IOBA Standard - Printable Edition

A Guide to Improving Your Online Book Sales

Brendan Sherar

There is little doubt that the internet has changed the nature of the book business, just as it has altered many other trades and industries. For many booksellers, this has resulted in a substantial additional revenue stream for their existing brick and mortar, and for others it has allowed them to become professional booksellers, selling exclusively online. However, for many booksellers, it can pose a challenge as they struggle to adapt to the changing expectations of customers and of doing business.

Over the years with Biblio.com, I�ve seen many of the best business practices of some of the finest booksellers, and I�ve also seen some which leave much to be desired. Based on that experience, I�ve written the following guide with the intent of highlighting some of the best practices (and to point out ways to avoid the worst). Naturally, this is not a comprehensive guide to running an online business, but hopefully should serve as a bed of ideas from which you can grow your sales online.

Part I�Managing Your Inventory

1. Your online business is your data�so invest in it.

I know this sounds a little dramatic, but the simple truth is that without a carefully compiled database of inventory, you�re not going to sell your books online (not many, anyhow). In fact, it is such a vital part of the online bookselling business that I am astounded at how many people invest unending hours in adding to and maintaining their book database, but do not invest in software to best highlight and maintain their data.

In fact, I should bring up one thing right here. If you are hand-entering and maintaining your inventory directly on a listing website (or worse yet, more than one) without your own database program, you should read the rest of this section and immediately begin finding a software solution for yourself.

There are a few free software packages out there that are marginally adequate for some booksellers� needs, but the first time you want to be able to do something slightly �creative� with your inventory, you�ll find yourself up against a cold stone wall with no support. Like what, you might ask?

Well, let�s say you are tired of those 3,000+ modern fiction hardcovers on your shelves (say it ain�t so!) and want to get them moving�out. �Simple,� you think, �I�ll just re-price it all to be 50% off my original price.� But then you realize that in your Modern Fiction catalog, you�ve also got a nice run of Cormac McCarthy firsts. �OK,� you think, �so I�ll just do that for books priced under $50.� If you�re using one of the free solutions out there, you�d better stock up on your favorite jazz albums and Arabica roast coffee, because you�re in for a long evening. But it doesn�t have to be that way. Some of the very reasonably priced software programs out there can do all of this for you in a matter of minutes. And, if you want, you can still listen to jazz and have a cup of coffee.

If you are thinking that software programs are expensive and only for expert computer users, it�s entirely the other way around. These programs are built to be extremely user-friendly, and most offer great support along the way if you need help. Some of the programs out there which are great overall picks for price, reliability and support are:

-BookHound: http://www.bibliopolis.com (Windows and Mac)
-Booklist: http://www.clique.co.uk/booklist.htm (Windows)
-BookTrakker: http://www.booktrakker.com (Windows)
-Readerware: http://www.readerware.com (Windows, Mac, Linux)

One final note on your database, which I�d be totally remiss in ignoring. BACK UP YOUR DATA AT LEAST WEEKLY, IF NOT DAILY. I recommend making this a part of your daily routine. Before turning off your computer for the day, simply put a floppy or rewritable CD into your drive and literally drag and drop a copy of your data file onto it. Keep this backup copy in a separate location.

2. Keep your inventory accurate and up to date.

This sounds pedantic, but it is one of the biggest difficulties a customer faces in purchasing used and out-of-print books online. Not only is it disappointing to the customer, but it is frustrating, because they are left feeling that their time has been wasted. And this is a feeling they may well retain the next time they are considering a book purchase.

Of course, everyone in the bookselling industry knows that stock-outs occur occasionally for a variety of reasons, and no one would reasonably expect a bookseller to indefinitely maintain a perfect 100% fulfillment rate on their orders. However, it is possible for booksellers, whether small or large, to achieve fill rates of well over 98%. We have a number of booksellers on Biblio with inventories of more than 100,000 titles who maintain fill rates over 99%, as well as hundreds with very small inventories who are able to do the same. These, of course, are the shining examples, but, as a minimum, I would suggest working towards a 92-93% fill rate on all the sites you list on.

So, what are some major obstacles to achieving high fulfillment rates? First, check that you are using software that enables you to perform incremental uploads (i.e., upload only records that have changed since a certain date). Or, if you are using your own system (such as Excel), make sure to add a field called something like �Status,� which contains a brief notation as to the record�s status (for example, �A� for �Add this book� or �D� for �Delete this book�). This enables you to upload your changes daily, without having to rely on a purge and replace, or even worse, deleting records manually from all the sites you list on.

I would highly recommend against performing a daily purge and replace. Not only does this run the risk of pulling your listings offline for a period of time, but it is burdensome to listing sites, and can often slow down their ability to process your files. Using an incremental upload method like this, you should only need to purge and replace about once a month to �freshen up� your listings.

Sometimes when a book sells you may realize it is potentially a hot item�and one for which you may receive orders for from other sites very shortly. In these cases, immediately upon receiving the order, visit each of the sites you list on and manually delete that item. Just don�t forget to mark it deleted in your database as well.

Additionally, the occasional stock-out presents an opportunity to implement another best-of-industry practice. If you must reject an order because of a stock-out, try helping the customer find an alternate copy of the book by sending them a link to a search service or bookseller that has that title in stock, offering assistance such as, �Have a look at the third copy in the results list.� In the short term this will not make any money for you, but you will have just taken the first step towards building a long-term relationship with that customer.

Finally, if you list on multiple sites, give consideration to using a service or tool that allows you to update and add to your listings on multiple sites simultaneously, such as:

-BookRouter (http://www.bookrouter.com)
-Art of Books (http://www.theartofbooks.com)
-Fillz (http://www.fillz.com)
-BookTrakker (http://www.booktrakker.com)

3. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Although it�s impossible to precisely measure the increased sales conversions associated with placing images with your listings, I have often seen examples where booksellers who provide photos with most of their listings achieve 200-300% more sales than other booksellers.

Although scanning or taking photos of your books sounds like a laborious process, consider setting a certain threshold value for books you�d like to list with images�say all books greater than $75. Given the option between a digital camera or a scanner for capturing images of books, I would generally recommend a digital camera, since most people are already familiar with using a camera, and it is much more versatile in being able to capture three dimensional views of a book. You can get a serviceable digital camera or scanner that comes with a very easy-to-use image editing program these days for about $100 to $125.

So, how do you get started? Below is a quick checklist that should help.

-Purchase a decent digital camera, and install the software provided by the equipment manufacturer.

-Set up a �studio.� If you have the space in your office or storeroom, consider setting aside about three to four square feet to tack up a cloth backdrop. Steer away from using patterned cloth, or extremely light (such as white) or vibrant colors for your backdrop, as that will take the customers� eyes away from the book itself. Blacks, greys, browns, and dark blues tend to make good background colors. Another idea is to take a cardboard box about 2'x2' and line it with your backdrop cloth. This way, you�ve got an easily storable unit which is highly portable. Instead of carrying armfuls of heavy books to your studio, you can take your studio to the books.

-Take your photos. I recommend images which will display the spine and the top edge�this helps reinforce the fact that it is not just a stock image.

-Crop and size your photos. Using the software provided with your camera (read the accompanying documentation for specific instructions), crop your images so that the majority of the photo displays the book, leaving only a small border around the outside. Rotate the photo, if needed, so that it appears straight. Save a copy of the image as is (high-resolution), and then trim the photo down to 30-35k (about 300 pixels high) and save it in a separate folder by its inventory number. For example, if your inventory number is 0001234, save the photo as 0001234.jpg. This is the copy you will use to upload to the sites you list on. Saving the high resolution copy will allow you to easily re-use the photo for other purposes that require higher resolutions, such as print catalogs, display ads, etc.

-Upload your photos. Most services will allow you the ability to upload your photos en masse through FTP, provided they are named according to your inventory numbers. For site specific instructions, see their help sections.

-If a site allows multiple photos with your listings (Biblio.com does!), take full advantage of that, especially for the rarer items in your collection.

4. Give the people what they want.

Nearly anyone in the trade would have no problem understanding the following:

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. 1st Ed. VG in or. cl. with slight bumping to spine heel. In VG mylar protected dj. Short closed tear to front flap. 8vo.

However, with the advent of the internet, the industry has opened up to include millions of potential new customers. Take a look at this from the point of view of someone who has never learned the terminology, but would like a used hardcover copy of Italo Calvino�s Six Memos for the Next Millennium in good condition, and you�ll understand why many of them find it easier to just go to one of the mega-sites to buy a brand new or more simply described copy, rather than try to comprehend this description. Unless your products are so specialized as to interest advanced collectors only, consider adding one more line to your description to help reassure the well-meaning laymen out there, such as, �Overall, an attractive, clean copy with a small bit of wear.�

Also, many booksellers catalog their inventory with only five fields: inventory number, author, title, description, and price. While this is likely to meet the basic requirements for uploading to most sites, this minimalism is not likely to make up in aesthetics what it loses them in sales. Again, the internet has changed the way people shop for things. Customers online generally prefer a logical presentation of data and search options which allow them to refine their criteria or to see things bulleted by field. For example, if you are only cataloging in a limited number of fields, and a customer visits a site searching for �Golden Cockerel� as the publisher, your wonderful reasonably priced copy of T. E. Lawrence�s Secret Dispatches from Arabia is not likely to be found by the customer.

In short, try to catalog your books with distinct fields for distinct parts of the bibliographic description, rather than relying entirely on a prose form of description. At least try to separate out fields for publisher, publication date, ISBN, condition, edition, binding, whether the book is signed, and whether the book is a first edition/printing.

