The white whale has disgorged most of the high-end stock it once contained. Now I’m down to triage duty, seeking only those books worth $20 or more. I no longer have an open shop and small-time provincial book fairs have gone the way of the Dodo. These days my only options for selling low-end stock are Biblio, ABAA, and ABE. After the labor of describing, photographing and posting a listing, and after these companies have subtracted their fees, I lose money selling anything for less than $20… and I probably should bump that number up to $25 or $30. This leaves a lot of perfectly good books for More Than Words, Better World Books, or some similar charity shop with a big truck. I have to keep reminding myself to be disciplined. The goal is to get that damned white whale out of my front yard and back to the Maersk Line where it belongs.
Surprisingly, this grunt work has turned out to be more absorbing than I could have imagined. Books don’t need to be valuable to be interesting.
Once the initial sort has been made out in the white whale, the keepers are sent to the basement where a final evaluation is made. This involves more than a little looking through books and, toward the end of the day – especially after dinner, inevitably along with a few drinks and/or a joint – the $20 cutoff fades and the wide variety of reading matter becomes increasingly fascinating.
For example, I’ve spent the last few days dealing with a mountain of unsellable 20th century books about Latin America that are also somehow impossible to throw away. I was up to my elbows in these dogs when a copy of a long article from Atlantic Monthly fell out of one of them. The article was titled “The Decipherment of Ancient Maya” and it looked interesting. I read it, then I read it again, and now I must learn everything there is to know about Mayan epigraphy! I’ve even gone so far as to purchase a book on the topic.
One paragraph from the Atlantic Monthly article particularly captured my imagination:
A defeated Mayan king, the epigraphers have shown, was held captive for as long as several years, tortured , costumed and prettified, forced to play a ball game that he was preordained to lose, and then often beheaded. The bizarre sadomasochistic rituals of warfare between kings, which the ancient Maya apparently practiced instead of the wholesale slaughter of one city by another, is one of the manv areas of Mayan life to which the epigraphers have brought dazzling new insights.
Dazzling new insight? Are you hearing this, Israel and Palestine? Russian and Ukraine? And on and on and on?
instead of the wholesale slaughter of one city by another
One mega-event, streaming everywhere. Bigger than Superbowl, Gray’s Anatomy, and Housewives of New Jersey put together. No holds barred. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to let the bigshots slug it out and spare us their endless bullshit, not to mention the suffering of hapless soldiers, helpless civilians?
Personally, I think Putin would kick Trump’s ass and eat Netanyahu for dessert. But I’d put my money on Zelenski being tougher than any of them.
I’m with you on this, but what can book nerds do to make it happen? There’s an award-winning (Israeli) columnist at Haaretz (Israel’s oldest newspaper) who could help popularize the idea…Gideon Levy. This guy’s defense of the Palestinian people deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.