Week 8: Where do you buy books?
somewhat demystifying the sources of the antiquarian book market
Hello a day late! If you would like a warning next time I decide to delay the newsletter, you can upgrade to the Grandma Phyllis subscription package. Benefits: I will text you so you don’t worry about the status of the newsletter. It costs nothing and also doesn’t exist.
The reason I delayed is because today I took a day trip with my boss to go look at someone else’s books in person. This trip felt especially luxurious because most of the book-buying we have done in the last three months (since I began working for her) and the last 12 months (since the Patrick Stewart began) has been entirely online, and by most, I mean all.
Before I dive into the ways that books change hands from private collections or one-off sellers all the ways up to the top book firms, I’ll just throw the key takeaway at the top: when books enter the antiquarian market, they will often float upwards from seller to seller until they hit their price ceiling, and then they are (usually) sold to private buyers or institutions who are not looking for a profit margin.
Seems intuitive, right? If you’re good with that summary, see you next week. But I find untangling the streams that booksellers wade in to find and buy and sell books rather fun. And off we go:
In times when we are not all more likely to be disease vectors, booksellers and librarians often meet at major antiquarian book fairs, which are a combination of selling-buying-schmoozing-networking. For both individual buyers and professional book people, fairs are an opportunity to meet and see booksellers of all specialties in one space, and they are a reunion of friends and colleagues. Fairs are also a financial linchpin for many booksellers, who display their heavy hitters to attract both institutional and private customers (in very unusual circumstances, shipping those heavy hitters across the world leads to…Mission Impossible-style heists that take years to solve).
One of the last major events in New York before the Patricia Arquette shut us all down last March was the annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, which unfortunately doubled as a super spreader event that infected dozens of booksellers (including some of my friends and colleagues), and eventually claimed the life of Alfredo Breitfield, a bookseller in Buenos Aires.
Since the Patti Smith, bookselling, including fairs, has shifted almost entirely online. Some online fairs have really nailed interfaces and search capabilities, others have not. Some dictate item maximums, and others do not. The latter kind of online book fairs are especially difficult if you’re not sure which sellers to visit or what items you might be looking for, and doomscrolling through 250 items per booth across 300 booths is enough to make your brain deflate like a three-day old birthday balloon.
On the flip side, some junior booksellers apparently like the virtual fairs more because they give them more latitude to suggest stock; at major fairs, junior partners often manage booths while senior partners actually scout new stock. The virtual interface levels the playing field (not to mention reaches people who might never otherwise attend a book fair. I’m a big proponent for digital accessibility, and also I’m tired of staring at my computer. Both can be true).
Another stream for booksellers is ex-Libris, an email listserv dedicated to rare/antiquarian book-world-adjacent things, both institutional and commercial. Like many listservs, people share events and job postings or ask questions about how to identify provenance or signatures. Every Tuesday is catalogue day. On Tuesday, booksellers are allowed to send out their catalogues (and if they send them on other days, they get scolded by the moderators). A designated catalogue day gives everyone a fair shot at selling things on the same day, instead of allowing a free-for-all that might favor bigger firms that produce catalogues more regularly than smaller independent sellers. (Although one of my favorite frequent list-serv posters shares 3 new books a week and I respect that so much. Subject line: “3 new books.” I click immediately. You’re telling me I only have to read 3 book descriptions? Quick and simple. Sometimes I open one of these emails and it says “New list of 500 books about cephalopods!” Immediate exit.)
On average, I get 40 catalogues each Tuesday, ranging 4 to 200 pages in length, featuring anywhere from three to 3 million books. I turn on my podcasts, open my inbox, and start scrolling. I have a running list on my computer of things that we’re looking for, but I am also searching for items that give me ~a vibe~. It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, really difficult to gauge a book’s vibe through a two-dimensional screen.
The downside of lists that come through ex-Libris is that their materials are at their price ceiling: booksellers do have to make a profit, after all, so scouting items through the lists is very hit-or-miss. Sometimes items are already described so fully that I cannot imagine a new angle that could bump up the price. Other times, a book holds promise, but I read and research too slowly and we lose it to someone quicker. Eso si que es, life moves on.
Which brings me to the last source of books at this moment: the trifecta of Google-Etsy-eBay. Really! I am still developing a knack for triangulating the right search terms to find good stuff on Etsy and eBay, but my boss is very good resurfacing from the depths of the double-digits of Google search results with intriguing stuff.
In some ways, plucking books from one-off sellers on Etsy and eBay is the digital version of another mode of book-buying: scouting secondhand bookstores. A lot of secondhand bookstores manage antiquarian sections of various sizes, and many regional secondhand bookstores operate as waystations between collections in far-flung country homes and the big antiquarian booksellers. Shawn Bythell, of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland, writes about this in his book Diary of a Bookseller (which I recommend reading if you seek to indulge the inner monologue of an exemplary misanthropic bookseller). He recounts various instances of being called out to some drafty country house, picking through large collections of books on trains or fish or British landscapes, and choosing the potentially profitable books, the best of which are then occasionally bought by bigger specialist firms in London.
A somewhat comparable path for books is from private collections to auction houses (which are their own kind of waystations), but even auctions are more difficult these days because there is more competition between booksellers who need that profit margin and wealthy independent buyers who do not.
Given the many different places one can find books, the actual process of buying books is rather straightforward:
we look at the stuff,
we consider if and how it meets the criteria of the kinds of materials we are interested in,
we check how the list price compares to other priced copies on the market (and how does this copy compare in condition/significance to others on the market?), and
we check how many institutions already have it (because if you sell to institutions and they already have that book, there is not a market for that book).
I hope this preamble clarifies how this trip was a breath of fresh air from zombie-eyeing my computer for 8 hours a day. What a relief to look at new books in person! And talk to another human! In person! I eagerly await when doing so is not a novelty, and I wonder how long it will be before I take such interactions for granted as I once did. But the joy of meeting a new person and looking at new books also speaks to how bookselling is a very social business for many people: books are bought and sold to and from colleagues and friends, and much of the knowledge of who to go to for what speciality is introduced in person, through professional and personal connections.
Antiquarian bookselling is unnecessarily opaque, and I have the benefit of a wonderful mentor who expands my understanding of the field, but most library students do not have these kinds of experiences. As we drove home, we chatted about how many junior librarians will likely lose out on opportunities to visit big fairs in the aftermath of the Patton Oswalt due to budget cuts; losing introductions to booksellers via senior librarians might stall librarian-bookseller relationships down the line. But that’s a different issue. Just as it is difficult to gauge the vibe of a book through a screen, so too is it difficult to discern the boundaries of and entrances to the antiquarian book world from your mother’s sunroom.
Housekeeping and birdseeding
house
Here is an update on my paint-by-numbers. That is my face in paint! Pretty wild.
What I read this week: Because I spent every free moment painting my own face, I was a little stalled. Nearly done with Natural Enemies of Books, and next up is Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz, which is April’s book for Roxane Gay’s book club. She interviews the authors at the end of each month and the conversations have been stellar.
bird
The finches’ feathers are nearly completely yellow now and they are amazing. I didn’t realize just how dull they get in the winter until the color roars back in the spring. Also on the birdfeeders this week: a magnificent robin and a grackle who was too heavy and locked the birdfeeder on himself. Tough luck, my guy.
More later.
I can't stop laughing at the various P names.