5. Include ISBNs wherever possible.

Unfortunately, too many booksellers neglect to include ISBNs in their databases for whatever reason. I suspect in part that some believe this cheapens their offerings. Others may not see it as important, and are reluctant to invest the small additional amount of time to include this information.

On the contrary, the ISBN is an important part of the bibliographic detail of a book, and is widely used by customers, and especially libraries, when searching for a title. Not only that, but some of the price comparison engines out there will not even pick up your listings unless they have ISBNs attached, so your book may be missing out on exposure to millions of potential customers.

Part II�Showcasing and Conducting Business

6. You mean business�make sure the customer knows this.

These days, nearly everyone has a story of how they�ve been burned in dealing with individuals on auction sites, or some of the major consumer resale venues. As a result, many are a little bit gun-shy when it comes to making purchases online from businesses they don�t know or have experience with. It can be hard for a potential customer to make a judgment call from among several similar offerings, and often the basis for this decision is derived from the way you�ve described your business. Make sure you stand out as reputable, fair, and honest.

So, how can you do this? Although not etched in stone, here are a few general points you might consider in presenting your business to the world.

-Choose a name for your business that boosts a customer�s confidence in you. Stay away from names that make you sound like an individual just selling off a couple dusty books from your attic. It sounds superficial, but we�ve seen that given the choice between the same product from �The River Village Bookstore� versus �ilovedogs879,� customers will nearly always buy from the former. Once you�ve chosen a name for your business, make sure to register a DBA (Doing Business As) certificate with your local government (inside the U.S., anyhow) so everything is on the up and up.

-Try to avoid using free e-mail account addresses for your business contact information. Again, although it sounds a little picky, this is very similar to the point raised above. To many people, e-mail addresses like something@hotmail.com or something@yahoo.com raise instant red flags. Not that they won�t do business with these folks, but it definitely makes people take a harder look at the individual or business. Unfortunately, these two companies in particular have a very tarnished reputation as havens for spammers and scammers.

-Include a generous return policy. Even with the most verbose descriptions and extra photographs, the customer is still making a purchase �sight unseen.� Make sure they know that the book can be returned if they made the wrong selection, or if it is incorrectly described. Consider offering a full 30-day return policy.

-Use your terms of sale to tell the customer how you are going to handle their order. If you ship by UPS, tell them so. If shipments are made within 48 hours, tell them that too. If you jacket all hardcovers . . . well, you get the idea. The more the customer knows about you and the way you do business, the more likely they are to make a purchase from you, and the less questions you�ll probably have to answer from them before and after the sale.

-Join a trade organization, and list those memberships in your terms of sale. Studies clearly show that trade association memberships help to boost customer confidence. If you�re eligible, consider pursuing a membership with organizations such as IOBA (Independent Online Booksellers Association), ABAA (Antiquarian Booksellers� Association of America), ILAB (International League of Antiquarian Booksellers), et al. In addition, there are many state or regional bookseller trade associations you may be eligible for. The bottom line is that if you place yourself in good company, you�ll immediately find yourself in good standing with a potential customer.

-If the site provides you with a place to describe your business, use it. Perhaps you might state how long you�ve been doing business, or your specialties. Include information that reinforces the customer�s faith in doing business with you. Be careful about sharing a whole lot of personal information about yourself in this area. Remember, the point is to assure the customer that you are a decent and fair business for them to enter into a transaction with rather than talking about your weekend hobbies.

7. People out there want to pay you for your books!

On Biblio.com, we have found that well over 90% of customers prefer to pay for items online with a credit card. If you�re not able to accept credit card payments from these customers, you may be achieving less than 10% of your potential sales.

If you do not currently accept credit cards, I highly recommend either setting up a merchant account or taking advantage of the credit card processing facilities offered by most listing sites. The sites� fees are usually very reasonable (usually about 5-6%), especially when you consider the fact that they usually absorb all risk of fraud charge backs, and you do not have to go through the frustration of credit cards being declined or billing address mismatches (which very often result in lost sales), since all of this is taken care of while the customer is still on the site with an eye toward finalizing the purchase.

If you would prefer to process your own credit cards, a phone/internet sales rate from a merchant account might run about 3-3.5% of each purchase. There may or may not also be a small monthly fee for account maintenance and equipment or software leasing. Some booksellers are able to get lower rates when they have a physical store where the card is present, however, this rate is supposed to be applied only to in-store purchases, and card issuers are increasingly cracking down on the practice of using a low �card present� account for processing phone or internet orders.

Some booksellers try to use PayPal to capture credit card payments for them, instead of using a merchant account or letting a listing site handle the processing. I would discourage using PayPal for this particular purpose for the simple reason that customers have to visit a separate site just to buy the book, and most simply give up, never completing the transaction. We�ve seen countless booksellers lose as much as 50% of their sales as a result of this.

So, either way, whether you use your own merchant service account or a service offered by a listing site, make sure that customers can buy your books quickly and painlessly with a credit card while you have them on the brink of finalizing said purchase.

Part III�Generating Repeat Business

This next section is all about one thing�repeat business. There is a great myth that, on the internet, repeat business doesn�t happen, and that shoppers are driven by nothing but the bottom line price on an item. Nothing could be further from the truth!

For most customers, shopping online can be a swirl of uncertainty and mistrust. With our company, for example, we spend a great deal of money on technical equipment and parts and have found a couple of vendors whom we trust. Whenever possible these are the vendors we choose to purchase from, even if we could get the part 20% cheaper somewhere else. We routinely see many customers who return to our site to transact repeat business with a specific bookseller. It�s all about establishing a trust relationship.

8. Don�t judge a book by its cover.

Despite that maxim, customers will. And to further abuse old platitudes, first impressions are lasting impressions. When a customer receives the book they�ve ordered from you, make sure the first thing they see is a product and package that you are proud to have supplied.

Make sure your books are clean. Our friend, Bern Marcowitz, with the help of Margot Rosenberg, has written a wonderful guide called The Care and Feeding of Books Old and New: A Simple Repair Manual for Book Lovers, in which he outlines some basic steps through which you can improve the presentation of your books, including cleaning and repair. Bern also moderates a book care forum on Biblio (http://forum.biblio.com) in which he will gladly answer your individual questions about preservation, presentation, and general care.

Consider investing in book jacket covers from companies like Brodart (http://www.shopbrodart.com), which not only protects your inventory but also improves the presentation of the product to the customer.

Try to use clean, new boxes without writing (or envelopes for low-cost paperbacks) for your shipments. That said, many booksellers have an admirable desire to reuse packaging, and I would encourage that. However, consider saving recycled packaging for sales to other booksellers or customers with whom you already have a relationship, rather than for your first shipment to a brand-new customer. Sturdy cardboard boxes can be purchased for 30-50 cents from either Brodart (http://www.shopbrodart.com) or ULINE (http://www.uline.com), as can padded mailers for about 20-30 cents each.

9. Keep customers in the loop on everything!

There is nothing more frustrating to a customer than to put their credit card information online and then hear nothing from the bookseller. Or, to order a book, and on the day they�re expecting to receive it, to finally get a notice that the book is unavailable. Always let your customers know the status of their order upon its receipt and shipment.

Also, consider using tracking for all orders over a certain price. The cost is often nominal ($2.30 through USPS), when you consider the value of both the book and the satisfied customer. For high value purchases, use Signature Confirmation, as this is the only way you can defend against credit card charges back from customers who claim not to have received their book(s).

It is also a good idea to update the status of your order on the site you received the order from. Many, many customers e-mail the listing service directly with questions about their orders, and the customer service reps at these services can be a big help to you in answering these types of questions, but only if you�ve kept them in the loop too!

10. Follow-up is king.

Nearly all listing services allow you to contact customers with information regarding their order. After you�ve shipped an item to the customer, send them an e-mail a day or two after you expect that they�ll receive their package, asking them if they�ve received it and are satisfied, and reminding them that you are there to help should they have any questions about their order. This is also a great time to remind them that you have similar items in stock or to offer them a coupon towards future purchases.

Please note that you should not take this as a license to send subsequent sales e-mails to the customer, unless they have requested that you do so. Not only is this impolite, but it is likely a violation of the federal CAN-SPAM Act or similar legislation, depending on the country you live in. However, sending a single follow-up to them regarding receipt of their order should be an acceptable practice in most cases. In no situation should you ever add the customer to a mailing list without their express consent.

11. Turn problems into opportunities.

Despite one�s best efforts, there will be cases where the customer feels they did not receive the product or service expected, and is disappointed. Take this as an opportunity to turn a disgruntled customer into a loyal customer. I�ve heard and experienced many cases where a bookseller is able to reach beyond their stated terms of sale to set things right with the customer, and later found that person to be among their best and most loyal repeat customers. When it comes to dealing with returns, complaints, and the resolution of disagreements with customers, here are some very important Dos and Don�ts.

-Do be polite, professional, and courteous in your responses, no matter how difficult the customer may be in their correspondence.

-Do respond quickly to all customer inquiries after their purchase.

-Don�t quibble with the customer over policies and procedures.

-Do readily agree to accept the return with a full refund, provided it is returned in the same condition as sent (unless it is a case of a package damaged in the mail).

-Do provide the refund as quickly as possible after you receive the returned merchandise.

-Don�t try to charge a restocking fee for returns.

-Do agree to pay the customer�s return shipping costs, unless it�s a case of the customer simply changing their mind.

-Don�t try to shift the blame onto someone else when something goes wrong, such as the Postal Service, the site they purchased the book on, etc. The customer does not care why something happened (or didn�t happen); they only want to know how you�re going to make it right.

-Do offer the disappointed customer a �consolation gift,� such as a coupon or agreeing to waive shipping on their next purchase from you.

