I thought I should share with you what’s recently occurred in my shop as a direct and in-direct result of blogging with this site.  It’s all good, and this article is meant as a thank you to Bruce and the other bloggers & participants at the Bookshop Blog.

It all started with the day when a fellow came into my shop, introduced himself over a handshake (let’s call him Mark) and mentioned that another bookseller in Melbourne (with whom I’ve had a conversation with on this site) suggested my shop to him.  He had some photographic prints he wanted to show me, so that I might possibly hang them in my gallery.  He also added that if his artworks weren’t quite what I was looking for, then he had another relative who is an artist living not too far from our town, and who is looking to get his work out in the public arena.  Whilst Mark’s photographic work is quite beautiful in a classical sense, it’s not really what we are looking to display in our gallery.  We are looking for work that has more of an edge to it, a little less conservative.

Mark’s visit was very fortuitously followed up by a visit from his local relative (let’s call him Justin Perkins because that’s his name!), whose artworks are vibrant, contemporary and unusual, and we loved his work instantly.  We were very keen to stage a solo exhibition of his work, and pulled it together by mid-February when we opened with a launch.  It’s been a terrific success, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.  He’s doing an advanced art course at a local tertiary school, and as a result of his time spent studying has many artistic friends and colleagues.

This month we launched our 2nd annual Biblio-Art Competition (a number of old books are selected and placed in a wheelbarrow for artists to select from, and they then produce artwork inspired by the book of their choice) and it slowly came to my attention that a large number of people entering the competition were coming from this local uni.  On asking one of the students, I find out that the course co-ordinator has actually made our art competition one of their assignments!  This is fantastic for us, because it’s giving us a lot of exposure, and hopefully generating some interest amongst people who might not otherwise have known we even existed. As well, it is exactly the kind of artists we are seeking for display in our gallery.  We want to be able to provide some level of support and another avenue for emerging artists, and this is certainly one way of doing it.  All this, as a result of blogging here!  It’s a strange world we’re living in these days…

My husband’s been hard at work on our website, and there’s a lot of new stuff there to look at, including Justin and his works, so do please visit and see what you think (one image attached, Justin’s work titled “Two Flies” – and the name of his solo exhibition).

As an adjunct to this article, I wonder if the bookselling man behind the man at the beginning of the chain would be interested in hiring a very good employee I’ve had in my shop and who unfortunately leaves me now to attend a university in Melbourne (studying writing & research)… He’s a talented & knowledgeable young man indeed, and would make a worthy employee in any bookshop!!!

Once I have my books it is time for some serious work. The first step is to clean them up by removing pencil marks and stickers, I don’t remove library stickers unless they’re already starting to come off. Then comes the need to remove any sticky left from the stickers and there’s a whole armoury involved in the processes of removing pencil marks and sticky from stickers which I won’t deal with now. This blog will deal with the precise mathematical formula for pricing pre-loved books for selling online.

I’ll do a random book from my pile so you can then look at the listing on my website afterwards. In this case, the book is Catweazle by Richard Carpenter. A lovely little book, it’s the novelisation of the series screened in the UK on ITV in the 1970s and also in Australia. I recall it well from my childhood and so when I saw the book I just had to pick it up to sell, the fact that they had a price of 30c on it and there is very little wear may have had something to do with it. A book like this I will normally google so I can look up the background to get some idea of the popularity of the book, see how many were written, when they were first published and any other related or unrelated information that I can find. So, my google search finds a fan website which indicates a possible fan base looking for Catweazle paraphenalia and also a Wikipedia page. It’s also useful if you’re able to read every scrap of newspaper you can in case there are related articles hanging around. My DD just saw the book and told me about an article she read recently in the Herald Sun Supplement. It’s about fashion and she tells me the way Catweazle was dressed is currently the height of fashion, it probably cost about 11 pounds to dress him in the 1970s and would now cost about 200 pounds. All these things can help or hinder.

