, packed into garbage bags by denizens of alleys and transported in grocery carts to be resold on corners. Others descend from the highest, auctioned off in marble halls after the death of a collector, the stuff of newspaper articles and memoirs. But most commonly an unwanted book will travel from bookshelf to yard sale, and then to the donation box at a church, library or thrift store. There it will be piled with hundreds of other discarded books in a basement shop, or prepared for the annual sale.  Here enters the book scout.

Most scouts that I have known are men, many of indeterminate age. There are a few women as well, and I must count myself among them as I scout for my own store. They range from the pathetically small scale, such as Peggy, who lives on the Chicago El and finds a few paperbacks a week to resell for a pittance, to sophisticated operators utilizing ISBN scanners that give them real time prices and sales rankings for tens of books at a time. They mob library sales to the point where many libraries have created elaborate rules and in some cases banned their devices in an effort to keep the peace. They are known to arrive at estate sales in the pre-dawn hours to obtain a precious numbered scrap of paper for early entrance.

Are these cut-throat scrambles really worth it? In most cases, yes. Because the books at these sales are indiscriminately priced at a dollar or less, finding a handful of gems in the piles can bring a very nice return. But there are a finite number of sellable books in every pile, so the scout must learn how to spot them quickly and grab them first.  Having a deep knowledge and remarkable memory of valuable books and authors is helpful, as is having a rotund gut and an unpleasant odor. But the electronic device has become absolutely essential for any serious scout, for the fluctuating prices of hundreds of thousands of titles are impossible to remember or predict.

Most of the scouts one encounters these days sell for themselves on the internet. A few, however, still sell to other book dealers, continuing a centuries old tradition.  Some are notorious in their regions. In Chicago, there is Pete.

Booksellers groan as they spot Pete's form outside their windows, frantically conveying overstuffed bags of books from the curb to their doors, haggling with the cab driver (most certainly not leaving a tip), grunting and wiping the sweat and snow from his bald crown into his remaining limp shoulder length hair. He will prop the door open with one of his bags, despite the freezing cold, despite the number of times he has been told not to do this, and barge through lines of customers with his dense shoulders. Many dealers have banned him from their shops, but a few have not, either out of pity or because the process of banning him is actually more difficult than simply buying a few of his books and sending him on. Like an impish toddler Pete has a remarkable ability to get away with whatever he likes by raising such a fuss that it isn't worth the effort to deny him.

He will have bags and bags of books of all levels of mediocrity, and he will insist that the buyer examine every one. (Often a book of worth will surface in one of his bags, but he will snatch it back and hide it away.) Rumors about his life abound, but few things are certain. He lived with his parents until well into his forties. I still remember the shrill nasal voice of his mother, who would call the bookstores looking for him. "Is Peter there? This is his mother!" And if he was there he would emit a low groan and roll his eyes like a teenager before dutifully trudging to the phone. A story goes that one day the ceiling in his mother's kitchen started to crack under the weight of the books in his room. She was unable to force him to leave, so she sold the house without telling him and moved out. Pete wasn't seen for a while after this, and was living in a storage space while morosely looking for an apartment when he resurfaced.

He constantly complained about the soreness in his back, the result of nights spent on the floor of his room. Why did he not sleep in his bed? Because it was covered in books of course! Sometimes piles of them would fall on him as he slept. He would relate these events as one would describe a storm in the night. To Pete the arrangement of books in his room was as much an act of god as the weather. Any suggestion to the contrary would be met with baffled anger and a sigh of frustration. He disliked sleep, and would often mention the large doses of ephedrine he would take to avoid it.

An old story circulates that Pete actually had a bookstore once. The problem was that he didn't want to sell any of his books, would stare down customers as they browsed, then refuse to let them purchase what they had found. Eventually he stopped opening the store and hung up a "By Appointment Only" sign. However he wouldn't answer the door or the phone, fearing it was his landlord attempting to collect the rent.