-Do help the customer find another copy of the book they want, if it is a case where they inadvertently ordered from you expecting a different edition, binding, etc.

12. Enjoy yourself!

It is easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer size of the internet, competition, and new technology. While some of these tips are things many of you already practice, and some may give you new ideas for your business, the single most important thing is that you enjoy what you do. And, believe it or not, this could likely increase your business far more than any of the other tips in this quick guide. Your passion for what you do will be apparent to your customers, and that kind of enthusiasm will help you form long-lasting business relationships. After all, the love of books is what brings us all together in this industry, whether we�re booksellers, customers, or the people behind the scenes running the listing services or making the software you use.

So, as a final roll call, here are the points I�ve highlighted as some of the most important areas for consideration if you want to improve your online sales.

Your online business is your data�so invest in it. Make sure you have adequate software for managing your inventory.
Keep your inventory accurate and up to date. Be sure that your most recent books are always visible, and that your sold books are not.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Include photos of your books, at least for your nicer items.
Give the people what they want. Include language in your description that makes sense to people outside of the bookselling and book collecting industry.
Include ISBNs wherever possible. The ISBN is an important part of the bibliographical description of a book. Make sure to include it in all your listings.
You mean business�make sure the customer knows this. Let your customers see you as the professional that you are.
People out there want to pay you for your books! Make sure you accept credit card payments for purchases.
Don�t judge a book by its cover. But the customers will. The books they receive should be accurately described, clean, presentable, and well packaged.
Keep customers in the loop on everything! They should be informed at each step of the purchase process.
Follow-up is king. After shipment, follow up with the customer to ensure that they were satisfied with their purchase
.
Turn problems into opportunities. When things go wrong, focus on making them right, and you may win a lifelong customer.
Enjoy yourself!

Brendan Sherar is the President and CEO of the book search service Biblio.com out of Asheville, NC, and can be contacted at http://www.biblio.com

Ethics & eBay—No, Really!: Perspectives from a Modern Library Collector

Scot Kamins

Ah, Commerce! The sounds of the hawkers touting the superiority of their goods, the sights of the brightly colored merchandise shining in the sun, the smell of the camels—oh, wait. This isn't Morocco. How could I have become so confused?

Maybe because were in eBay, the world's largest flea market. And a flea bite is a flea bite, no matter what the source of the vermin whether it be a camel, a badly cleaned oriental rug, or a bookseller with the morals of a 42^nd Street watch salesman.

Step Right Up Everyone's a Winner

As a Modern Library specialist and webmaster of www.ModernLib.com, a website for Modern Library collectors, I get lots of e-mail from folks looking for leads on ML bargains and how best to find them. EBay would be the perfect place to find bargains if (among other things) you could trust what the listings say. But, of course, you can't. Eternal vigilance is the price of a great deal (sorry, Mr. Jefferson), especially in a virtual reality viper's nest.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that all—or even most—eBay sellers have larceny in their hearts. The majority of sellers I've encountered show no obvious inclinations to robbery or even deceit. Many are professional booksellers of long standing who adhere strenuously to a high code of ethics such as IOBA's own (http://www.ioba.org/code.html). Why, some of my best friends are . . .

Of course, the majority of eBay auctioneers are just-plain-folks selling old books from the basement and attic. They don't describe books completely or accurately, have no clue how to do so, and they can't be expected to. To these folks, eBay is just an electronic garage sale.

Still, the Internet highways are fraught with marauders when all roads lead to eBay.

Puffery versus Treachery

Here's a fairly common near-prototype example of an eBay book description. It mixes plain old puffery with outright lies. The book advertised is a 1950s Modern Library copy of Brothers Karamazov.

“This Rare Hardcover Dustjacket Edition is in excellent condition. . . . This book is very elusive and copies of this scarce book are extremely hard to find."

The puffery here lies with “in excellent condition." Looking at the images of the book, it's Very Good at best. But as we all know, the seller's Near Fine is the buyer's Near Very Good. But that's OK—few mothers describe their children as average.

The problem in the description lies in touting the title as elusive and scarce. On the surface the claims are absurd because:

-Modern Library was a reprint house and few titles from the '50s are scarce.
-Karamazov is one of the most commonly reprinted titles in the world, and it certainly is common in the Modern Library.
-At the time of the listing there were six copies of that printing available on eBay alone.

The technique is a common one: claim everything is unique and see how many sell. I looked at the other titles this seller had for sale. The same paragraph appeared in nearly all his listings.

Ignored Expertise

We all make mistakes—especially other people. Being a natural troublemaker and the owner of an asbestos suit that I purchased many years ago soon after discovering newsgroups, I always write to sellers pointing out what I believe to be just plain mistakes, and I'm polite about it. After all, most book dealers are certainly not Modern Library experts! So I expect to see errors and omissions, not out of malice but out of ignorance.

Not assuming folks will take my word for it, and why should they, as I am just some guy with an e-mail address (“Excuse me, dude in the next seat in the diner, you wouldn't happen to know the first edition points for Styron's The Long March, would you?"), I usually back up my claim with references to expert texts and reliable web sources. Here's what I include:

-Description of the alleged error.
-Statement of why I think it's an error.
-If I have it, reference to my source material.
-Suggestion(s) for correcting the error.

I can't claim great success here. I usually get ignored. Sometimes I get thanked and the listing actually gets changed. Occasionally I'm shown why the error isn't one. And sometimes I get my ancestry questioned coupled with suggestions for things I might do to take up my time rather than bothering honest citizens in the pursuit of commerce.

My favorite response—a common one—runs something like, “Hey, thanks for that information, I didn't know that." I used to think that meant that the listing would be changed. Often it doesn't. When I write back to the seller pointing out that he forgot to change the listing, I'll be ignored or get the reply, “I don't know how to change the listing because I already have bids." (And yes, if the listing is for an important book and I've got the time I do write back with a pointer to the eBay instructions telling him how to do it. And no, the listing is usually still not changed.)

Reputable sellers are always interested in correcting errors. Beyond being the ethical thing to do, it's just good business because it attracts long-term customers. These sellers welcome corrections and will thank you for them. (Well, sometimes they will—and sometimes they'll just fix the error without thanking you.)

Guarding Against Sleaze

Here's a list I use to determine if I'm dealing with somebody with whom I need to take extra care.

-Has an eBay positive feedback rating of less than 99%. EBay folks are reluctant to leave negative feedback for fear of getting negative feedback in return. So if there is negative feedback, there's reason to be suspicious. Feed the seller's eBay name into the Toolhaus eBay Negative Search at http://www.toolhaus.org/cgi-bin/negs and see what comes backnot just in terms of the kinds of complaints people have about the seller, but the responses that the seller gives.

-Accepts payment only by money order, cashier's check, wired funds, or cash. This is a deal-killer for me. If the book turns out to be a dud, I'm stuck with it if I pay cashand all of the methods listed above are essentially cash, so I have no recourse.

-Does not allow returns (“all sales final"). This is another deal-killer on the face of it. The seller won't stand behind his/her product. Often the listing has a qualifying statement such as, “All sales final unless the book is described incorrectly." But in such listings the terms are generally arguable condition statements, and the seller has the final say about what's an

incorrect description. If the seller doesn't offer a no-questions-asked return period of at least seven days from the book's arrival, I won't bid.

-Refuses to answer questions or gives evasive answers. Prima facie Deal Killer # 3. I can't think of a single reason that a legitimate seller would refuse to answer a question directly. Of course, “I don't know" is a direct answer and often quite acceptable. This is especially the case when the dealer isn't a Modern Library specialist. For example, if a seller claims that the book is a first edition and I ask for the points, he/she may only know the obvious one—say, a first edition slug on the copyright page. But determining firsts in Modern Library editions can be fairly complex, so I'll tell the seller what the points are and ask him/her to verify that the points are there. If the seller doesn't get back to me, I won't bid.

-Totally ignores e-mail. I make no exceptions here, no matter how much I want the book. If the dealer won't contact me before the auction, it's a pretty good bet that I'll be ignored if I have problems after I send my check.

-Wants unreasonable shipping charges. A great bargain is no bargain at all if the shipping charges are three times the price of the book. Some eBayers use shipping charges as a profit center. Generally I won't bid when shipping is high. I check Priority Mail rates for the weight of the book and add $1.50 or $2.00 for packaging and handling. Any non-giant Modern Library book should have charges of around $5.50 to $6.00 tops, less if sent by Media Mail. If shipping charges and method aren't listed, I always ask before I bid.

-Keeps bidder's list secret. The chief reasons that sleazy sellers keep bidder's lists secret is so that you can't contact other bidders to ask embarrassing questions or to warn them of an obvious scam eBay's “auction interference rule" be damned), or so that you can't see obvious shill bidders.

-Refuses to send additional scans/photos without good reason. Sometimes a book is too cheap for a seller to spend a lot of time on it. I'm not going to ask for extra scans for a five buck book. (I say “extra scans" because I usually ignore listings without scans unless the title is genuinely scarce.) But when the price gets over $20 or so, I won't buy a book without scans of the front, spine, and back.

-Uses stock book photos. A stock photo for a used collectable? I don't think so.

-Makes absurd claims. Here's my absolute all-time favorite and incredibly common stupid statement: "There is no copyright nor print date so it's probably a first edition." Such claims can often be blamed on plain old ignorance rather than skullduggery, but it's certainly a warning flag.