The next move is to go to places such as www.abebooks.com and put the name of the book into the search field. Here is where it gets interesting. For a mass market paperback you’re expecting to see 100s of listings for $US1 before you finally get to a ‘proper’ price. With Catweazle I find 57 listings. Click on the Sort Results By field and choose Lowest Price as that ignores the cost of postage and the cost of postage is really not part of this equation. I run my eye down the listings to get some sort of feel of how the prices are going, in this case the lowest price is $US1.53 and there’s a steady increase up to about $US30. There’s then a fairly big jump to $US60 odd and $US78 but these prices are just silly and can be ignored as there are shops on www.abebooks.com which put up silly listings like this without actually having the book in stock, when they sell a book they then trawl the listings looking for a copy that matches what they’ve sold in order to buy it and send it on to their buyer having made an exhorbitant profit that doesn’t actually match the value of the book.
Here is where it gets incredibly interesting as I have the original book and all sequels happen to have Catweazle in the title as well, so at this stage I have to look at the titles to make sure I’m looking at the right book and find that there are a number of German editions which have to also be elminated as they have no impact on the price of an English edition. Sometimes I take into account that this volume is not a first edition having been published in 1984 (I’ll just cheat here and put 1984 into the Search Within These Results field which narrows it down to one book at $US7.81. The description of this book is poor and I look at mine again to notice it’s in very good condition. Having looked at all of these things I then have to take the time to recall that I’m selling in Australian Dollars and not US Dollars and I have to do a quick translation to Australian Dollars.
So, compare the condition of the book with the condition of the ones I can find and then get a price with that, look at the fact that it is a novelisation and that there’s a fan base and some of them will be interested in buying novelisations while others won’t. There’s a great deal of something called ‘hunch’ at this point and experience about the market which is difficult to quantify, the fact that I really enjoyed the series when I was young is part of the equation as I’ve found many of the things I enjoyed back then are making a comeback right now. Looking at the spread of prices and number at the low end and then the final thing is to translate the price to Australian Dollars. Now my book being better condition than the only one I could find of the same publishing date would obviously get a better price so I’ll put it at $18, remember this is US Dollars and translate it to Australian Dollars. The exchange rate is pretty awful at the moment so it only takes it up to $AUS19.74 but I’ll round it up to $AUS20.

Now to throw in some other information. The pre-loved book market in the US is totally different to the one here. The pricing differs completely. Let’s take another title for an example. The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum. If I put this through the same process I find there are 1,241 results and the first 332 of them are all for sale at $US1. It is not economically viable to sell books for this price in Australia, the only places you’ll find books for these prices in Australia are in op shops, at garage sales and book fairs. I’d have to price them fairly low as they’re not good sellers so I won’t bother buying authors such as Robert Ludlum or Dan Brown unless they are first editions and hardcover…unless…I happen to take the ones from my shelf that I read when I was young and sell them, that’s the only way those authors would be economically viable.

There you have it, my precise mathematical formula for pricing pre-loved books in Australia. As you can see it’s very scientificly designed. I found a post written on Bookthink by Karin Bergsage, she attended a Booksellers Boot Camp and one of the sessions she attended was how to price a book. It’s a very informative post and gave me food for thought as well as thoughts for another post I’m in the middle of researching. On page two she discusses the pricing formula given to her by a long-time bookseller “* the selling price of a book is split 3 ways: 1/3 acquisition cost, 1/3 overhead, 1/3 profit. ” Challenging to do when the book costs $3 and it’s only possible to sell it for $4 but that could be the subject of another article.

If you happen to be near Plano Texas pop over to Dicho’s and tell them you saw them on The Bookshop Blog!

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Collectors in other fields usually search out hard-to-find items: rareness is valued in and of itself. Rare books are no exception.  However, the word rare does not have the same connotation in book collecting that it does in coin or stamp collecting.  Rare books are not valued because of their rarity alone. A rare book is valued for its content as well as having only a few copies available which must be appreciated by the collector.

James Lenox was an early North American book collector.  He began collecting in the early 1800’s.  At that time there were few rare books available in North America.  He was mostly interested in early, fine printed volumes and manuscripts.  These he attained from Europe when libraries sold off their collections.  He commissioned a spacious building in New York City to house his collection of books which eventually became the New York Public Library, now considered the largest public library in the United States.  There were other larger book collections of more everyday books from the Astor and Tilton families, and Andrew Carnegie, famous for his library contributions, gave a cash donation of millions of dollars to fund the NYC public library, but Lenox provided the rarer books.

