(no subject)

[oyceter]

Day two as a book buyer: Coolness!!

I am quite happy that now instead of hovering over the buyers and surreptitiously checking out all the books in the order while trying to clear the table and everything, I am now the one going through all the piles of books ^_^. Imagine that. They are paying me to flip through tons of books. Wow.

It's reinforced a lot of things that I knew before from working behind the buying counter, though, and it's just so fun seeing the different books people have. Actually, the majority of people have really boring books, but that makes the nice orders that much cooler.

It perpetually amazed me that the people who always ask for cash or a combination of cash and trade credit will almost invariably be the people who have musty books from the seventies and eighties on topics that go rapidly out of date. Or they will be people who always underline and highlight their books and wreck the spines in the process. Or they will have an order of books that they've left outside for six months or something, so that the books have been rained on and all sorts of nasty molds and insects have had a chance at the books. Or they will have thrown all their books in a garbage bag so even if the books were nice beforehand, by the time they've gotten to us, they're wrinkled and bent and dented.

And it's amazing that these people all have the same kinds of books -- lots of old self-help books and old, cheap cookbooks (not even the pretty kinds with glossy pictures, or nifty ethnic cookbooks), old success psychology or business books. I get bored just flipping through them.

Or they will have stacks of CDs that look like they've been played with a record player, they're that scratched.

Then there are people who keep their books in pretty nice shape, but unfortunately read (or get sick of) the exact same books that everyone else reads and gets sick of and sells back to us. Then I get to cart around armfuls of bestseller genre books or general fiction to see if we need them. And I always feel kind of bad turning them away, because a lot of the new customers think, "But these are nice books! Why don't you want them?" and I have to tell them that we see about twenty of them a day.

And then there are the orders that make me drool -- beautiful, pristine picture books in gorgeous colors and dust jackets, young adult hardcover and paperbacks in like new condition, fat and expensive art books from Abrams and Rizzoli. And once in a blue moon, there comes a person who has absolutely beautiful fantasy books in great condition, and (the big surprise) it's stuff I read. That's when I get a little nuts and start putting my name on everything ^_^. We almost never see Emma Bull or Patricia A. McKillip's non-Riddlemaster books.

It's just so much fun trying to keep track of all this stuff in my head.

(and it doesn't hurt that the boss says I am picking it up quite well, although I still feel like I mess up very often)

Comments

[dherblay.livejournal.com]

If you come across a copy of Dad's Nuke, by Marc Laidlaw, let me know.

Also, anything in hardcover by John Sladek, Philip K. Dick, James Crumley, and pre-1993 Lawrence Block . . .

Hell, I could probably take a few hours and come up with an agonizingly long list!

[oyceter]

Sure thing.

My list has grown exponentially since LJ and working at the store ;).

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Now I know why second-hand record store clerks can get so snooty ;-)

[oyceter]

I know, isn't it awful? ;)

The thing I really like about my boss is that he tries really hard to get the rest of us to remember that we are to be nice and non-snooty.

[actoplasm.livejournal.com]

In our used books department downstairs they hae this regular guy who comes in to sell books. And once he just got a whole load of books from an auction where a storage space had been abandoned and the owner of the storage place took all the books to the auction. So they ended up at our store with some others books the seller wanted to get rid of. The buyer gave him a deal for the other books and took all the books from the storage space essentially for free since in they were dirty, some in pretty bad condition, and he had to go through them all, painstakingly cleaning each one, and then deciding what was sellable and what was trash. What blew my mind was that it was an immense religious collection of works and I never knew these books even existed. And I thought that that was a wonderful aspect to buying used books: you see works that you never even imagined existed; of course the buyer knows I like anything medieval and has started holding stuff for me, which can be dangerous, since I will usually buy it, but that's something completely different.

[oyceter]

Oh that's awesome ^_^. We get some buys like that every so often, and they're really cool to look up... I think one of the older ones was someone's library of theosophy and metaphysics stuff from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

I love used books! Every time I look up stuff, it's still sort of boggling realizing just how big of a percentage of things out there are out of print.

[scrollgirl.livejournal.com]

Ooh, congrats on the new position! Sounds like book buying is pretty fun, all things considered. Lots of pretty books :P~~~ <-- that's me drooling, btw.

And yay for you that you're picking stuff up quickly and doing a good job! Very happy for you :)

[oyceter]

Thanks! Hee, too many pretty books, too little money! Alas, my poor wallet ;).