[This is extracted from my column in the MT VOID, 04/11/08.]
Well, book sale season is upon us and there seem to have been some major
changes this year in the nature of "Friend of the Library" (FotL) book
sales (and other fund-raising sales).
For example, many FotL sales now ban scanners. While some people seem
to think the laser scanner is a liability issue, I tend to believe the
people on the FotL boards who say that it is not that, and it is also
not just the fact that "normal" patrons were upset that the dealers
would grab huge quantities of books and then sit and scan them to see
which were valuable. It's that after the dealers scanned the huge
stacks of books they had taken, they would leave their rejects in a
heap, and it would take the volunteers hours to re-sort them. And
sometimes they would just commandeer some stretch of table space and
inconvenience everyone else in the process as well.
Checking the book sales web site, I see many have also ended the preview
sales as well. There has definitely been a conflict between dealers and
"readers", with the latter increasingly annoyed over "preview" sessions
in which dealers get a chance to cherry-pick the books. Oh, there was
an admission charge for this, but what is $5 or $10 to a dealer who buys
a few hundred dollars worth of books that they re-sell for five or ten
times that much? On the other hand, it is a fair amount to people who
want to buy a few books for themselves. In fact, the Bryn Mawr sale is
so popular that while they still have preview admission, it is by
lottery--they have decided either that there were too many dealers in
any case, or that they were losing customers from the bulk of the sale
because people felt the best items had been grabbed up already. But
many FoTL sales found out that many people had stopped coming because
the books were picked over. So they dumped the preview sale entirely,
advertised this fact (most say "*not* picked over" in bold letters on
their web sites), and discovered that they made *more* money this way.
This is also the reason for the higher prices ($1 for mass market
paperbacks, rather than 50 cents, for example). Dealers can still get
piles of books cheap, at least at the sales that have "Box and Bag Day"
(though see the next paragraph!). But the sales have a chance to sell
some of these at a better price to people who are more selective and not
looking for stock to list for $.01 on amazon.com. (On the other hand, I
find that the East Brunswick FotL pricing of *ex-library* mass market
paperbacks at $1 is off-putting.)
Many sales have also either discontinued "Box and Bag Day" on the last
day or put a size limit on the boxes and bags. I was talking about this
to another patron at the Bryn Mawr sale and he said he had been there
one year when someone had shown up with a *refrigerator* box on a dolly,
which he filled for $5! The East Brunswick FotL does not have a "Box
and Bag Day"; instead, non-profit organizations can make arrangements
ahead of time to come after the sale closes and take what they want for
free. (A friend says that she was at one sale where arrangements had
been made to send large amounts of what was left to a prison library.)
Anyway, on to the particulars.
Last year I bemoaned the fact that the paperback prices had risen to $1
at the Bryn Mawr sale. This year they kept that, but also priced almost
all trade paperbacks and hardbacks at $2 (as opposed to the individual
pricing of previous years). This "unit pricing" makes their setting up
the sale a lot faster, and avoids extra writing in books.
The East Brunswick FotL sale was very disappointing, for a couple of
reasons. First of all, the mall has cut back on the space the sale can
use by insisting that there be a wide walkway right through the center
of the area. This seems to have cut down the number of tables by about
a third. The result is a lot more boxes of books under the table at the
start of the sale--and less room in the aisles for those trying to go
hrough the boxes. Next, there was a lot of science fiction, but at
least 90% of the paperbacks were "Star Trek" novels. So even if one
could manage to go through the under-the-table boxes, it was hardly
worth it (unless of course, you were looking for "Star Trek" novels).
(I would suggest that any book sale that has this high a percentage of
"Star Trek" novels might want to make a separate "Star Trek" section.)
In any case, the cramped conditions, the enormous domination of "Star
Trek" in their science fiction section, and the higher pricing make me
really ambivalent about returning to this next year.
--
Evelyn C. Leeper
All art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment,
and that if it does not it dies and is forgotten. --Raymond Chandler
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