Another famous U.S. book collector, Harry Folger, put together a fine collection of Shakespeare’s works.  In this case, it was Shakespeare’s fame as a playwright which lent value to the collection. The fame of the author often adds value to the rare edition of a book. Mr. Folger did not know that these books would be valuable, especially since he was collecting a British author in America.  Well, the result was the Folger Shakespeare Library which opened in Washington, D.C. in 1932. This library is also significant because it holds many rare books from the years 1450 A.D. to the mid-1700’s.

An American book collector with great re-known was Henry Edwards Huntington, who was a West Coast railroad baron.  He collected Americana, English Poetry and Drama, early manuscripts, and voyages and travels.  He was also an art collector and his library, and museum with botanical gardens, called simply The Huntington, is located in San Marino, California. He is often considered the grand daddy of North American book collectors.

Something you might encounter when trying to collect books are the weirder titles out there. Books today labeled erotica were once called curiosa. Curiosa and so called weird books have the qualification that they are little known works, thus making them possibly collectible. If you collect weird books in your shop, you may add that much more uniqueness which attracts customers.  Instead of focusing so much on everyday titles, why not add some hard to find books which you can price a bit higher? Weird books are not necessarily famous rare books but are valued more for their obscurity.

As booksellers, there is one difference between us and the rich and famous collectors of days gone by which is that we sell and profit upon our collections rather than donating them to public usage.  It behooves the bookseller to be on the lookout for rare books and gems.  After all, the antiquarian bookseller and dealer of rare books is essentially the crème de la crème of the bookselling industry.  If you want to sell your inventory for fantastically high prices, and have those books be worth the higher prices, you should consider adding rare books to your lineup.  As stated in the beginning, the book must not only be rare, but collectible such as being a first edition… etc.  Not every edition of the same book is collectible. We may find these books in the out of the way places that we get our inventories including, of course, library book sales.

If you count book collectors among your customers then consider this: collectors of rare books may want to read the books that they collect.  However, no collector would ever read the collectible copy of the rare book.  This provides good reasoning to sell copies of collectible books which are in used condition as a reading copy. When you begin thinking of your books as possibly collectible, it will make you examine your inventory more carefully and price the rarer books closer to their true value, rather than gifting them away.

The famous banker, J. Pierpont Morgan, was also a leading book collector along with art and antiquities.  His museum has a copy of the Gutenberg Bible.  This book may have had 300 copies printed and less than fifty exist today. The museum has images of that Bible here – Gutenberg Bible images.  While an extremely rare book may only have one copy, this Bible is valuable because it was the first book printed with modern typography way back in the 1400’s.  Some copies of the Gutenberg Bible have sold for a couple of million dollars.  Johann Gutenberg, the namesake of this Bible, was the inventor of the printing press.

References

http://www.huntington.org/uploadedImages/Content/About/HenryH.JPG

http://cs-exhibitions.uni-klu.ac.at/fileadmin/gdf/gdf10/gutenbergpress.jpg

The Official Price Guide to Old Books & Autographs, House of Collectibles, @1988

I would first like to say thank you for an interesting and informative
site, with a good dash of humour. It’s one of the more interesting websites
I’ve found!

I’m interested in starting up my own second hand bookshop, preferably
selling sci-fi & fantasy (& all the surrounding genres). I have all kinds of
ideas and plans as to how to make it successful, as I think there is a
definate market for more secondhand sci-fi shops especially as (well over in
the UK anyway) the ‘geek’ concept is becoming more acceptible especially
with the popularity of Harry Potter and more recently the Twilight series.
My problem is that I have no idea on where to begin to get the books to
start with. I want to start by just selling books online & expand from
there, but I’m back to where to get the books. I’ve got information on what
my shop should look like, but haven’t found much on bulk buying or
wholesaling – especially not for second hand books. I have no experience in
running a business and no bookshops (selling new or second hand books)
seeing too willing to take me to let me learn, I think because I now have 2
university degrees and I probably seem over qualified to them, despite that
this is what I’d really like to do.

I would really appreciate any advice and suggestions you could give me
about the things that no-one seems to mention about establishing a
bookshop.

