From the play “Money” in Bulwer’s Works Volume IX: Dramatic Works, Peter Fenelon Collier, Publisher, 1892 (p.232)

Please sit down.

There is a used bookstore in Starkvegas that I did not know about until recently. I was excited to learn this because my rate of crappy old book acquisition has fallen precipitously since Danny resigned from the Friends of the Library board and quit bringing in boxes and boxes of wonderful crappy old books– some, I think, just for Daughter C, the J-man, and myself– to the sale every first Monday of the month. This year I have acquired 46 books. At this same point last year, I’d added 279 crappy old books to my library. For those who are afraid of arithmetic,  that’s a 506% decrease. So I was excited!

The store itself is crammed packed and the proprietor is chatty as can be. She gave me a guided tour and offered me a ($2) glass of mint iced tea in a mason jar. In the main the assortment is a little too heavy on really crappy fiction and newer textbooks for my taste, but I spied a few corners in which to poke around. (Aside. Never ceases to amaze me what garbage gets categorized under “philosophy.”) I was informed that nothing was priced, but most things– including vinyl, CDs & whatnot– were around $5. Just ask.

I found a book of 3-D paper folding something that looked like it might interest Daughter C, and a book about Fred & Ginger; she looked at them and said $5 each. Now, as you know, five whole United States dollars is a little on the pricey side for me but okay. I kept looking and that’s when I found a a crappy old book of some fictional work by Edward Bulwer Lytton. I checked my card catalog on my iPad and no! I do not have this work. Can’t remember the title but the date was 1882 or close to that. I have four volumes of a multi-volume collection of Bulwer’s works published in 1892. So I was interested.

And now the fun begins.

How much? After a few minute of clicky-clacking on her computer she told me it would be $10. I asked if she had her inventory cataloged– because that would have been fun to talk about. But no. Some minutes later she was still looking online for the book because the previous $10 version she’d found had a different publisher than the one in her store (that should have been a clue about the book’s value with respect to its supply). So she’s still looking for the correct price. Hummm.

She explained her pricing strategy. The market for old books is so variable (true enough) and so many things factor into the price (also true). For example, the illustrations in the books can have value above and beyond the book taken a whole (well, that don’t make no sense but I understood what she was trying to communicate). Subtle differences in editions can also affect the value (again, true). And because of all of this, she just looks any older book up on the internet to see what it’s valued at and that’s what she sells it for (wrong). She kept on looking– not knowing that if I was not going to pay $10 for that book, I certainly wasn’t going to pay $10.01.

I am not an economist. I took a bunch of Econ classes back when I used a slide rule. My dad spent 40 years in retail management; I spent 10. I’m also acquainted with the real world. I’ve talked to a lot of successful booksellers about value and pricing. So I have some rudimentary– in the store– understanding of markets and that’s not how markets work. A price is the value a seller places on an item to see how gullible the customers are. Sure– you factor in costs &c., and every market has some “what the market will bear” level of markup. (Please note, I am not even going to mention that little thing called turnover. Except to not mention it.) But the value of an item is what the buyer is willing to pay. Crappy old book markets are no different.

Let’s pause a moment and think along another line. Bulwer died in 1873. So unless the crappy old book in which I was sort of interested had been a long lost manuscript (which found its way to the States), in the sense that would matter, nothing published in 1882 was a first edition. Sure, it might have been a first edition by a particular publishing house– but Bulwer was extremely popular in Britain– The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1941) has four pages of his stuff. The publisher of the book in question was Peter Fenelon Collier, Publisher, New York (not P.F. Collier & Sons– that came later). So it could have been a first American publication– but who cares?

Back to the main point. I do not know where on the internet she was looking– and it really doesn’t matter too much because if a book is listed at Book Finder or some rare antiquarian book site or ebay and it’s not the first week it’s put up it’s not selling at the listed price. It hasn’t sold! So if it’s not selling between $8 to $100 on ebay or between $7.95 and $35 on Biblio then the market value today is less than $7.95. Past sale prices may be useful as a guide– I mean seriously, the market for American printings of a popular British author’s fiction is not that hot– but it takes some time to figure these out. As far as I know, there’s no Zillow for crappy old books.

She should have said $5 and been done with it all but for the putting the grand total of $17 in her pocket. But she didn’t and she only pocketed $12.

This is what people don’t understand about what I’m not even going to mention.