Occupational Hazards of the Second-Hand Book Trade | Hacker News Reader

Occupational Hazards of the Second-Hand Book Trade

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> Williamson’s astonishment that a Kilmarnock edition of Burns could have made £350 in the early twentieth century would doubtless have been surpassed had he known that a copy sold for £40,000 in 2012 through the Edinburgh saleroom Lyon & Turnbull.

I couldn't help but use the Bank of England inflation calculator. 350 quid in 1902 is the same as about £25K in 2012. So the rate of return of holding onto the book for 110 years isn't actually that high.

A nice slice-of-life article. The world of used and rare booksellers has always been fascinating and alluring to me, a lover of books.

Books like "Club Dumas" (upon which the great yet unfortunately directed movie "Ninth Gate" is based) as well that offer a fictionalized peek into the world I find utterly captivating.

For folks that enjoy the article I highly recommend the 2019 documentary "The Booksellers." Such great stuff. I someday hope to be fortunate enough to be something more than an amateur collector, though I wonder if having the means to simply buy the editions you want outright rather than having to hunt them down might somewhat diminish the thrill :)

> great yet unfortunately directed

What a silly thing to say

Not at all. It's a flawed jewel and departs from Perez Reverte in so many ways. Lots of films are unfortunate to direction or story, it doesn't have to stop them being great.

For folks that enjoy the article I highly recommend the book/s it is taken from. Shaun Blythel tales of owning a bookshop are a lovely read. Nothing epic, just interesting slice-of-life stuff.

Club Dumas is worth mentioning because there are few really good novels involving the rare book trade. Most of that aspect of the book didn't make it into the movie, though. As in most cases, it's best to just regard the book and movie as distinct creations.

My partner ran a branch of "Skoob" books here in Brisbane, ex Sicilian Avenue by Holborn Tube in London. It was a dirty business, handling old volumes. It closed in the 90s. The book trade is a hard grind.

A huge number of copies of both "future shock" by Alvin Toffler (it led John Brunner to write "shock wave rider") and "A voyage to Arcturus " by David Lindsay, (one of the most depressing scifi novels I have ever read) got dumped on her by the London shop.

Also a copy of "Codex Seraphinus" which I wish we'd hung on to, it was sold under value.

She edited the Skoob guide to British second hand bookshops. Happy days driving around.

Petersfield bookshop > Hay > Voltaire & Rousseau (glasgow) > Charing X Rd

I have both the 1st edition Codex Seraphinianus and the 40th year reprint (as a coffee table copy). It's a fun book, entirely useless and living in the spirit of any mechanical device ever drawn by Dr. Seuss.

I think more people should know about it.

I'm wondering if there's an equivalent to Discogs for old books?

They have pretty much every record ever recorded, in every release, in every country. If you have a release you think is rare, the buyer might ask you about the "dead wax", the writing on the space near the label after the last track. You can accept bids on it. They know all about shipping costs. I found it all to be a very pleasant experience.

But it would be nice if the used book market stayed old-fashioned.

I've never used discog but abebooks.com might be like what you are describing.

I felt better about Abebooks before Amazon got their hands on it. Now, I'll only turn to it as a last resort.

Oh, I didn't know amazon had bought them out. The whole project was first developed by a local second hand bookstore here on Vancouver island.

I didn't, either. From what I can tell, they have a fairly light touch with their acquired companies (Zappos, Goodreads, IMDb). At least at first.

It varies, the one called bookpages.co.uk became amazon.co.uk almost immediately, mobipocket sort of disappeared into Kindle services, bookdepository (a later UK purchase) continues to operate in its own fashion, shipping books for free in padded envelopes one at a time.

The old and rare book market is still completely old fashioned. Most of the best books on the field are out of print and themselves hard to find (we collectors horde them).

See my other reply to you about bibliographies. There isn’t a central repository because we’re talking about millennia worth of very messy data [1]. Instead we have to first find a bibliography (usually itself an old or rare book from the same decade or century), make sure its not full of shit, then use that to identify the books we’re actually interested in.

Edit: should have added a disclaimer that I collect books that were published before the ISBN was a thing. There’s definitely an ISBN database

[1] collecting pre-Gutenberg manuscripts is insanely fun, hard, and eye wateringly expensive

I read his earlier book, “Confessions of a Bookseller”. Recommended, esp if you love used book shops and those in their orbits.

Has anyone held a garage sale in the Portland area and had people with barcode readers pricing every book your selling? (And at 8am)

My dad has a friend who has been a book hound for half a century and says coders are everywhere now and relatively bad at it - they’re utterly flummoxed by books without isbns for example.

Where’s your ‘ttoo?

Unscanable! An unscanable!

Now I'm wondering if there's a publishing equivalent of the "dead wax" on a record: some little marks that a printer makes that you have to know to look for.

There are indicators used to show which printing it is on some (most) books, but there are details that people can use to determine if a book is a first printing.

Yes publishers often have first edition logos that are different from or accompany their normal logo but it’s far from a fool proof method, especially for pre-20th century publications.