Many thanks,
Rachel Bickley

By Louis Gereaux, MBA

Many of us who have entered the independent bookstore business wanted a low overhead business, and the opportunity to work on our own – in our own way.  Hiring part-time staff can compromise that dream.  After all, there are some downsides to hiring employees.  Your time is no longer your own… you lose some freedom when you hire someone else, and you add responsibility to your job as business owner.  When you hire an employee, it means that you take a step back and a step up to bookstore manager.  You are doing less of what you love – that of dealing with books – and more of your time is spent setting up meaningful work for an employee.

At this time, my book business is very small and entirely online, but I have had times when I needed help from others, so I know the difference between freedom and obligation.  As a business grows, (and you will want it to grow), you might encounter being swamped with work.  What at first seemed fun – you controlling and working in every aspect of the business, becomes burdensome.  Worse than that is when you end up losing some passion for what you do.  In the end, you may also miss the camaraderie of teamwork if you were previously in the job world.

It has been discovered that one of the main reasons that customers are turned away from a business is an attitude of indifference.11 You as business owner should not blame yourself.  Too much work for you to do can get you down.  You might need that extra help, but how to go about making a smooth transition from working alone to hiring part time employees?

One of the first things you’ll need to do is to create a job posting, along with a job description.  Keep in mind that you want to create a position which is fulfilling and eliminates the attitude of indifference.  A job description, after all, is not simply a listing of job duties.  People work in the book business because they are passionate about books.  There is another side to duties at work, and it is a big word called responsibility.  It is very tempting in the casual work world of independent bookselling to give your future employees drudgery and gopher type tasks devoid of responsibility.  That is a big mistake because it leads to indifference.

There are a number of places to post your job applicant wanted listings. On the other hand, the small independent bookstore is very likely to hire from their local community, and the employees you bring on board could be some of your best customers, or possibly family members or close friends.  For a job application, you can probably get away with a general application form that you find for free online or photocopied from a business book.  Another idea is to take an existing application that you find somewhere and modify it to your purposes.  Some of you will be sophisticated enough to turn that form into digital format on your website.

As far as legal issues are concerned, you will definitely be confronting the Civil Rights Legislation, and the Americans with Disabilities Act.  You may also encounter a need for medical exams or drug testing which you should inexpensively outsource somehow.  My personal opinion is that most of the requirements for a bookstore are fairly lightweight, and rather than your typical bookworm bookstore employee, why not hire a person who is disabled?  Reading is a great hobby for a disabled person, and they have the potential to be very well read.  The deaf, the blind, and those confined to wheel chairs may surprise you in what they know.  You may carry large print books, but do you carry books in Braille?  How about audio books – or are sound books not part of your business plan?  Whoever you hire, use the chance as an opportunity to expand your circle of colleagues and your horizons. College kids and retirees can also use the extra dough and are quite knowledgeable.

An appropriate way to end this article is to consider some interview questions you might ask your candidates.  Yet, I am sure you will think of some good questions on your own.  Make sure to keep your interview questions job related because candidates may have a tendency to talk about their personal lives too much.  The topics you should cover in an interview include:  past work experience, job requirements, fitting in, working with others and don’t forget about your customers, resilience, passion for the industry, what the candidate can do for you, and how professional they present themselves.

While the safe option might seem to be to destroy them, in many ways this is worse than keeping them in circulation.  This whitewashes the past.  It sanitizes it and makes it easy to pretend certain things didn’t happen.  Things weren’t THAT bad.  Surely it’s being exagerated…

(go see a larger version here.  Complete with spears and watermelons.  That the jacket itself is watermelon colors just makes it worse.)

Oh.

This book is probably familiar to many people, just not with this title.  It was almost immediately republished as “Ten Little Indians” until it was determined that was also offensive and was republished as “And Then There Were None.”  The local school district has asigned this as summer reading for several years in a row. No school district would assign it with the original title. The original title is rarely mentioned in current printings.  It will say ‘previously printed as “Ten Little Indians.”‘  This means that it often ends up with a rather disturbing cover design if you DO know the publication history.

Imagine this cover with the original title. It would be yanked off every bookstore shelf in a heart beat! Pretending it never happened just creates a worse situation.

Of course the original title referred to a common 19th century nursery rhyme which was illustrated in many different editions.