Did he ever read his books? "I look at parts of every one! I open them up and read a few paragraphs!" was his offended response when asked. The only interests he ever mentioned were figure skating and LSD.  He seemed to have some occult inclinations, and wore a holographic medallion around his neck that he refused to speak about. One bookstore clerk in a fit of exasperation asked Pete if his medallion would make him disappear, and if so, would he please rub it?

I hear that he comes around less often now, and many of the dealers who once bought from him have retired. Some day his hoarded pile will also be frantically picked through by scouts, then dispersed around the globe...

Posted by: Adrienne Eaton

In my last entry I addressed the rise of internet bookselling and its effect on brick and mortar used bookstores. This week I would like to look at the nature of the growing online used book marketplace.

What books are selling there? Certainly the same titles that are selling everywhere else. The paperbacks that were piled up at Cosco last month flood the internet today. These books will sell quickly and profitably online for a brief period, then their prices will rapidly drop to pennies a piece as the public finishes them, discards them, and moves on to the next new thing. Over 1,000 copies of "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" are now available on Amazon.com, most at a price of under one dollar. Yet why would anyone want to pay even that when a call to one's aunt or a tour around the block is likely to yield a copy for free?  
      
The intelligent used bookseller soon learns to avoid yesterday's fads and focus instead on obscure and overlooked titles of the past. The surest sellers are books that never appealed to the masses, but remain persistently interesting to a few. Those few have often been searching and will happily purchase when they find.

I can look through my records and find a week last year when the following titles sold:

Alaska's Mushrooms
Forensic Entomology
Sex Toy Tricks
Weaving Contemporary Rag Rugs
Radical Street Performance
Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology
Stick Fighting: Techniques of Self-Defense
The Healthy Bird Cookbook

Some are out-of-print, some are otherwise difficult to acquire. (One, at least, might cause embarrassment at the register.) All are not what one would expect to find at the local Borders, and many were shipped to places where there is no local Borders. I often ship books to soldiers and prisoners, to rural areas and developing nations. These people and places make up a part of the growing market in used books--a market that previously had limited access to any extensive and affordable selection.

Interesting connections can now be made between books and readers that could rarely have happened before.  I recently sold a book on the history of Kentucky place names, acquired in Chicago, to a woman in northern California, and also a book on Chinese cinema, published in France, to a professor in Brazil. I believe that I have sold obscure biographies to the children of their subjects (although I didn't ask), and I know that I have sold signed copies of books to their authors, many years after the fact. Last week I found an interesting book in a basement: a hefty commemoration of the destruction of the Jewish population of the Polish town of Ostrowiec during WWII, that was written by the survivors and their descendants in the 1960s. I look forward to seeing where it will go. Most likely it will cross an ocean.

We cannot see these new connections being made, they are not framed by quaint bookshops, but they represent a change in access to material that affects many lives. Fifteen years ago, the transactions that I have described above would have been lengthy and costly for the customer, in many cases prohibitively so, and perhaps impossible. The customer may not have even known that the titles existed, but can now become aware of them through the many excellent online book databases with subject descriptions and reader reviews.

The future of this industry can, I think, only become more interesting. New online used-book marketplaces continue to develop in all parts of the world and are becoming increasingly interconnected. Every year more books surface on the internet as booksellers continue to list their inventories and as basements and closets are dredged by book scouts around the world. This brings the prices of books down (causing us dealers to grumble), but it also brings in new customers and new readers. It is difficult to predict what long term effects these changes will have on readership, as the advent of e-books and other digital information sources will likely overshadow most developments in used bookselling, but a globally accessible book marketplace is something the world has not yet seen, and is nothing to get depressed about.

Posted by: Adrienne Eaton

What is the used-book market? It is for the most part a prosaic place: dingy, dusty, occasionally shady; yet there are rumors of ancient treasure, marvelous happenstance, and secrets of the dead and famous lining its walls. The richest and the poorest have their respective places in it, as do the in-between, sometimes unknowingly. It exists (as it always has) in bookshops, basements, and closets; yet also on computers and networks, in libraries and on lawns. It is a place that throughout its history has been looked upon with great nostalgia: it is eternally dying, its most glorious era always a few decades past. Yet, it continues to live. In fact, it is currently healthy and growing.

