Cleaning Up

Over the years, I have gathered a lot of books. Most of them are now for sale. Some of them, of course, we want to keep. But then there is that middle group, that we are not sure what to do with.

They fit several categories.

1. Books that have no market value. These are books that list on other dealers’ websites at $5 to $10. Or they are books whose condition makes them unsalable.

2. Books that have market value, but where there are so many for sale, that the idea that someone would buy one from A. Richard is remote. These are books that may sell for $30 to $40, but where there are twenty or more listed for sale. If we had a physical store, we would hold on to these books for on-site customers. But we don’t.

3. Books that may have some value, but are so large or heavy that their shipping cost would either make them impossible to sell or would absorb most of the profit.

We have all three.

I am sitting next to a pile of books that we will probably donate to one or another charity for their annual book sale. Each of these books is a book of interest. I think.

Let’s look at a few of them, picked at random.

1. The Official Guide Book to the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Clearly of interest, but there are many for sale, and the condition of this one is far from the best. Did you attend the 1939 Fair? Did you go to the Junket Food Products Exhibit, and get to see how Junket Quick 4 minute Fudge is made? Did you meet the Liberty Girl at the air-conditioned Macfadden Theater? Did you see Lucky Strike cigarettes being made? How about the 150 cows in the Borden Company exhibit, where the cows got milked on a merry go round? Of course, all the states had their buildings, as did most foreign countries. My mother visited the fair. She was in the Czechoslovakian exhibit at the very time the staff was told that Hitler had taken over the Sudentenland. She said that the shock and tears were unforgettable.

2. A first edition, with dust jacket, of Sinclair Lewis’ late novel “Bethel Merriday: a Novel of the Young Girl on the Stage”. Not one of his better know books, this might explain why there are so many of these for sale for $20 or less. “That was the first time that anyone ever called her an actress—June 1, 1922, Bethel’s sixth birthday. There was no spotlight, no incidental music, and her only audience were her mother and a small dog looking regretfully through the window of a boardinghouse. But she was sensational….” Doesn’t make you want to go on, does it?

3. “The Penn Country and the Chilterns” by Ralph M. Robinson, published in 1929 by John Lane the Bodley Head, Ltd., and illustrated by Charles J. Bathurst. This is a tough one. On the one hand it is easy: it is not a book you would most likely be interested in reading and there are a surprising number for sale. But on the other hand, it is a very attractive book. It is a little oversized. It is in quite good shape. The paper stock is of very good quality. And the art work is attractive. It looks like a somewhat rare, and desirable, book. Apparently, it isn’t.

4. The 11th printing of Nabokov’s “Lolita”. Here’s one you would want to read, but you can buy it for a dollar.

5. “The Story of South Africa” by John Clark Ridpath, published in 1899. A gargantuan book, halfway between a normal volume and a coffee table book with over 600 pages. An elegant book, that would cost about $40 on the web, our copy is, to put it simply, falling apart.

Each of these books at a used book sale should make someone happy. And the best thing we can do, considering how much we have in stock, and our tight shelf space, is to give them away.

Once again, gotta get back on track.

Major posting tonight.

The First 86 Books Sold

That is the grand total from January 3 to March 9.  If you asked me when we started, I would have said that 86 books over this span of time is more than I anticipated.  But because sales were so strong in January, and have seemed to have progressively slow down, I am not particularly happy with the number.  But there might be a number of things at work.  The economy for one.  And everyone has now spent their Christmas money.  I understand that there is some seasonality to this business; I am just not yet familiar with anticipated ebbs and flows.

Because each book that we have was bought individually, I feel some connection to many of them.  I looked back at the books we have sold so far, to see which of them I might miss the most.  They are not necessarily those which sold for the most money, or those which are best known.  Here goes:

1.  I will miss the small travel pamphlet titled L’armenie Sovietique, an Intourist travel booklet printed in the 1930s in French.  I will miss it because I know I won’t find another, and it had a beautiful stylized cover, filled with yellows and blues and reds.  I am not sure why I didn’t take a photo of that cover before it left town.  Its new home is in Switzerland.

2.  I will miss Kate Waller Chambers’ privately printed A Little Confederate Girl’s Recollections of the War , her memories of childhood in Montgomery, Alabama during the 1860s (published in 1910), and signed to her uncle, but I will admit that, as to this very hard to find book, which we shipped to a collector in Florida, I did make a photocopy of the complete text before I sent it on.

3.  I will miss The Politics of Repentence by Andre Trocme, a French Catholic clergyman active in the resistance during World War II, because Trocme was such an admirable fellow and, again, I won’t find another book signed by him.