Source

This in no way forgives the use in the Christie book, but it provides context.  If all the earlier books had been destroyed, the book’s title would have made no sense.  Tossing either due to modern sensibilities destroys a bit of a the past and makes it easier to forget just WHY the term is offensive and just how pervasive racism was and still is.

Sometimes the use of offensive terms was meant specifically to shock and offend and recall that past.

Source

The title conveys the subject matter well. You have a good feel for this autobiography just based on the title.  It would not have had quite the same impact with a more politically correct title. (and it is still is in print with this title)

Sometimes books themselves originate a particular term.

Source

If all copies of this vanished, it would be unclear where the term had originated.  As with the example above this, there were also attempts to reclaim the term as it lent its’ name to a erotic magazine in the 70s.  Culture builds on culture… even when the historical roots are offensive. Even if a term is successfully reclaimed, people KNOW its been reclaimed.  But it they don’t know what it was reclaimed from, it loses much of its significance.

Pop culture feeds upon itself, building on what went before.  Unfortunately this means that if the context is no longer widely known, people wonder why everyone is upset over recycling and old image.

Source

Without knowing the context, recycling the “mammy” design back into wide use seems harmless.  But just because the context is more obscure doesn’t mean it’s not there, ready to blow up again.  What was acceptable even 30 years ago is no longer acceptable today.  The next generation can easily offend the last generation by recycling material that they don’t know the context for.

While these potentially offensive  items deserve to stay in circulation because of their historical and cultural significance, they do require more careful handling than your average book.  Many items can probably be put on display without issue because they’re recognized as using archaic terms that have a specific historical meaning that can’t be conveyed with another term.

Source

Other things, well, they probably shouldn’t be mixed in with the general stock.  They may need to be kept in a cabinet or possibly online only for people looking for items from a specific era.  Keep them accessible, but not in the face of people that aren’t expecting to trip over potentially offensive material in their local book shop.  Handled tastefully they can often provide a window into the past that helps explain the presents.  They’re valuable to collectors and historians alike.

Source

These types of books are not for everyone.  Even many dealers may feel uncomfortable handling them and feel they cannot deal with them in a respectful manner. In that case, your best bet may be either not acquiring the item at all or passing it on to another dealer to handle.  Some items are almost guaranteed to cause offense, no matter how carefully handled.  They were offensive then and they’re offensive now!

Source

(that book is intended as a “humor” book.  a very tactless humor book, even for the time it was published)

It’s up to individual dealers to decide how they want to deal with such materials, but just because a book uses racist terms or has an offensive cover is no reason to automatically ban it from your shop.  Such items have their place. That place may not be in YOUR shop, but they still have a part to play in history.  The ugly parts of history should not be forgotten or they will come back to haunt us.

This job is going to be big. I have tried to do this before and it all went horribly wrong. I almost felt like I was parting with one of my children! I had paid money for almost all of them, and I kept thinking – every time I put a book in the To Be Donated pile, that someone might buy it. If I just relist it one more time it will go. This occurred with approximately 90% of my To Be Donated pile.

I acknowledge this is another area I am not terribly good at.

When I first started out, and I had sold all of my old books, I would go up to my local shopping centre and trawl through the book departments searching for new stock to on-sell.

The particular shop I would go to has a couple of bargain bins which I now know were remainders but back then they were cheap treasures, and I just couldn’t believe that nobody else had thought of doing this. So I would walk out with trolley loads of books. All very cheap, and almost completely unsellable! I was indescrimanent. I didn’t care that I hadn’t heard of the author. Look, they have 5 copies – it must be a REALLY good book. I’d better buy all of the copies just in case they sell well.

Or I would go into the shop and look at a particular author and think to myself “I had that one at home and it sold so I’ll get it again”, only to find when I got home that I had 3 copies already and it was another title from that author that sold really well (not the 3 copies I had). The title that never, ever appeared in the bargain bins.  I managed to do this quite a few times but seem now to have managed to retrain my brain.

I’ve since learnt the value of Google searches, EBay completed sales, Abe Books and other various book search facilities. They are educating me on what sells well, and what doesn’t (although a quick look in my excel spreadsheet should have told me that J)

I’ve learnt to have a list in my bag (which I’m currently transferring over to my phone) that has my most sold books. I also have access to a list that was compiled by many wonderful sellers (thank you again) of their most sold books/authors. I tend to refer to that on a very regular basis.