Book collectors depend on bibliographies that catalog publications and their print runs, sometimes providing detail on identifying features (like spelling mistakes fixed in later editions). Most bibliographies focus on a specific niche, era, or even an especially large collection. For particularly interesting books, provenance is often just as important as with artifacts.

I don’t even bother collecting anything with an ISBN unless it’s a rare short run nonfiction book. Completely pointless exercise with all the brainless competition.

There’s something about having to pour over paper bibliographies to identify first editions by spelling mistakes and print errors that really separates the wheat from the chaff.

> There’s something about having to pour over paper bibliographies to identify first editions by spelling mistakes and print errors that really separates the wheat from the chaff.

It truly is fun. In my case, it's trolling through old biographies of a minority language, hunting down authors names and then the names of their books. But it's great fun as often there's never been a complete list of these works compiled, so I'm sorta now the go-to person for a specific dialect region with regards to books by authors of the region.

My particular specialty is pre-Standard books written by authors from Conamara, in Ireland. I'm at the point where I have most of the first editions I know about from before the standard, with only three, at most (I need to get to a library to compare editions of one, as I think I have the school edition but am not sure if the school was the first edition published), eluding me. Then I'll branch out into other, similar dialectal regions.

It's so fun hitting up used bookshops for books in another language, and types of books like that. I'm kinda looking forward to expanding my dialectal region as it'll allow me to basically start the hunt all over again.

The experience of being a seller of old books is available to amateurs, in the form of volunteering at your local "Friends of the XXX Library". These organizations receive donations of books, sort and price them, and resell the books with the proceeds donated back to the library. Friends of the Palo Alto Library[1] processes tens of thousands of books in a year, and a single monthly sale weekend typically grosses over $15,000.

As described in the article, books do arrive in, mostly, cardboard boxes, or in paper or plastic shopping bags, and I think I remember a plastic washtub. And of course in a suburb, they arrive as a loose pile in the back of an SUV.

As volunteer manager of a section, I get to evaluate and price a couple hundred books a month. The primary tool for this is Bookfinder[2]. I can't imagine working in this business without it and other sites like Addall[3] and of course, eBay.

[1] https://www.fopal.org/volunteer [2] https://www.bookfinder.com/ [3] https://www.addall.com/used/

Oh, I love the Friends of the Library store. I've bought hundreds of books from them, and very low prices.

The book that the article quotes from - R.M. Williamson's Bits from an Old Bookshop (1904) - can be found in its entirety on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/bitsfromoldbooks00will/page/n9/m...

I always used to try to take a run past Wigtown when I was working in the far distant end of Galloway. It's well worth a trip if you're into books, or better yet bookshops.

The amount of padding in mobile in this page is ridiculous. I get 2-3 words per line in some areas!

Yeah, it’s egregious.

This made me wonder what Stephen Fry was up to these days. A documentary detective show following him around as he solves these antiquerian mysteries could go forever.

Beware old fakes: My family has an apparent 1st edition of sir Walter Scott's "peveril of the peak" which in principle is worth serious money, despite being in poor condition. It's printed publication date on the colophon is not the same as the recognised first edition dates in the copyright library catalogue in Edinburgh and we're told it's a Dutch or American reprint, they stole IPR all the time. (It's a year earlier, from memory. I guess it's an attempt to twist the law)

Dickens and Trollope complain about it.

TL;DR old books can be both old, and fake.

Ps if you can prove it's real ...

It’s not fake unless someone literally printed it out on some modern acid paper or whatever then tried to age them and pass it off.

It sucks to have an unauthorized print you thought was a first edition but it’s not a counterfeit. I’ve been on the hunt for a first edition Origin of Species for a few years now and keep getting something that’s almost but not quite the right one. Its madening

That’s why bibliography reference are so important in old/rare book hunting. You often gotta know down to the spelling mistake found on the third page in the first 200 copies or something equally random because unscrupulous publishers were legion in those days. They’d also sometimes run a secret shift to print a bunch of extra copies for graymarket sale which looked exactly like the first edition but with cheaper paper or cover material - these are the most infuriating

Pirate copy. A contemporary pirated book, with a fictitious first publication date on the colophon.

Ouch that really sucks, I'm sorry

Doesn't help you now but in case anyone else is thinking of getting into book collecting, a great start is A New Introduction to Bibliography by Philip Gaskell. It goes over centuries of the techniques and technologies used by printers which helps a lot with spotting fakes. It goes over fonts, paper, pigments, and so on. Lots of other little things to look for like paper weight and smell (the breakdown of lignin which smells faintly of vanilla)

A $20 WiFi microscope off Amazon that works with iOS and a cheap LED light source works wonders. I have a collection of cheap old books no one wants from a bunch of publishers across the time period I work most with as a control.

Note though that nothing stops someone from printing on old stock - printing presses are very simple tech that's easy to utilize for high value forgeries. That's where it can get really dicey and you have to start doing destructive chemical analysis on the pigments.

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