What an Ideal Modern Library Listing Includes

Sometimes sellers deliberately fudge on their listings knowing that what they have wouldn't pass muster even as reading copies. But the vast majority of book listings on eBay are incomplete because most sellers aren't professional booksellers, and many professional booksellers aren't very good at their jobs. Additionally even the best non-specialist booksellers will have trouble determining the finer points of Modern Library titles. (By the way, sellers who handle a lot of Modern Library titles really need to own a copy of Henry Toledano's Modern Library Price Guide, and should spend some time at the Modern Lib website as well.) Here's a list of the items I tell folks they need to see in a listing or should ask the seller about before they bid on a Modern Library book.

-Title and author. This can actually be tricky, as the title on the dust jacket was often different from what appeared on the title page!

-General condition statement based on AB Bookman's Weekly guidelines. Actually, this may be the least important item on the list if clear scans and fault descriptions are present. Condition statements are vestiges of the pre-internet era when listings were one paragraph long with no photographs. In such situations puffery ran rampant (even more than now).

-Clear scans or photos. Scans of the front and spine of the dust jacket or, if the jacket is lacking, the front and spine of the book are sine qua non for me. There's really no excuse for not scanning these days: scanners are very cheap to buy, very easy to use, and work very quickly.

-Description of all faults. Here's where the above-mentioned AB Bookman's guidelines come into play. Listed faults must include tears, folds, chips to the dust jacket (front, spine, and back), browning, foxing, underlines, highlighting, loose pages, stains, warping, ex-library indications, integrity of the block in the boards, and so on.

-Copyright date if present. Many Modern Library titles came in two or more editions. For example, Don Quixote had different translators, The Mayor of Casterbridge included introductions written by different people, and several of the short story anthologies had their contents change while the titles remained the same.

-Date of the printing. This can be really tricky. Sometimes the only way to hone in on the correct date is to use the catalogs that often appeared

on the dust jacket and at the back of the book. (Modern Lib provides dating keys to solve this problem.)

-Description of the binding type. There are nearly 20 distinct Modern Library binding styles. Different styles were used during specific periods, including one that was employed for just a single year.

-Whether the book and dust jacket match. This is another tricky area in Modern Library collecting that most sellers don't know about. A cooperative potential bidder should supply the points and ask the seller to verify their presence.

-Number of titles listed in the dust jacket catalog. The number usually appears on the upper inside of the dust jacket in a statement such as, “Which of these < XXX> outstanding books do you want to read?" The number of titles currently available in the Modern Library series at the time of printing is often a key first edition point.

-Statement saying if the printing is a first or later. This may be the trickiest point of all. Many first editions carried statements identifying them as such, but around 10% of titles in the series most of them published between 1959 and 1965—carried no such statement. To make matters worse, titles printed by offset lithography (all titles after 1965 going into the 1980s “revival" period and about six earlier titles) retained their first edition slugs in later printings. Once again, the Toledano guide and the Modern Lib website are your best friends here.

-If a buckram or a paperback, the number on the spine. Both college paperbacks (T series) and quality paperbacks (P series) had numbers on the spine. Buckrams, all of which were issued with no dust jackets, were supposed to have the number of the title at the bottom of the spine and the words “Buckram Reinforced" above it. (Some printings lack the statement and number but have the distinctive binding.)

-If a paperback, description of the type. College Series, numbered series, and so on.

Buyers Can Be Unethical Too

"But wait," you say, "What about unscrupulous buyers?" Well, there certainly are such people. Sellers don't have an exclusive on unethical behavior. Buyers can cheat by not paying for the books they receive, by claiming they didn't receive the book, or by sending back for a refund a different book than the one they received. Here are some ways that I

protect myself against these common buyer scams.

-Don't ship until the check has cleared. I accept money orders, cashier's checks, and personal checks. Sometimes I accept PayPal (although I don't like to because of the cut they take—the eBay hit is high enough as it is). If I don't know the buyer I wait until the check clears before shipping the book.

-Unobtrusively mark the book and dust jacket. Sometimes the buyer wants to return the book. I want to make sure that the book I get back is the book I sent. So I make the lightest possible pencil mark in a non-obvious place on the back of the dust jacket and on a specific page in the book and make sure the marks are there when the book is returned.

-Make and keep scans of the book and DJ's front, spine, and back. I make 300 DPI scans and keep them until my warranty period expires (generally ten days after the book is delivered). This is a further check in case the book is returned, as I can compare the scans against the book and DJ.

-Don't send a refund until the book is returned. If the book I get back is the one I sent, I send a refund the same day.

-Always use Delivery Confirmation. As a small-timer who doesn't sell that many books, I always use USPS for deliveries. I've never had one go astray. But to protect myself I always use Delivery Confirmation.

-Sometimes I act in sleazy ways myself. For example, a seller will advertise a book as a first edition but the dust jacket or binding photos don't match what a first in that title should be. I write to the seller asking for the first edition points even if I already know that I don't want the book. If the seller makes stuff up, I know to put him on my kill list to be excluded from future searches. You might claim that this is sort of unethical on my part in that I have no intention of bidding on the book. I'm just playing Net Cop and in some ways wasting the seller's time.

Unethical? Maybe—but this is eBay. I'm just trying to fit in.

Scot Kamins can be contacted at http://www.ModernLib.com.

Ephemeral Assays: Pulp Frisson

Shawn Purcell

There are many excellent print and internet resources on pulp magazines, and I wont rehash the essential features here, but just take a look at http://thepulp.net sometime if you want a good crash course in all things pulp. Ill use this space instead to relate some personal stories about the genre.

I kind of liked staying at Grandma Elizabeths in a small upstate New York town hard by the side of the Upper Delaware River. It was a landmark house, centrally located at the bottom of a slight incline leading up to Main Street, well shaded with a wide turnaround in front for horses, though by then the old stone hitching post was just ornamental. It was filled with brooding antiques, however, particularly Victorian furniture and cut crystal, and we always felt in danger of breaking things. Even years later, when the contents were sold in an onsite auction our branch of the family did not get enough advance notice on, I had no remorse whatsoever. Looking back now, I sorely wish I could have attended for the family heirlooms and the bargains, as this was all pre-Antiques Roadshow. Years later some jackass installed a woodstove where it didnt belong and the whole thing burned down.

Anyway, old pulps my Dad and his three brothers collected back in their youth were lined up along a second floor landing in a pile two deep, and about four feet high by twenty feet long. He did manage to score about fifty of those before the auction, where the whole massive pile probably went for well under $100, and I remember him trying to market them back in the 1980s by laboriously sending lists to collectors and dealers advertising for same in the backs of magazines. Invariably, they just wanted one or two famous cover artists like N. C. Wyeth, and they only wanted to pay $5 or so each. I have one left from the original horde, with our family name in pencil on the front cover as that is how they were held at the country store.

In the intervening years I would see these puffy and nicely musty missing links between magazines and comic books at auction, usually in poor condition due to their cheap manufacture, and I followed the prime pulp market from afar, as prices and interest went through the roof. I received a very fortuitous though expensive phone call not long ago from a family that wanted to clear out two full van loads of pulps, magazines, and newspaper comic sections, primarily from the 1920s through the 1950s, and this opened a rare and thrilling door into the lost world of pulpdom which I had missed all those years before.

In this case, the boy whose name was penciled on many of these was lying in a hospital bed at an angle in the middle of the living room, attended there by various machines and visiting doctors and nurses, well toward the end of his long road. He fixed one rheumy eye on me somewhat balefully, as in a Poe story, as I whisked out load after load on a very hot summer day. I could not tell if he was taking note of this, or was long past such earthly concerns, but I enjoyed my visits with this family, which drove a hard but fair bargain.

For a paper and periodical freak, it was great fun cracking open these dirty old cardboard boxes out on my gravel driveway work tables and sorting the hundreds of pulps by title and year. While I had been hoping for top of the food chain titles like The Shadow, I was well pleased with what emerged anyway, and they were all basically new to me. Many of them were in fairly long runs, which is the best way to understand any periodical. They were in good to very good condition with the covers attached, though edgewear on old pulps is almost inevitable, as the covers overshot the text block. Some even showed up in duplicate and triplicate for some reason. A large portion of the lot (which must have been his favorites) was composed of Ace-High Magazine, largely western and pretty collectible, and Short Stories, which is less sought-after but interesting. Every Short Stories cover had to have a large red orb . . . usually the sun but sometimes a gigantic crystal ball or something along those lines. Dozens of people associated with this pulp from artists to ad men must have discussed and dealt with that red orb branding mandate, but does a scrap of that publishing history survive?

Research quickly proved that the monetary value was in the titles themselves, the cover artist or art, prominent contributors such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, and, as always, these factors were all leavened by condition. Some of the common titles with boring covers died on eBay, but most went for an average of $25 or so, with some of the coolest detective examples up around $100. I quickly learned who the core group of pulp buyers were at that time, their bidding habits, etc. I accommodated them by running up long tallies, in order to save on shipping and bookkeeping efforts. Once I sent collecting rivals the wrong issues, but instead of swapping they just kept them, as the price was about the same and they were just upgrades anyway. All the lesser examples were consigned to paper auctions, and eventually it was over.

I saved the images though, and some are presented here. Once again, they are not the most spectacular examples ever published, but by the same token their covers may be more unfamiliar. Pulps had only a few moments to sell themselves, like comic books did years later when people like my other Grandmother tapped her foot while we quickly decided how to spend our small change. The best covers were lurid, colorful, and full of the promise of action, adventure, and mysteryproviding an almost pleasurable sensation of fright. Youngsters were transfixed by images of the Wild West, the Far East, the steamy south, the frozen north, inner cities, and outer space, not to mention beautiful women who seemed to be in peril or bondage more often than not. Though pulps had their origins at the turn of that century with the publication of Argosy, many consider the 1920s and 30s the true zenith of the art form. When I hit the boxes from the 1940s, when paper rationing and sanitized patriotic themes held sway, I felt a bit like boys such as my Dad must have back then when the thrills of childhood and promise of adventure were replaced by drab uniformity and duty. Some of the pulp titles sputtered through the late 1940s, but the world was a much smaller place after WW II, and TV dealt the fatal blow. The exotic mysteries and adventures of pulp readers receded from the mind and back into the earth, save for those happy cases where they were physically preserved for future generations to enjoy.

