I dunno, maybe I’ve written about this sort of thing before. It happens once or twice a year and when it does, it’s like a cool breeze on a hot Labor Day afternoon.
It involved the recent purchase of the collection of an old customer of mine. I’d sold him about 100 books at book fairs and through catalogs in the 1990s and early 2000s, but I was surprised to discover how much wider he’d cast his net. The executor of his estate told me our deceased friend had a houseful of antiques, paintings, and collectible nautical notions such as sailor’s valentines. Most of it went to Eldred’s over the past few years, but books… meh. Eldred’s had never had much luck with books at their auctions. Bob Eldred himself was something of a bookman, and he had performed an appraisal of this collection some years ago. However, the fact that he only appraised the book collection and did not offer to sell it at auction told me all I needed to know.
They were almost all standard “good” nautical books, the sort of things I’d made a living on in pre-internet days. Of course, with the rise of Abe, Biblio, and similar listing services, the perceived scarcity of these books vanished, and their value plummeted. Consequently, I was able to purchase them for a reasonable sum – one that accounted for the fact that I’d probably die with half these books still on my shelves.
So why did I buy them?
Not, as was the case with the purchase I wrote about in last week’s blog, because they were “beer money books,” (although, strictly speaking, that’s exactly what they were). No, I bought these because I’d already cataloged them.
I mean, literally. A good percentage were the same copies I’d sold him decades before, in the earliest years of computer databases, and the rest were titles that I’d already cataloged and sold to other customers. Cataloging these babies meant simply typing in title and author and hitting “search.” A few minor modifications might be needed, but generally speaking the whole process was effortless. I probably could have dug up old images for most of them, but I think I’m a better photographer now than I used to be, and many of those books were cataloged in pre-image days. (Remind me to write a blog post sometime about my first digital camera – a hideous thing, difficult to use. It ate C batteries at a rate of four per hour.)
The only bottleneck I’m facing now is shipping the darned things. It takes about as long to wrap and ship a $2000 book as a $20 book.
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