Gotta Love Grandfathers

I've sold children's books since the early 1990's, first by catalog sales and since 1996 via the internet. From my earliest days in business one of my favorite type of customer to talk to has been Grandfathers. In print or out of print they want to provide there grandkids with the best of the best. Whether it is my Armenian American grandfather who wants books that reflect that culture, the grandfather who wanted to replace the books he read to his daughter, for her to read to her own daughter, or the call I got recently from a soon to be granddad who wants to surround his new family member with the best of children's literature. They are dedicated buyers and repeat customers.

Series Books

Collectors of series books, bless their hearts, are a passionate and dedicated group. Anytime that I get a good series title in and list it in my inventory I can count on calls from collectors not just for the title listed, but for other titles in the series that I might have stashed away or may find in the future.

The problem is that I have over 13,000 children's books online, at any given time maybe 10 of them are series titles. I've found that serious collectors of series books are not usually interested in collecting other genres, and to specialize in series books as a dealer takes a major commitment in time, reference material, and most importantly space.

I never mind getting a call from collectors wanting to talk books, I always come away learning something, like the last book of most series is the most valuable etc. Kind of like the market research coming to me. But it does get frustrated at times to get calls that can't turn into sales.

Nobody reads anymore?

Anytime I read too many articles proclaiming that no one reads anymore and the days of the book are over, I go re-read this paragraph written by my daughter shortly after she moved from the mid west to San Francisco:

I went to the SF Friends of the Library book sale today. I've been to library booksales before, so I knew I had to go to this sale. It was held in Fort Mason, one of the old warehouse-military type buildings on the piers. I walked in, past a dozen registers or so, and got to a mini-food court area before I really comprehended what I was seeing. You know that part at the end of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the lost ark, where the arc is crated and stored in a huge area filled with other crates? Thats what it was like, only with tables and tables of books. I almost wet myself.

In the end, I bought what I thought I could carry home then grabbed a cab when I realized I couldn't. Good times.

The readers are still out there, harder to find perhaps but just as passionate.

I wish I could be lofty and superior and claim to know the secret of raising a passionate reader, but truth be told we've raised two children in the same environment, crammed to the rafters with books, but only one is a serious reader the other does not read anything unless absolutely necessary.

2007 National Book Festival

I took a bit of a busman's holiday today and went to the the National Book Festival on the mall in Washington D.C. Bought some books, listened to a bit of the talks, stood in a few of the very long signing lines....

Before it got too crowded.

Mercer Mayer designed the banner for this years festival.

Jennifer L. Holm promoting her new book called "Middle School is Worse Than Meatloaf".

Patricia MacLachlan signing her new book "Edward's Eyes".

Me with my loot!

Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar

The Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar which just finished up in Colorado Springs has been held every summer for well over 20 years. The 5 day seminar is advertised as being a training forum for for Booksellers, Librarians, and Collectors and among the talks includes a detailed training exercise on how properly catalog (describe) a book.

One of these years I'm going to beg, borrow or steal the time and the money and attend. I can't imagine anything more fun than spending 5 days with other crazed booksellers. I've been reading the news group and blog discussions on the seminar and besides making me pea green with envy they got me thinking about how my book descriptions have been dumbed down over the years.

Some of the traditional book selling terms and abbreviations that I no longer use for online book listings are:

signature: a group or gathering of leaves printed together on a sheet of paper which is folded, bound with other signatures and trimmed to form a book or pamphlet; i.e. a section or grouping of pages in a book resulting from printing and binding methodology. (omitted altogether, too many customers confusing this for an author or illustrators signature)

n.d and n.p. are spelled out as no publication date or no place of publication

t.e.g. or a.e.g.: is now written out as top edge gilt or all edges gilt.

x-libris or x-library I've had to change to library discard.

Another identifier that I'm not using at all in online are the traditional book sizes:

Folio: more than 13 inches tall
Quarto (4to): approx. 10 to 13 inches tall, average 12 inches
Octavo (8vo): approx. 8 to 10 inches tall, average 9 inches
Duodecimo (12mo): approx. 7 to 8 inches tall, average 7.5 inches
Sextodecimo (16mo): approx. 6 to 7 inches tall, average 6.5 inches

The Abebooks site has a glossary of bookseller terms, but I find most customers don't want to wade through a lot of abbreviations and in the internet world of instant click are not going to take the time to look up terms they don't understand.