Shawn Purcell operates Balopticon Books & Ephemera and can be contacted at http://www.balopticon.com.

Books About Bookselling: Seeing Shelley Plain

Shawn Purcell

Seeing Shelley Plain: Memories of New Yorks Legendary Phoenix Book Shop, by Robert A. Wilson. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2001.

Sell me a book tonight, Larry. You havent sold me a book in weeks.
Why dont you buy all of them?
Okay, how much?

Thus begins both this book and the authors adventures as a novice shop owner in the late glory days of Greenwich Village bookselling. Wilson left his job at a cuckoo clock factory and scraped together the necessary $12,000, which was a tidy sum in 1962. His previous experience in the rarified world of bookmanship was basically limited to a serious hunt for the first editions of four particular authors.

Wilson quickly realized that he was in over his head and the figures were not adding up, so he threw all his energy into printing and mailing out catalogs (some 1500), following the pattern set forth by fourth Phoenix owner Larry Wallrich in Catalogs 50 through 59 (there were no earlier numbers because he did not want to look like a beginner). Sales from Wilsons 157 catalogs, particularly to universities seeking the complete output of contemporary authors for their modern literature collections, were the key to survival. This enabled him to empty out the existing stock and concentrate on acquiring collectible first editions and discovering his niche, which primarily consisted of first-run poetry and the Beat field. He reveled in material more established shops did not handle, such as ephemera and periodicals. Eventually Wilson mastered the catalog genre, to the point where he inserted phony items for his own amusement, like a very worn telephone directory for the town of Rapallo in Italy for the year 1937, without the cover but listing Ezra Pounds phone number; and a framed butterfly, genus unknown as the label has fallen off the box, but inscribed Given to me by Prof. Nabokov during my senior year. He replied to prospective buyers that these curious items had been sold already, regrettably. There were two all-Gertrude Stein numbers, and one on Henry Miller material solicited a response from Miller himself, who wanted copies of the catalog.

Wilsons chapters on important finds are delectable. The genteel negotiations in London over Dylan Thomas original working manuscript of Under Milk Wood, for example, and subsequent tribulations when customs demanded it be held over the holidays because the large leather case it was housed in was dutiable. And how would you like the chance to purchase W. H. Audens personal library before he returned to England; or discover the manuscript of William Faulkners first novel in its original shipping box (complete with an alternate ending, unpublished poems, etc.) while sipping cocktails on a Fire Island deck? There is also an interesting chapter on Phoenix publications, including bibliographies and the Oblong Octavo series.

Another charm of this book lies in the small but universal details of running an open shop. Wilson names or refers to most of his assistants over the years, including one who opened a short-lived rival shop. The hours were 3:00 to 11:00 P.M. in the early crime-free days, when evening strollers were his main customers. Bleecker Street pizza was a favorite repast, accompanied by a superb California wine with the charming double-dactylic name Inglenook Zinfandel, alas no longer bottled. Thanks to a notice in the Antiquarian Bookman, a Madison Avenue colleague helped him recover a scout-stolen copy of Steinbecks The Cup of Gold. We also have tales of buying stolen material (twice belonging to Allen Ginsberg who was not all that careful about whom he brought home); turning down offers of common material thought by their purveyors to be priceless; plumbing-related floods; relocation; and a brace of white store cats.

This being the fabled Phoenix, however, there were rarer pleasures too, like the day when William Burroughs showed up for the first time and Wilson introduced him to fellow shopper Edward Albee. Celebrity visitors such as Richard Burton are noted. The humorist S. J. Perelman was always looking for copies of his own out-of-print works, the absence of which was politely ascribed to their popularity. Perelmans guest book inscription reads, We are both in a dying business, but what a way to go!

Crime, impractical regulations, and rising costs finally sapped Robert Wilson. He tried in vain to keep the Phoenix rising through a new owner, but was finally forced to sell the stock and close the doors, with some surprise twists and turns at the end.

What I found most interesting was the publishing history and forms taken by the early writings of the various poets, some of which were issued as offsets and mimeographs. Even more traditional pamphlets had very limited print runs. Marianne Moore was one of Wilsons first four collected authors, before he even dreamed of owning a bookstore. He had been advised not to collect her, as the first two titles were virtually unobtainable. On vacation in London hunting up Stein material at the firm of Bertram Rota, he noticed the small blue impossible Marriage right on the counter and snapped it up for a mere two pounds. On returning to New York, he now sought out a known copy of the slightly more common Poems, issued privately in 1921 by a friend without Moores permission. It had sold to another book dealer for $12.50 in the interim, who offered it to him for $20. It should be noted that Wilson was onto many of these writers well before most other collectors, the Beat poets in particular. In addition, he developed an early knack for securing signatures which stood him well in the cultivation of literary friendships. Wilson ended up visiting the elderly Marianne Moore many times, and eventually helped to broker the sale of her archive and personal effects to the Rosenbach Museum, with stiff competition from the University of Texas at Austin. Once while lunching at her apartment she confided that a substitute editor at the New Yorker had rejected one of her poems, causing a bit of financial distress. Wilson offered her twice as much for an unpublished poem in pamphlet form if she could manage to sign them. Moore readily agreed, and promptly retrieved a typescript copy of Tipoos Tiger from her bedroom. When printing was complete (one hundred copies for sale and twenty-six to be lettered for their personal use, thirteen each), she examined them carefully and remarked, That last line is all wrong. Wilson was floored, and insisted that the printing was accurate. As it turns out, the inveterate revisionist had simply changed her mind. The dilemma was solved when Moore insisted on rewriting the last line by hand in all of the copies.

There are a few slight faults with this work. It is divided into three parts. The first is a chronological memoir; the second a more leisurely consideration of the players and the sheer joy of the profession; and the third a brief description of who these writers were for those not yet initiated, followed by a list of Phoenix publications and a list of visiting authors who signed Wilsons guest book. The format is fine, but there is some repetition, as if the parts were written quite separately from each other. We are reminded three times, for example, that LeRoi Jones changed his name to Amiri Baraka, a number which would have been easier to confirm if an index had been furnished. Wilson had some printing misadventures in his day, and may have been mildly miffed to see at least half a dozen typos, most with correctly spelled small words like of substituted for if. The whole work could have used a good last read-through for the type of slips and redundancies that a spell checker does not pick up. Finally, one wonders how some of the subjects would have reacted to certain intimate details shared by the author. These are small things though. Seeing Shelley Plain is a wonderful and entertaining read, and a nice addition to the literature of bookselling. Some excerpts follow.

Scarcely had I gotten the fire going when I heard the door being pushed open, and to my astonishment there stood Frances Steloff, proprietor of the legendary Gotham Book Mart, and at that time indisputably the most famous book seller in the entire world. I had been a customer of hers long before I had ever dreamed of owning my own shop. In fact, I had bought my first rare book (Hemingways God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen) from her in 1943 when I was stationed on Long Island during my military service in W.W. II. I was even more stunned when she said on entering, I heard about you buying the Phoenix and I want to be your first customer.

Looking now at that first of my Phoenix catalogs, I am astounded at how much really significant material was in it; a two-page typed letter by William Burroughs with a holographic postscript by Allen Ginsberg; a sixteen-page typed poem by Allen with manuscript revisions; four drawings for a proposed but never executed comic strip by Jack Kerouac; three paintings by Kenneth Patchen; as well as letters and manuscripts by Michael McClure and Gregory Corso.

I wasnt quite as lucky with the star item of the second catalog, for some hawk-eyed customer snapped up a Civil War history with a nice chatty inscription by F. Scott Fitzgerald for $12.50. I was quite thrilled to make such a handsome profit, for I had found it on a sidewalk stand for fifty cents.

But, sorry to say, by the late 70s the heady days of fat budgets and government subsidies began to wane as Republican congresses kept hacking away at federal endowments until all such funding disappeared totally under the Reagan regime. One by one, these university libraries were forced to limit their spending on new issue material drastically, or, in many cases, cease their programs altogether.

Apparently the inmates were allowed showers only once a week, and on one such day Dorothy [Day] heard a prostitute on her way to the communal bath quote Audens line, Thousands have lived without love, but not one without water. He was immensely pleased by this, and regarded it as his greatest successto be quoted in prison by a convicted whore.

While they were in the shop Nanda [the beautiful Fernanda Pivano, who introduced the Beats to Europe through translation and promotion] asked if there was a bathroom she could use. I was immediately terribly embarrassed. The only one available was a public one in the hall, used by other tenants in the building, and far from clean. I explained to Nanda that while there was one, it was very primitive. Totally undaunted she replied, What I intend to do in it is also very primitive.

And the intractable landlord got what was coming to himthe shop remained unrented for two and a half years after I left. And even then he had to divide it into two smaller shops. The right half became a video rental store, with racks of cassettes where once had been poetry. In the other half, where formerly had been shelves of first editions of some of the twentieth centurys greatest literary masterpieces, and where my desk had been located, around which had congregated many Pulitzer and Nobel prize winners, there was now the ultimate ignominy of a dry-cleaning establishment, with the neighborhoods clothing traveling back and forth on a mechanical rack.

Shawn Purcell operates Balopticon Books & Ephemera and can be contacted at http://www.balopticon.com.

