"You gotta believe in your books." -- ARM's guiding philosophy
This post is by Joe with a postscript by the editor:
I suffer from the same delusion/fantasy/misconception /disease. I’m not sure there is a cure.
It is nearly impossible to get me to physically throw away a book. If the book intrigued me enough to buy it in the first place, then why should I abandon that belief (and book), even when evidence exists that it is unsaleable? I can’t even pitch books that I did not explicitly choose, the dregs of some collection or another that arrived as "part of the deal." I leave them outside the door as freebies in hopes that somebody will come along and rescue them. If I could send them off to an island of misfit books, I probably would.
The problem? A kind of a Gresham’s Law of books. Just as bad money drives out good, so, in a brick and mortar shop, bad books always drive out the good ones. It’s like this. You have a limited amount of space in your store. You stock them with books you believe will sell.
They are all, in your mind, ‘good’ books to begin with. Slowly your clientele pick and choose what they want. What is left, over the years, can only be described as "rejects," literally books that have been rejected by your customers. You rationalize that the right customer has not come along (which may very well be true) but in the meantime, those rejects take up space on your shelves.
You restock, again with high hopes. Customers come. Customers go with books in hand leaving you with more rejects. Repeat enough times and you have a bookshop that is filled with "bad" (read: unsaleable or worthless) books and no customers (because your customers have seen nearly every book each time they came in) and even if they did come in, they do not want to take the time to sift through all that bad to find the ever-dwindling good.
The correct solution is to ruthlessly cull your stock and pitch the drek. But you must have the time, the personality, and yes, the confidence in yourself to admit you made a mistake in the first place when you bought it.
But wait, you think. What about the Internet? Ssshhh. Don’t say that! Because that’s what folks like me and (somewhat ironically given his non-internet nature as a seller) Allan say/said to ourselves. "The right buyer just hasn’t found us yet." And, we imagine, with the whole world searching, s/he is bound to find our treasure sooner or later. Long tail and all that rot.
Alas, too many booksellers with too many books and not enough demand mean you wait a *long* time for that buyer. Meanwhile, it takes up space, either on a shelf or even in storage.
I’ve not thought this through yet (it occurred to me literally as I wrote this piece) but we are watching a form a Gresham’s Law on the Internet, too. Search for books much on-line and you can’t help but notice the increasing amount of drek cluttering the databases. Ex-libs, incorrectly cataloged books, PODs. Bad listings drive out good.
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Note from editor: Well, maybe. Pre-internet, of course, this was the thrill of bookshops. You found something that everyone had passed over, including the owner, for years. There were fashions in literature then, not this 24-hour buffet where your subculture could feast at any moment. Cormac McCarthy went from being unsaleable -- the era of the Southern writer had ended, the Gothic had never taken off, and a Southern Gothic writer couldn't get the postage to get out of town -- into a modern classic whose individual titles were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. For a brief moment, you could find his books on the shelves for $5 -- and be smart enough to pick them up.
(I remember Allan selling a shelf of McCarthy books to an LA dealer. They agreed on a price of $600. The books included at least one early proof, something that is literally unfindble now. The dealer sent Allan a check for $600 minus 20 percent. Allan was annoyed but didn't stop doing business with him. He was proba bly happy to unload the books.)
Some writers, perhaps most, never came back of course. Serendipity, to its closing day, had bookcases of Joseph Hergesheimer and Gertrude Atherton that had never been touched in my lifetime. But for the amateur scout, deciding who was dead and who was only sleeping was part of the fun. Allan had books on his shelves that no one wanted, that I failed to buy, and that I've literally never seen again.
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