Sunday night, Mr. Miles Davis on the deck. Books everywhere. All five "new arrivals" units (10' x 6' = 60 linear feet of books) filled since Saturday morning, and another 2500-odd mystery pocketbooks still in boxes around the desk, waiting to be unpacked, cleaned, priced, and filed away onto the shelves of what is now probably the largest collection of mysteries in Vancouver, if not the Lower Mainland.

Buds on all the trees outside.

Steve, one of the regular scouts, was in late this afternoon, lamenting the decline of his industry. In the old days (eg., 1960s-70s-80s), very few bookstores paid for recent books, preferring to spend their scarce cash flow on antiquarian stock. Hence, shelf stock went to the Salvation Army, or Value Village, or some other thrift store, where it was disinterred by a small army of freelance scouts and carried into dealers, who paid the scouts next to nothing for it.

Nowadays, most reputable stores pay for recent stock, and most thrift stores think they're the Strand Bookstore. So much stock goes directly from consumers to dealers, and the scouts make do with the (inevitably overpriced) dregs that show up at library sales, church sales, & etc. The upside from the scouts' point of view is that, thanks to Alibris, ABE, Biblio, etc., anyone with a computer can now go into business as a "used book dealer."

These changes don't frighten me, but some of them do puzzle me. Case in point: the woman from Langley who drove in today to buy mystery paperbacks, because I have "better selection and prices" [my italics] than her local Value Village. Sure enough, over 40% of my paperbacks are now cheaper than they are at Corporate Thrift Store. Go figure!
- posted by cjb @ 8:03 PM