Selling your used books

Archive: Used Bookdealer

A typical happening in a used bookshop: a man brought in several grocery bags of books he hoped to sell. The books were mostly mass market trash, Oprah’s Book Club selections; I found a half dozen I hoped I could sell.

The books were respectable but average. I decided to give him a buck apiece for everything excepting a golf book. I hoped that would be worth $2.00. If he hadn’t discarded the dust jacket I might’ve been able to offer him more. The book was fat and recent so there was a chance its publication price was high and there’d still be plenty of demand for secondhand copies. Lacking the dust jacket the book wasn’t going to appeal to collectors but only to folks looking for a bargain.

He decided to keep the golf book. Maybe he planned to make a present of it. Maybe he harbored illusions about the book’s value. Thankfully if he felt I was cheating him he didn’t tell me. The folks who complain about that always protest about the most commonplace books. They’ll point out that the book is a First Edition. Indeed, it is the only edition. Often the author is well-established and print-runs are if anything too high. The unneeded copies wind up on Barnes and Noble’s bargain tables for $2.98 and Amazon’s Marketplace for 99¢.

I’d only given him for a popular cognitive science book because it had gone through at least five printings. My best hope was to get $5.00. Despite the several printings the demand on the secondhand book market let me feel secure in asking $25.00. That more than made up for a couple of the paperbacks that I’d bought from the guy that I shouldn’t have bought at all much less paid $1.00 at all.