But I digress.

I wonder how others make the decisions on when it’s time to start lightening the stock load. How do you make the choices on what stays and what goes?

I guess you know what has been sitting on a shelf for too long so they would be the first ones to go. The recent post by Louis Gereaux, Improving Inventory Turnover In Your Bookshop, gave some excellent advice on stock inventory and what a good bookstore should aim to turnover in a given year.

But then the unexpected (and sad) happens. We’ve just recently had a few very prominent authors pass away and people have started buying their books again. I realise that this is usually only short lived and the ‘rediscovery’ of the author doesn’t tend to last too long, but some of the titles written by these authors may have been on the To Be Donated pile. They may have been sitting on the shelf for a few years – and will now probably sell.

This does not, in any way, help me with my dilemma on what to donate and what to keep.

Perhaps I might just keep them all for a few more years and hope some of these authors (usually the obscure ones of course) rise to some sort of prominence so I can offload them at a great price? Or maybe I should just send my list of unsellables to Oprah and see if she can include one of the authors in her Book Club?

We recently decided to relocate some bookcases in the store and that was an adventure.  It turned out we couldn’t put the bookcase where we wanted because the slight slope to the floor meant the bookcase was too tall at one end.  Oops. It was off by a 1/4 inch.  We also moved the front counter at the same time.  That involved moving it around multiple times and installing it slightly off square to make it fit in an octagonal bay.

It doesn’t seem to matter how well you measure, you always have to wiggle fixtures around a bit to get them to set just right.  Even if you do get them in the “right” spot, you may end up moving them again shortly thereafter as customers interact with them in a way you didn’t intend, or something else crops up.  We moved another bookcase when we moved the desk and it seems to now be casting a shadow in the mystery section.  Fortunately we were planning on replacing that light fixture anyway, so moving it over 6″ won’t be a big deal…

But nothing has beaten the very first remodeling job we did at the store for sheer craziness.  It looked like it would be such a simple project…

This was a terrible layout, but it came this way when I bought the business.   Not only was it narrow, it’s a dead end! Once upon a time, this was a hallway.  Here is my mother unloading the bookcases before we moved them. (Thanks Mom!)

The reason for moving the case was because there was a door behind it!  It should be a simple matter to move the bookcases on both sides and open the door.

On the other side of the door, there was another bookcase.  It should be simple to empty and remove the case.

Wait, wasn’t there supposed to be a DOOR there?  HAHAHAHA! Simple remodeling project… famous last words…

After a call to the landlord, we got a keyhole saw and cut a hole in the paneling only to find the door had no knob and was nailed into the doorframe.

Haven’t I read this horror novel?  If not, it’s a great setup.  The only way this set up could get better is if I was an occult bookstore.  “During a remodeling project, the main characters find a boarded over door in the wall. The doorknob had been removed and the door is nailed into the frame, but they open it anyway unleashing…”

Mostly unleashing a lot of dust.  We ended up taking the half rotten door out with a sledgehammer.

Did I mention the store is across from the Masonic temple?  And we’re in New England?

If it was a horror movie everyone would be screaming at the screen right now going “NO, DON’T OPEN THE DOOR!!!”

Lovecraft would have loved this plot.  So would Stephen King.

This is what it looks like today (after a second remodeling job to make it work a little better).  The door frame was painted a cheery blood fire engine red afterward to make the Elder Gods welcome make sure people didn’t bump into the door frame while turning the corner.

Remodeling when you’re in a building that’s more than a century old never goes exactly as planned.  The sad part? There’s ANOTHER boarded over door and a boarded over fireplace in the middle of the space!  I still have more opportunities to have remodeling go horribly wrong!

I really do love my location most of the time.  It has great character and fits well with the store.  It makes it look like the maze of books that people expect from a used bookstore.  It sure doesn’t feel like a commercial bookstore with a standardized floor plan.  They’re constantly surprised by what’s around the next corner and delighted by discovering “hidden” treasures in the stacks.  It’s a little adventure to find out what treasures lurk around the next corner.  But when it comes time to remodel, I sometimes long for a level concrete slab for a floor and an empty warehouselike interior.