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Your most important asset as a bookseller is your ability to locate and purchase quality books at prices low enough to enable you to resell them at a substantial profit. Yes, it's important to know how to sell them - to master the many associated skills involved in salesmanship, operating a business, etc. - but unless you begin with good books, you'll start nowhere and end up in the same place.
Getting them requires two things:
- Bodily putting yourself where they are
- Spotting them once you get there
Chances are you already know where lots of books are, and putting yourself in front of them will be relatively easy. If not, stay tuned; an extensive list of ideas on how to locate hot spots for books, yes, even in the frozen north, will appear in a later article. For now, however, let's talk about the most important tool you have for spotting quality books: instinct.
What is instinct? Simply defined, it's an involuntary reaction to an environmental stimulus. As such it might seem to be an unreliable tool for locating books. After all, isn't deciding which books to buy and which to leave on the shelf a function of knowledge? Knowledge, in turn, an outcome of experience? Many think so. Put two book dealers in front of a wall of books, and who will do better, one with 20 years experience in the business, or one with two? It might sound ridiculous to make this assertion, but I contend that it very much - and almost exclusively - depends on which one has the best instincts.
Yes, experience can be important, but only if it's good experience, the kind that shapes instinct into a sharp tool. In the past few years, time and time again at various sales, I've seen booksellers, veteran dealers who have sold books for years and years, pick up things I wouldn't touch, and what's more, pay $2 or $5 or more for them! I don't doubt that they have at least some success reselling this stuff, but if the subsequent sales come in at $5 or $10, is this where you want to be? Is this the kind of experience that will help you grow as a bookseller? If you could buy books that resold for $20, $50 and $100, wouldn't your fate on this planet be far better?
What separates the average bookseller from the world-class one isn't experience. It's instinct. At first glance this may seem to reduce the book buying process to one of pure chance, given that instinct is a more or less involuntary reaction, but nothing could be further from the truth. Instincts aren't static. They aren't fixed by genetic makeup. They can and do change. More importantly, they can be refined into exquisite tools.
To illustrate, let's start with some specific numbers. When I first started selling books, my instincts were less than good. For every 100 books I bought at sales, at best 5 or 10 of them turned out to be worth something, and by this I mean that I could resell them for $20 or $30 or more. Today that same number might be 80 out of 100. What accounts for the difference? I say this without hesitation: it has almost nothing to do with my increased knowledge of specific books. Yes, occasionally I encounter and buy books I've sold before, but out of the 80 good books I now buy, 70 or 75 of them are titles I've never seen before.
How could this be?
Consider this: the Library of Congress currently holds almost 24,000,000 volumes, and this isn't by any means a complete collection of every book ever printed. Even if you have a photographic memory and years of experience buying and selling, how many books could you realistically expect to carry useful information about in your head? A small fraction at best.
Furthermore, even if you could carry an online device with you, consult databases as you look for books - and the day when we can do that affordably may be coming soon, if it isn't already here - I would still recommend leaving this device at home and relying deliberately and exclusively on instinct.
There are two reasons why:
- At sales, time is often of the essence, not only at individual sales where other buyers are pulling books off shelves on either side of you but also on any given morning when there is only a two- or three-hour window in which most of the quality books in a geographical area will be sold, and unless you move from sale to sale quickly, you'll be left behind. Spending even a few moments to research a book (or even examine its condition) could cost you dearly; whereas the risk of using your instincts will at most add, over time, only pennies to your average cost per book.
- Even if time isn't an issue, if you have the luxury of investigating a book prior to purchasing it, this still isn't necessarily the plus you might think it is. Learning by mistakes, buying on instinct then investigating, is a much more powerful experience than that of investigation followed by purchase. Pain (and the pleasure of hitting pay dirt) builds your bookselling head more rapidly than anything else. Mistakes are easily recalled, sometimes painfully so, and usually won't be made again. A good mistake, one made on the basis of purchasing a book that really got your blood pumping, is well worth a buck or two, especially if it eliminates an entire class of books that you will never waste time or money on again.
This brings me to:
A Tale of Two Vans
Early in my bookselling career I came across a book by Hendrik Willem Van Loon titled "Van Loon's Geography." I'd never seen it before, and it had all sorts of good things going for it. By "good things" I mean specific features which seemed to indicate that it might have value. For reasons which I'll explain in detail in part II of this series, I call these flashpoints. This book had five flashpoints that I can recall:
- The publication date was 1932. (The importance of this will be explained in a later article.)
- It was a stated first edition.
- It had a colorful, strikingly designed dust jacket that folded out into a gorgeous color map of the world.
- There were numerous quirky, stylized color illustrations by the author throughout the book.
- The content also was quirky, or seemed to be as I glanced through it, a sort of off-beat look at the world - in fact, Van Loon had in effect created a world according to him, the kind of thing that often holds appeal to collectors years later.
I remember driving home and looking at it on the seat next to me again and again, thinking smugly to myself, sometimes you just know when something's special. A sure winner. Boy, was I getting good at this at this book buying stuff!
Imagine my horror when I got home, logged onto Abebooks, and discovered 100's of comparable volumes offered for sale, some priced as low as a few bucks. This was especially poignant because I'd driven deep into the countryside to get the dumb thing and felt I'd totally squandered half a day's work, not to mention ten bucks worth of gas - that is, until I looked up three books I'd also grabbed almost as an afterthought at the same place: "The Greene Murder Case" (1928), "The Bishop Murder Case" (1929), and "The Scarab Murder Case" (1930), all detective Philo Vance vehicles by legendary mystery writer S.S. Van Dine (Willard Huntington Wright), all in ho-hum, predominantly black dust jackets, all printed on distinctly pulpy, low-quality paper with absolutely no illustrations, all books I'd never seen before, and worse, almost didn't buy. Later that week, of course, I was hundreds of dollars richer. And wiser.
The lesson of this story? It's not that instincts are unreliable, just that they have different degrees of refinement depending on your level of good experience. The same instincts that prompted me to pick up Van Loon's hunk of junk had previously stood me in relatively good stead, helped me find more than a few winners (yes, along with a number of losers). They weren't wrong, just not as sharp as they could have been. Don't mistrust your instincts simply because they lead you astray now and again. Expect to make mistakes. Count the time and money you spend as a silent tuition towards your degree as a master bookseller. In time, those instincts, especially if tempered with painful memories of quirky, rainbow-colored 1930's books in dust jackets, will become a precision tool.
The next article in this series will continue this discussion with a description and analysis of flashpoints.
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