Overlooked and Undervalued: The Bookseller�s Inventory Database

Chris Volk

Most booksellers when evaluating their business assets will consider the cost and potential market value of their inventory, the cost of computer equipment, and maybe even the replacement cost of their reference library, but it seems that the value of their book-selling database is often overlooked.

A database is far more than just a listing of books which you have for sale and the price you are asking for them. If that is all you need, you can simply input listings directly online, and then download these listings.

The true value lies in the information which is not uploaded�the historical information about sold books, the private fields, and also in the other modules (client, invoice, wants, vendors, etc.) which work together with the inventory database.

We use BookMinder, which is a template based on FileMaker Pro, one of the few programs for both Macs and Windows. The point of this informal commentary is not to advocate any specific program, but to toss out some thoughts that might help booksellers to expand the usefulness and value of whatever database they do use. If you think that you, as a bookseller, cannot afford to spend $200-$300 or so on a decent database, and that a �free� one is good enough, maybe the following will help you reconsider that decision.

The first and most obvious value comes from the cumulative weight of entering books into a single database for years (we have slightly over 16,000 listings online now, with over 34,000 entries in our inventory database). While I have written most of the entries (at a rate of not quite ten books per day for ten years), we have hired others to do data entry at various times, and the usual payment was $1 per book. It doesn't take a lot of math to see that at $1 per listing, we now have $34,000 �invested� in the database.

However, it goes much deeper than that: by retaining information on sold books, we begin to gain a solid understanding of the prices at which copies will sell and how long it might take them to sell. Obviously, this is valuable for uncommon books, where prices are on a steadily upward trajectory (and where sometimes there are no copies currently offered for sale online), but it can also be useful for a lot of �bread-and-butter� books.

Since the time it takes to write a new description is a significant factor in the cost of selling a book (especially for one that is inexpensive), our buying decisions are often skewed by whether or not a book is �in the database.� Sometimes this has unexpected results. For example, every first printing of a certain title which we were able to acquire sold reasonably quickly in the $30-$40 range. One day, we spotted a nice book club edition for sale, bought it, quickly modified the database listing, and almost as quickly sold it. Knowing which books will sell only in first editions (or only as signed copies), which books will sell easily in any hardcover edition, and which books will even sell as paperbacks can be very helpful�especially since the less expensive versions are usually a lot easier to find.

Each record in our inventory has a �private notes� field which is not uploaded. The size of this field is essentially unlimited, and so are the types of information which I might include there. The actual name of this field in our database is �quote to/notes� but that is only one use for it. In addition to whether or not we quoted the book to a client (and if the client purchased or declined it, and why, if we know why), I might note the number of comparable listings online at the time we catalogued it and the price range (sometimes this info gets updated), any pricing changes we might have made, where we got the book signed if it is a signed copy, points that are not included in the actual description, and much more.

For example, we just sold a signed copy of Westlake's Castle in the Air. The private notes included the comments that when we first catalogued this in July 1996 there were only three hc 1sts on ABE, the book was mistakenly marked as sold, was signed in Los Angeles in 2004, and when it was reinstated online in late 2004 there were 28 hc 1sts on ABE. Abbreviated, this type of information takes almost no time to enter.

Among the other private fields are those where we enter the price paid, and the vendor from whom we purchased the book. (In addition to the obvious bookstore names where we regularly buy books, we also create vendor ids for buying trips out of town. This will provide easily accessible documentation on how many books we bought on that trip, how much we spent, and how much profit we made from those purchases.) We use another field to create printed catalogues, and this field consists only of two character codes. For example, if I wanted to do a list of mysteries by women set in California or one for Florida children's books, all I have to do is search in this field for �wo my ca� or �fl ch� respectively. There are probably 100 different codes which we use, and most of them are self-evident.

We have other fields which are only used for uploading to specific sites. For example, we enter Amazon's condition codes in one field. We can also enter three different prices for a book. If we were doing a lot of eBay auctions, we might create an eBay title field. The possibilities are unlimited.

So far, we have just been dealing with specific books, but one of the benefits of �researching� books or authors on the internet is the ease with which the information can be captured. If I find an interesting article on an author or an illustrator or a book, I will copy this into a separate record (I use the subject name �author and book info� for these records) along with the author's name, and maybe the url of the website where I found the information. These records can be as specific as the points of a single title, or the tracking of the prices of all copies being offered for sale over a period of years, or a complete bibliography of an author. Again, to give a specific example, I was cataloguing a book recently, and the illustrator who did the frontispiece had an extremely interesting career himself, so I created a record for him. When and if we come across something else with his work in it, we have the information needed to place it in context.

The inventory portion of our business database is only part of the database. We also store our client records and our invoices, which provide complete information on books sold, including discounts, if any, sales tax collected, shipping charged, and the source of the sale. But even this small part is much more than just a listing of books we have for sale. It is a living, growing, ever-expanding, focused reference work�a combination of �book prices realized,� bibliographies and points of issue. It becomes worth far more than the few hundred dollars we actually invested in the program and in upgrades or the $34,000 we might have paid for raw data entry. It becomes the single most valuable and virtually irreplaceable asset in our business.

Chris Volk operates Bookfever along with Shep Iiams and can be contacted at http://www.bookfever.com.

The Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar

The Colorado Book School, as it is informally known, offers a wonderful opportunity for those seeking to improve their knowledge of the profession. Attending this famous seminar involves a serious commitment of time and money, but all reports indicate that it is well worth the investment. Please note that IOBA�s own Chris Volk is their newest faculty member. Perhaps Chris can give us a nice report on this experience in a future issue. An official announcement follows.

THE COLORADO ANTIQUARIAN BOOK SEMINAR
August 6-11, 2006
Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO

Please visit http://www.bookseminars.com for this year's program highlights and schedule.

We proudly announce this year's program which includes our Keynote Speaker, Terry Belanger, a recent MacArthur Fellow and founder of the Rare Book School and Book Arts Press at the University of Virginia; specialty dealer John Crichton of the Brick Row Book Shop, San Francisco; and our newest faculty member, Chris Volk of Bookfever.com, an early member and past officer of the Independent Online Booksellers Association (IOBA), a member of the first advisory board for ABE books, and a current member of the advisory board for Biblio.com.

Other members of the faculty include Tom Congalton and Dan Gregory of Between the Covers; Dan De Simone from the Library of Congress; independent booksellers Mary Francis Ciletti, Mike Ginsberg, Ed Glaser, and Rob Rulon-Miller; and our conservator, Angela Scott.

Nearly 30 years ago, Jake Chernofsky (Editor of AB Bookman's Weekly) and others established a week-long seminar in Denver aimed at providing education for persons interested in entering the used/OP/academic/rare book trade. Under various administrative configurations, the Seminar, long well-known and highly respected in the rare book community, has continued to fulfill this function to this day. Given the enormous changes in the antiquarian book world since 1978, the curriculum has changed accordingly, with increasing emphasis on the realities of bookselling in the electronic age. Over the years more than 2100 students have graduated from the Seminar, many of whom have gone on to become prominent members of the bookselling community.

This year both the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America (ABAA) and the Rocky Mountain Antiquarian Booksellers' Association (RMABA) will offer a total of five scholarships for the Seminar [and Alibris has just announced a scholarship as well]. Applications should be sent to each respective organization by July 1, 2006 [as a heads-up for next year]. Details will be available at the Seminar website shortly.

Please direct questions about any seminar information to:

Kathy Lindeman, Local Coordinator
Colorado Springs: (719) 473-6634
or E-mail to: KathyL@bookseminars.com

Father Richard Reed of St. Gabriels Bookstore

Hello, I am Father Rick Reed, the Pastor of Saint Gabriels Chapel and online bookstore. Our aim is to meet and greet each customer with the golden rule of treating others as we would wish to be treated. I opened our online bookstore as an extension of our ministry to all! As a bookseller and book reader, I love books of all kinds and wish to spread this love of reading and learning to everyone I come in contact with.

I was not sure where to start when asked to do an autobiography. I sat down and prayed, and began to put some thoughts on paper. This is almost as scary as when I was asked to write my life story for chaplain training, for when I did as I was told, I thought thats nice, but what impact did all that have on your life? Books have shaped me and guided me throughout my life. Good and not-so-good books, but lots of them.

I am fairly new to online bookselling but I know the value of efficient, friendly service and quick delivery of an order! Our goal is for every buyer to be pleased with every purchase. Our motto: WE CARE. In addition to our own website and an eBay store, we list on Alibris, Biblio, A1Books, and, of course, IOBAbooks.com. I am currently serving a term on the IOBA Board of Directors as an At Large Representative.

A little about myself. I am an Orthodox Catholic Priest, have been married to Carol for just over 33 years, have two grown children, and six grandchildren. I have been in the ministry for ten years now and serve as a Hospice chaplain as well as at two local hospitals as an on-call chaplain. I also serve as a priest at Holy Trinity Celtic Orthodox Church, and I am an online bookseller. In shortI am kinda busy. I was born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, was gone for many years, and then returned back about four years ago to take care of family.

I began a career in the medical field 35 years ago and have served as a surgical and x-ray technician, as well as in radiation health, emergency medical, and field medicine, including several administrative positions. For around 25 years I served in the US Military, retiring from the US Navy six years ago. I served in many different settings and capacities including Desert Shield/Storm; the first Gulf War in a US Marine Corps field hospital; staff positions; joint military; hospitals and clinics; as well as with a Marine Corps Expeditionary Unit Medical Planner.

I have two Masters Degrees as well as a smattering of experience just living and I am still wondering what will happen tomorrow. Okay, that really gives everyone a good picture of what I have done.