It is healthy and growing? We find this a bit hard to admit. In fact, it is terribly unromantic. What we find even more unromantic and objectionable is that its healthy new life is being lived on the internet, a new-fangled place teeming with teenagers, hoaxers and pornographers. Hardly the spot for the great cultural wealth in our cherished dusty volumes! How could they mix with such a crowd? Where will our marvelous happenstance happen if we must use a search engine? How will we ever stumble across the ancient treasure if it is perched atop a web-page for all to see? Our circumstantial bliss is gone! This cannot happen! Our books must remain where they were, in the keep of the old and the bearded, in a shop on the street, where our hands can paw and our imaginations can wander.

Yes this would be nice, wouldn't it?  But, before we get too upset, let us look closer at what is happening. Perhaps the future isn't as terrible as we think, and the past might be different than we remember. In these blogs I would like to look at some common perceptions of used-bookselling, and try to sort the reality from the nostalgia.

Today I'd like to discuss the much bemoaned disappearance of independent bookstores, and the factors in their demise.

We must first make the distinction between the new and used book markets. When new bookstores were badly hit by the arrival of internet bookselling (among other things), used bookstores suddenly found themselves with a much expanded marketplace and opportunities for efficiencies that had never existed before. When the independent new bookseller had to compete with a big box retailer and an internet giant for the sale of a new Sue Grafton novel, our old and bearded friend was excited to finally find a buyer for an obscure book on Scandinavian fishing that had long lingered on his shelves. The used booksellers flocked to internet marketplaces, rapidly creating a large and efficient global book trade the likes of which they had only dreamed of in their catalog mailing pasts.

But still, we some used bookstores close their doors. Why? Consider this as a likely scenario: perhaps the old bearded curmudgeon we all miss so much wasn't as fond of us as we like to think. Why, he thinks, should he pay rent and utilities for this place for us to come in, molest his cat, mess up his shelves, stink up his bathroom, pester him with questions and then leave after dropping $10.36 on an old J.D. Salinger paperback and a gardening handbook? He has a guy in Japan who just spent $700 on a set of technical manuals that are stored in the back.  Why not close the door, unplug the coffee machine, head to a cheaper spot and do what he loves most: hang out with his books and his cat with some peace and quiet? So, while a few storefronts closed, giving the general public the impression that the industry was suffering, the stores had in fact just moved into back rooms and warehouses, their public faces now visible through a modem connection only.

Some storefronts have not closed, however. If you still have some independent bookstores in your area, there is a great likelihood that most or all of them are used bookstores. But why have they not all moved into back rooms? First, because most of these booksellers really do love their bookstores. They love the customers, the community, the serendipitous moments, the magical things that we all love about bookstores. Second, because while their in-store sales might not be growing, they aren't doing so badly either, as they can still give the big box stores some competition for value and selection. Third, because in most cases they own the building. While rising rent for retail locations in urban areas is not the most exciting factor in the demise of the independent bookstore, it is a significant factor that is often overshadowed in discussions by stories of corporate greed and rising illiteracy. An increase in rent is usually the deciding factor when our favorite bookstores go out of business, whether used or new. A good portion of the stores that still exist today do so because they bought their buildings and were able to weather many a storm that would have forced them out of business if their rent was raised or they had to move.

Yet still, I would argue that the most significant factor in keeping these stores alive is the internet. Without it, rising rents, declining readership, and all of the other familiar scourges would have forced these stores out of business along with their counterparts in the new book trade. A Book Industry Study Group report stated that in 2006 brick and mortar used bookstores relied on the internet for 40% of their sales. That is a make or break percentage, and I believe that most used booksellers would readily admit that without the internet they would not have open stores. So, while we might not have the number and variety of bookstores that we had in the past, we still have some wonderful places to browse and explore, many of which are expanding and preparing for their futures. And for this we must begrudgingly throw a little thanks to that baffling source of all that we find objectionable: the internet.

Posted by: Adrienne Eaton