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Present this card at time of purchase

Archive: Used Bookdealer

In the early days we started collecting customer addresses from checks to build a mailing list. Later we created a sign-up sheet that sits on our counter. Mostly we sent out announcements of our seasonal sales.

During sluggish springs we send out a “Present this card … ” discount card the customer (theoretically, we're forgiving of the absent minded, if only prudentially) brings in for a discount.

The return this time wasn't large. But a few customers - Hi, Mike - made it profitable. The cards expire as of closing today which coincidentally is a holiday Monday. Memorial Day is a holiday I forget until the Friday preceding it. So today's brisk business, mostly from the cards wasn't due to my canny fore planning.

With a little luck folks will spend their last holiday evening adding some our books to shopping cards and “Buying Now!” and that batch of books that I expected to sell Saturday night will be heading off to new owners tomorrow.

Richard Evans Lee • May 31, 2004 • Reader, what do you think?
Prior: Help the customer tell me how to ship his book • Next: She seems to be enjoying her book

1 · Posted by: Mike on May 31, 2004 05:07 PM

Hi yourself, Richard. Always happy to enrich my local favorite bookstore to the detriment of my checking account.

I'm in fact listening now to the CDs I bought, giving them a fair listen before deciding whether they will stick around.

And because I don't have a web site or blog, I will list here the books I bought (not the comics and collections), to show what wonderful values can be had on sales days:

  • Cakes and Ale, Maugham. Been reading reviews of the latest bio on Maugham, and thought I'd start with this one.
  • Selected Prefaces & Introductions by Maugham. I have his book “Summing Up”, which was very pleasant. This looked dippable, with nice short chapters.
  • Boswell's Life of Johnson, abridged. Excerpts with appropriate titles. I don't want to make the commitment to the full-strength “Life”; I like good-parts versions. (I also bought my “Shorter Pepys” bk at BDFAR, a few years ago.) (Do I detect a theme in “brief books”?)
  • Kilvert's Diary (selections). Diary of a Victorian clergyman; have seen his name recur in other journal anthologies I have, so a surprise to see this on the shelf. If I had to choose between a novel and someone's diary, I'd probably pick the diary every time.

See you next month.


2 · Posted by: Richard on June 1, 2004 03:35 PM

No, no. Everybody needs an unabridged Life of Johnson. To be fair I took the only one we've ever had.

I keep hoping we'll get an abridged Pepys that is more than a two hundred-page octavo. I'm not sure how much I want to read but would like some critical apparatus as well. Just hit me that I've never seen a Penguin Pepys.

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My thanks,
Richard

















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