Over many years I collected books and soon developed my own large library. My collection included books on many different topics to include Christianity, Religion, Military, Survival, Medical, Marital Arts, Weapons, Wilderness, and History. This love for books grew into my dream of owning and running my own bookstore. Not being able to actually open a B&M store, I turned to online bookselling and have found excitement and my passion! I joined IOBA almost a year ago when I first started in the business. Oh, and yes my books moved with me over the years from place to place.

I guess you can say I have served my fellow man (and woman) all my life, and owning and running an online bookstore is just an extension of that service to my fellow humans; ones who have a thirst for reading and knowledge. One of the books I had to read in high school was Fahrenheit 451. I detested that book almost as much as I did 1984. I was once told by a teacher that she wanted to see me ten to twenty years down the road to see what I turned into, because I kept saying there had to be a better way and society was not going the way I thought it should. Well I am not sure how much I actually changed in these many years, though my love for reading and books grew and grew until now I am able to say they have become a major part of my life.

Let me please give you an example or two of how books have helped to change and enhance my life. I was raised Roman Catholic, and drifted from my faith. As study and reading took place, I eventually became an Ordained Pentecostal Minister ten years ago. Four years ago my faith and beliefs were challenged and I ended up in Sudan in East Africa for six months, assisting and teaching in a Bible College. After that I began to read and study. Eventually after careful study I returned to the Catholic faith, Old Catholic and then Orthodox Catholic. Without the written word, the Bible, and other early Church Fathers writings, I may never have had the opportunity to read and study. My whole life was changed.

While serving in the US Navy I had the chance to teach survival. Many men have written about their challenges to survive a variety of situations, from prisoner of war to wilderness and desert survival. These men put their experiences into words and print. I was able to read and study those works, becoming a better instructor and person in the process as I learned from their challenges and life-changing decisions.

Reading books has changed my life, and now I have the opportunity to share these wonderful books with the whole world, for the life of an online bookseller is truly global. The first book I sold was to a gentleman in Germany, and since then I have sold many books to customers overseas as well as throughout the entire USA.

Oh, I didnt say I could writethough that is another goal somedaybut this is my story!

Postscript since this was first submitted. After careful consideration and prayer, we have decided to relocate to New Port Richey, Florida. It has been a nice challenge to pack up our household goods and the bookstore and move 1100 miles. I have been told this is an excellent area in which to obtain books for my store. God has continued to bless us. As I have put things on vacation with the online listing sites, we have had four orders in the past two days. We didn't want the customer to have to wait, so we searched, found the books (that was fun), shipped them out, and then resealed the boxes again. We will be all moved in and back online by the time you read this.

Father Rick Reed operates St. Gabriels Bookstore and can be contacted at http://www.christianbooksonline.us.

Caite Stevens of Vivarte Books

It all began with eBay in 1999. At the time, I was a single girl working full-time as a sales assistant for a national brokerage firm. Id been earning extra money by cutting my teeth on eBay, selling all the knick-knacks in my Maryland apartment that I decided would be better converted to cash. I slowly learned to master the art of eBay by selling perfume, jewelry, LPs, comic books, Halloween costumes, my old cell phones, a Pee-wee Herman kite, and inflatable Star Wars props.

Not long after my apartment was stripped of saleable product, my art dealer parents announced they were moving to Florida. This meant I would inherit all the stuff they didnt want to move with them. Alongside the groceries, funny hats, and kitchen gadgets transferred to my possession were boxes and boxes of books. Old school books, foreign titles, literature, novels, and, of course, art auction catalogs, along with a few monographs penned by my mother. I quickly listed and sold most of the regular books on Half.com, but didnt know what to do with the auction catalogs and monographs. So I gave them a shot on eBay, and discovered that there was a market for these obscure, heavily researched, single-printing publications.

After enjoying a flurry of sales from my newly listed books, I jumped right into bookselling, adding to my inventory exponentially by scouring local book sales and internet auctions in search of any non-fiction book I could find. I spent nearly every weekend driving from book sale to book sale with my eBay friend Roselle, at times traveling two to three hours for a single sale. Sleeping in on the weekends was not an optionin order to arrive an hour before a sale started (a requirement if you dont want to stand in line behind the forty people who got there before you), we routinely woke up before dawn on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

Book sales were always tense. In the minutes before a sale was officially scheduled to begin at local schools, libraries, and churches, our anxiety level rose to an unbearable pitch, culminating in a mad dash against all the other dealers as we raced toward the best corner of the sale once the doors opened. Being the first one to grab the most interesting box of used books was a triumph only a fellow book-saler can appreciate.

After a heart-pounding and sweaty 30-45 minutes at each sale, I left with boxes and boxes of books, careful to never buy more than my car could hold. Sometimes that meant having a passenger in the front seat in the form of three boxes of books stacked on top of each othernot the safest way to drive, but certainly the most exciting. Bag Day was always my favorite. They would let you pile as many books as you could into a single bag or box for a small sum, say $5 or so. Id make Roselle drive her truck on Bag Day. At the time, I lived on the top floor of a three-story apartment complex with no elevator. Although Id reserve that entire afternoon and most of the rest of the weekend for listing books, it sometimes took a week or two before I was physically able to remove the last box from my car.

Sales were ripe. I was selling general non-fiction books on a daily basis on both Half.com and Amazon.com. Every few weeks Id list a handful of art books on eBay to bring in a big chunk of money. I had no monthly listing fees to cover, only commissions on books sold. Even selling a seventy-five cent book was profitable for me, since I tracked profits in terms of lots from each book sale. Once Id made my money back on a given lot, the rest was gravy. I was doing so well that I was able to partially finance my wedding with the money that was coming in.

Vivarte Books officially came into existence in May 2003. I took my eBay User ID vivarte and turned it into an official taxpaying business in the state of Maryland. By this time, my inventory of books had grown to about 5,000 titles.

It wasnt long before the non-essential furniture was moved out of our loft and replaced with towering bookshelves. And it wasnt long after the bookshelves arrived that stacks of books began to appear on the floor because the shelves couldnt handle any more titles! Although my husband enjoyed the extra money that was coming in, it drove him nuts to navigate the obstacle course of books that had become our loft just to check his email.

I quickly discovered that buying every used non-fiction book I found wasnt the best business plan I could have developed. More than half of the books I was lugging home were worthless for my business and were subsequently donated to my local library.

And then the bottom fell out. The announcement of Half.coms impending demise during the spring of 2004 marked a major turning point in my business. Coincidentally, sales had begun lagging in the months leading up to Halfs announcement. My sales on Half and Amazon dropped by 90% and they stayed put for months. The shelf space in my apartment was completely diminished. It seemed my only alternative was to list on sites that would charge me anywhere from $15-$50 each month just for the privilege of listing a single book, and this was in addition to commissions on each sale. To make matters worse, I had no inventory software to comply with these sites, as I had never needed any. The prospect of entering all the data from my 5,000 books into inventory software seemed a daunting and never-ending task. I knew it was time to make some changes.

I had to streamline my business if I was going to turn it around. So I spent about two months physically examining each title in my collection, donating every book that I felt wasnt worth my time. Then I surveyed what was left. Nearly every art book Id acquired remained on the shelves. I knew that my most profitable books were those that were art-related, even though they made up a small portion of my overall inventory. They were the most costly to obtain, the hardest to find, and the most labor-intensive to list, but they offered the best return on the dollar by far and were the most interesting to work with. So the decision was made. The focus of Vivarte Books would now be on art and art-related subjects.

Selling art publications isnt as easy as dealing with your run-of-the-mill Grisham novel. Most of the publications I sell have no ISBN. And when it comes to researching titles and artists, its not unusual to find that the only current documented copy is in my hands, which makes pricing difficult, albeit exciting. Finding an obscure foreign artist makes for fascinating reading if the publication isnt in the artists native tongue. This has made language translation an important tool in my business. A lot of my customers dont know of the existence of the publications theyre buying before making a purchase from me, which can make marketing each title a challenge. Its not always apparent why or if an art publication is important, or what the focus was of a given exhibition. But I enjoy doing the research and picking out the relevant information, and have found a worldwide audience.

Its taken me years of practice to figure out which art books to leave behind at a book sale. The majority of books in the Art section at book sales have no value. The information in them is either outdated, too basic, or too well-dispersed.

Although I still sell odds and ends on eBay and a small selection of general non-fiction books on assorted bookselling sites, the crux of my business has become centered on art, and I couldnt be happier about it. I sell on eBay, Half, Amazon, Alibris, Biblio, and IOBAbooks.com.

A native of the DC area, I now live in a house in Olney, Maryland, with my husband and newborn daughter, and still work full-time in finance. My inventory fits neatly into five tall bookshelves that line the walls of my office. There is a clear path to the computer, and my husband doesnt have to step over a single book to check his email.

My mother has long contended that the first word I ever spoke was book, and that I was reading out of Newsweek when I was four. As a kid, Id come home from the library with as many books as I could carry. I read Gone with the Wind when I was ten. During my teen years, we had a constantly changing array of paintings hanging on our walls. Mom would sell what was hanging over the piano and replace it with a new acquisition. There is no better industry or market niche for me to be in.

I love the business Ive created, and I intend to nurture it for as long as possible. Vivarte Books functions for me not merely a source of income, but as a source of education, pride, and absolute enjoyment. It combines my love of art and reading with my love of computers, the internet, and the entrepreneurial spirit.

Caite Stevens operates Vivarte Books and can be contacted at http://www.vivartebooks.com.