(Information that I always include in my listings is: Author(s), Illustrator(s), Publisher including place and date. Binding type i.e. Hard Cover, Soft Cover Library Binding etc. Edition statement and a solid description of book and dust jacket condition. )

Newbery and Caldecott Award Prices

The high priced speculation in Newbery and Caldecott Award books is a relatively new feature of the in print collectibles market. While some of the price increases can be attributed the the high number of dedicated and active Newbery and Caldecott collectors, a lot of the increase results from book publishers being less and less willing to print large runs of juvenile hardbacks. Also a factor is that if a book is successful and sells well, there is a very good chance that it will be in a later printing by the time the awards are announced. In the last decade or so all these factors has driven the prices of the award books up accordingly.

The first book I recall selling for around two hundred dollars within a week of the award being announced was The Giver (Newbery 1994). Some of the other titles that were difficult for me to find in collectible condition: Smoky Night* (Caldecott, 1995), Out of the Dust (Newbery, 1998), Holes (Newbery, 1999), Snowflake Bentley* (Caldecott, 1999), A Single Shard (Newbery, 2002 ), Kira-Kira (Newbery, 2005), and last year's The Higher Power of Lucky (Newbery, 2006).

*Publishers tend to have larger print runs of picture books than juveniles so it takes a real surprise by the Caldecott Award comittee to result in a scarce Caldecott winner.

Gone But Not Forgotten

When I morphed from a fanatic reader/book collector to an equally crazed bookseller it was with the understanding that I really was in business and other people were allowed to touch or (gasp!) even buy my books. I enjoy the collectibles end of the business very much but it was, and still is, hard to let certain books go. Over the years there have been a dozen titles or so that I wished I'd held onto for just a little bit longer...say 10-20 years?

In short, a few of the books that I've sold and wished that I had not....

OLD TURTLE by Wood. This copy was a Fine first edition with no ABA medal on dj and signed by both the author and the illustrator. A lovely picture book.

A WRINKLE IN TIME by Madeliene L'Engle. First Edition. Very Good in a Very Good dustjacket it was a first edition in the second state dustjacket. I sold this book for a customer, if it had been my own inventory it would still be sitting on my shelf.

DRAGON RUN by Carley Dawson. First Edition, Fine in a Fine dustjacket. The third book in the trilogy which started with Mr. Wicker's Window. This book would still on my shelf too, if I'd realized at the time how difficult it would be to find it again in collectible condition.

(It has always disturbed me that I can vividly remember the details of a book I've had in my hands once in my life, but rarely remember what day it is or the name of someone I've met on numerous occasions...)

Scouting: juvenile sports books

Early juvenile sports stories, especially those written from the 40's through to the 70's are always worth scouting. I've found over the years that the genre desirability is roughly in the following order of interest: Baseball, Baseball and Baseball then Golf, Martial Arts, Surfing, Ice Hockey, Basketball and Football. (I admit to an American bias here, I have handled and sold very few Soccer books.)

Genre collectors are still interested in condition as well as content, but overall scarcity of the item rules the day. A few years ago I had a rather thin, unimpressive juvenile bio of a baseball player which I listed online at a modest price which sold within 6 hours. The book was only in very good condition, the author was unremarkable, but it turned out that it was the only bio ever written about that particular player. A fact that the second, third and fourth people who called about the book were very quick to point out.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

I mentioned in a previous post that Burrough's Tarzan of the Apes was one of my all time favorite childhood reads. I not only read all his Tarzan books, but his Mars and Venus series too.

For any other fans there is a great website dedicated to All Things Burroughs published by his grandson at: www.tarzan.com.

a dinosaur grumbles

I love selling books online in the internet age, if only for the shear diversity of the books I sell and the locations I ship them. Since the advent of online selling I've shipped to every state in the U.S., almost every Province in Canada and a good many countries around the world.

In today's mailing alone I shipped books to Washington D.C. and Washington State, Virginia, Oregon, New Jersey, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Spain and also right here in Maryland. Quick and easy, upload the book description to the online mega database sites, get the email notification of order, pull, process 'n pack and out the door. And totally, totally boring.

As tedious as pre-internet catalog sales were to compile, publish and send, I really miss the personnel contact I had with my collectors. Each group of collectors had their high spots, the books or the authors than "made" a collection: Primrose Cummings and Walter Farley for the horse collectors, Sally Watson and Rosemary Sutcliff for historical fiction, Dare Wright for dolls etc. With catalog sales and a toll free phone number, I was able to find books and help build collections, and also enjoyed many a long conversation "talking books".

Ironic really, but I feel I had more real interaction with my collectors, was more "in tune" with the hot spots of the different genres when I lived on a rural property in Iowa (pre and early internet) than I do now 20 minutes from Baltimore.