4.  I will miss Andre Aciman’s Out of Egypt, because it was such a nice copy of such a wonderful book.

5.  I will miss Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist  and Francoise Gilot’s Vivre avec Picasso  just because, I guess.

6.  I will miss Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation because I always figured if I could know everything that Clark put into that book, I would have a much better understanding of western culture than I ever will.

7.  I will miss Margaret Truman’s biography of her father for obvious reasons.

8. And I will miss both of Philip Agee’s books, On the Run and Inside the Company because I am sure that they contains stories that would have fascinated me, had I bothered to read them.

What is a first edition

Sometimes, I can’t tell.

For example, we have for sale a very nice copy of a book by Alison Lurie called “Foreign Affairs”.  It was published by Random House, and it says “First Random House Edition”.  It also says that there was a limited, signed first edition published by the Franklin Press.

Does my copy qualify as a first, as the other was one of the Franklin’s limited editions that don’t get sold on the open market?

On the other hand, the publication line item that often tells you if a book is a first edition starts with number 2, not number 1.  This would normally give you a hint that this is not a First Edition, but here what does it mean?

Does it mean that there was the limited Franklin Edition first edition, so this is called #2, even though it says First Random House Edition? Or might it mean that in fact, there was an earlier printing of the Random House edition, so that this is not a true first edition, first printing, but rather a second printing of the First Random House Edition?

See the confusion?

Now first editions are not very importan to me personally, but to some they are.  And a potential customer wrote me this morning about this book, with a simple question:  Is it a first edition?

How do I answer?

D.H. Lawrence and the price of a book

I am currently reading one of D. H. Lawrence’s early travel books, Sea and Sardinia.  the edition I am reading is a Penguin paperback edition.  The Penguin edition was published in 1944, during the heart of World War II.  Because of wartime shortages, I assume, nothing was as it should be, and the paper stock was bound to yellow and dry out fairly quickly.  In addition, the cover has completely come off the book.

You can find this book for sale at www.abebooks.com for as little as $1.50.  Of course, that copy appears to be in much better shape than mine.

You can also by a copy of Sea and Sardinia on abebooks for $850.00.  It is a hardback, and a first edition.

So, two copies of the same book sell for a difference in price of $848.50.

And the text is the same.  And the reading pleasure is probably the same, as well.

Go figure.

How to reach A. Richard Books.

Until we get our website set up………

go to www.abebooks.com,

then click on “bookstores” on a top line towards the right,

then write A. Richard (don’t forget the period) in the line that says ‘name’ ,

then click on that line, and click on the only choice it gives you, A. Richard Books and More, LLC

OR, you can go directly to

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/StoreFrontDisplay?cid=51339573

You can search our entire inventory of 5500 on line books, or browse through our special categories (which together reflect about 50% of that inventory at this time)

So sales have slowed down

but I did register a domain name:  www.arichardbooks.com.  Not sure what I will do with it, but I appear to own it for the next five years.  I bought it through www.godaddy.com.  Hope that they are reputable.

“The Orientalist” by Tom Reiss

I am half way through this book and it is terrific.

Just thought I’d tell you.

Sometimes the Condition is Awful

Take “Toasts and Maxims”, published by Greening & Co., London, about 100 years ago.  There are nine copies for sale on www.abebooks.com.  Mine is the least expensive at $20, because the condition is so bad.  Actually, except for the cover, the condition is pretty good.  But the cover of this paperback is torn to pieces.

Well, you can’t judge a book by its cover, they say.  But it seems that you have to price a book at least in part on the basis of the condition of its wrappings.

Now some of the maxims are the obvious ones:  “Women don’t dress to please the men, but to worry other women”.

But what about: “You could not get a girl with freckles to worry about such trifles as Consols”?  What could that possibly mean?

Or:  “A bird on a bonnet is worth five on a plate.”

Or:  “Chop and there will be chips.”

Or even: “It’s always dark under a lamp”

I am going to ponder all of these.  And more.

The Institute of International Labor Research

I am not sure if this organization still exists (I could Google it, couldn’t I?), but in the 1950’s it issued a pamphlet called 50 Million Captive Women”, which criticized the world’s Communist regimes’ espousal of gender equality.  Basically, the conclusion was that women were at a decisive disadvantage in Communist countries because they had to do the same work as men, while having as well to do traditional women’s work.

The Institute was headquartered in Mexico City, with an office in New York.  The pamphlet was “printed in Mexico City by organized workers”.

So, is the Institute leftist/non-Communist?  Or is it rightist?  I am not sure.

But another question is what to do with a pamphlet (50 pages)  like this.  Should I list it for sale? (There appear to be no Institute pamphlets for sale at www.abebooks.com).  Or should I put it back on a shelf where it stay untouched for years?