IOBA Standard: Volume 7(1) Article

The Team Behind Books Tell You Why

Back in old Europe, many years ago, Andrea and Joachim Koch started collecting books, well before this fascinating hobby took on a much more significant role in our lives. The house was always filled with books, for everyday reading as well as rare items brought back from travels in different countries. Coins were scraped together for those titles more expensive than reasonable to buy. Grandpa�s nineteenth century treasures built the initial collection and made us curious to find out more about a subject that�s been fascinating to the family and has now turned into our business.

After moving to Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1990s, the historic environment down South continued to foster our love for preserving the values and treasures of times gone by. It didn�t take long for Books Tell You Why to be conceived. Originally a Christmas present for ourselves, the once smallest bookstore in the world expanded rapidly. Books do tell you why, which is for us the raison d��tre for reading and collecting them.

Meanwhile, our customers come from all fifty states, and every third book or so is being shipped internationally. Despite dealing with a very traditional product, our infrastructure is anything but. Computer systems accessing a multitude of websites, images for book listings, electronic ordering, tracking and shipping confirmation for all shipments, networking to allow secure access to staff working from remote locations, the highest level of secure payment processing, etc. Wim Wijnen juggles this marriage between traditional and high-tech, making sure that our books can be easily found online, and that our computers, databases, and systems keep supporting our growing operations.

Book buying needs to be easy. Andrea, being responsible for our Customer Operations, works us extremely hard to gain the confidence of our customers, who receive the book they want in the condition they expect at the time it was promised. Few things are more rewarding than to get a Saturday afternoon call and be able to fill an order for a scarce first edition that has to be on the other side of the country on Monday morning to be presented as a gift. Our favorite customer is the discerning collector�discerning in the books they seek as well as the level of service they expect and appreciate.

The next generation, Christopher and Katharina, are beginning to contribute significantly to the daily operations in the order processing and shipping departments, and they put the final touches on a great product on its way to a satisfied collector.

And yes, Joachim is still hunting those same books we were fascinated by as kids in a different language in a different part of the world, such as Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Eloise, or From Russia with Love. These days, however, we are not satisfied with just having any copy. We chase first editions in exceptional condition, to satisfy the collector in us as well as our customers.

Focus areas of Books Tell You Why include many contemporary works, signed first editions, Easton Press and Franklin Library, biographies, authors such as Saul Bellow, Dan Brown, Jimmy Carter, Ian Fleming, Anne Rice, Philip Roth, John Steinbeck, J. R. R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, and other great authors who tell you why through their books.

Joachim Koch operates Books Tell You Why and can be contacted at http://www.bookstellyouwhy.com.

Errata

International Editions

Dear Editor,

I thank you for your service, and have found the information on your web site to be most useful. I am an engineer disabled with Lou Gehrigs disease, and as such I pass the time and maintain my intellect engaged in a variety of independent research projects. As I do not have ready access to a quality technical library I purchase a large number of books and other reference materials over the internet. The information on your organizations web site has saved me considerable heart and head ache over the years.

I would like to make a suggestion for an addition to your glossary of terms (http://www.ioba.org/terms.html). In the last six months or so I have noticed the so-called International Edition of books offered for sale by a number of internet book vendors. They are being sold as new books at steeply discounted prices, which is a true statement as they are in fact new books at a very cheap cost. However, International Editions are known to have problems. They are often printed in black and white, when the regular edition (also known as the United States Edition) is printed in color. The quality of paper in an International Edition is often inferior as well. The graphics and type fonts of the International Edition are seldom the same as in regular editions, and this is particularly true for technical books. International Editions often suffer from poor quality control. Common problems include skewed pages, margins that vary from page to page, inverted print or mirrored print, smeared ink, non-sequential or missing pages, and blank pages. In fairness, all these problems do not occur in every International Edition, nor do they appear simultaneously.

Sellers will frequently claim the International Edition is the same as the United States Edition, or that the International Edition is simply a paperback version. It is not uncommon for the International Edition to have its own ISBN (International Standard Book Number), particularly if it is an authorized copy. However, some overseas publishers do not bother to obtain a new ISBN, or they do not bother to include it as an identifier. This is especially true of publishers in India, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Korea, and other Pacific Rim countries.

Do not confuse the International Edition with the European Edition. Frequently technical books have a European Edition and a United States Edition. The main difference here is simply in units of measurement, with the European Edition using the metric system and the United States Edition using the inch/pound system. Other differences may be in the choice of language, like centre in the European Edition instead of center in the United States Edition. The end of chapter problems in science, engineering or mathematics books are usually quite different between European and United States Editions.

In short, prospective purchasers should realize that there is probably a good reason that International Editions are so steeply discounted. It is not uncommon to see them selling for half the cost of a regular edition. You get what you pay for.

Eric Sawyer
Manchester, NH

Happy Hits

-Just picked up two signed copies of My Memories: 1886-1977, by Ira Gray, the Adirondack Mountains guide. Only one copy listed at $95. Author/title searching on Gray/Memories, the only other hit was for a single copy of My Hair and Other Memories: The Adventures of a Boomer Facing 50, by Bill Gray. A brief excerpt from what is perhaps the more important work, under the heading, A Wilderness Picture. It was a nice warm evening along the last of June. I had been out and got me a mess of trout. Had just finished my supper and lay on the bunk in my cabin near Miners Marsh. I had the door open, as it was real warm. I hear a little noiseand there by the doorway was an old partridge and her brood of eleven little babies. No pictures on T.V. can be like this.

-From a Texas A&M University Libraries 2004-2005 printed report, "With Al and Darlyne Lowman's donation of Adrian Wilson's Printing for the Theater (1957) to the Lowman Collection, the University Libraries now claims a quartet of books popularly considered to be the four most important in the history of 20th-century fine press printing. The other three volumes are D. B. Updike's The Book of Common Prayer (1928), Edwin and Robert Grabhorn's Leaves of Grass (1930), and the Grabhorns' The Santa Fe Trail (1931)." Further research shows that Printing for Theater was limited to 250 copies, with twenty tipped-in examples of Interplayers theater printing, in addition to extra rear pocket programs (17 in one case) which are different for each edition. When you author/title search "Wilson/Printing for Theater" on ABE there are no copies listed, but a full author search reveals two with the variant spelling "Theatre," priced at $950 and $1,500. BookFinder reveals a third copy through ILAB, priced at $900. "Theater" is spelled correctly in the title but the other way in the description, which is fine, and they added a the to the title, which is not fine but would not be a search term fatal flaw. (The Texas A&M entry goes back and forth on the added the themselves.) One of the online offerings includes this nice description. "Folio, original decorated cloth, illustrated endpapers, with the prospectus (and other material as described), in the original shipping carton, exceptionally fine. This copy was mailed at publication to one of the Wilson's oldest friends, Alma Holmgren, long a figure in Bay Area publishing, and subsequently a teacher. Alma attended the publication party, or a party, at which Wilson sold copies in order to finance a trip for himself and his wife Joyce Lancaster, to Europe." So, it pays to attend publication parties like that, and if there is a bright side to a thousand dollar typo, it may even pay to be off a bit on the correct spelling of the author or title, as fine copies of such books will only appreciate in value.

Blurbettes

Is there a good book out there on the minor commercial art form of blurb writing? Or a dedicated website (Canada's Alex Good bestowed awards called the Puffies on the worst examples not that long ago, but those lists don't seem to be up any more). Maybe, but I didnt look too hard. Instead, I just dipped a minnow net into that flow of electrons called Google for a few minutes and pulled out a few wrigglers.

-"What a fantastic book!" from the dust jacket of Peter Bernstein's Capital Ideas, and "This is a great book!" from William Bernstein's The Intelligent Asset Allocator, both by popular blurber John C. Bogle.

-Here are a few from A Distant Book Lifted, by Michael Stevens, which is a collection of blurbs, forewords, afterwards, introductions and prefaces written by William S. Burroughs.

John Waters, Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters

John Waters is the Pope of Trash and his taste in tacky is unexcelled."

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

One of the few books I have been able to read in recent years."

Irving Rosenthal, Sheeper

"Rosenthal has brought back to writing the almost forgotten element of style. On each sentence he imposes his seal. Each word is transmuted by the alchemy of arrangement. Brightly colored beetles move and shift in a glittering mosaic of Mandarin complexity. A brilliant specialized performance."

[Note: This 2001 title with a Spicewood, TX imprint sounded interesting so I checked online and ordered the only one available for $45 (directly from the bookseller of course), one of 26 lettered copies signed by the compiler, in stapled wrappers, with a previously unpublished photo of Burroughs on the cover. If I could write a blurb for this one it would read, Engaging bon mots from the bow of Burroughs in a flattering vein, and a book that will surely double in value! Alas, though, it wont, as the familiar reply comes back, The book is no longer available. A Distant Book Lifted indeed!]

-A U.K. edition of Mitch Cullin's Tideland carried a Terry Gilliam blurb which read, "F*ucking wonderful!"

Dust jackets are part and parcel of many of the books we handle. The blurbs they carry are often informative and interesting, often shameless and misleading, and often funny or unintentionally funny. Please consider sharing some good examples under this heading.

For example, what happens when a blurber simply runs out of things to say? I am holding a plain light brown and white dust jacket for Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. It's Volume 35, from the second series, covering the period 9/1/1956 to 11/30/1956. On the rear panel, under "From Reviews of Earlier Volumes," we have the following. "This (Volume 34) is an important volume because it is a trailer to a yet more important one that would follow next."

Book Blogs

We will feature a verbatim excerpt from a different book blog each issue. IOBA does not necessarily support or endorse these blogs and their contents, but they do contain some good stuff or they wouldnt be here.

Mutterings of a Mad Bookseller

http://madbookseller.blogspot.com

Posted 6/5/2006

How the Databases are Ruining the Book Business

Veronica Lake

This will not be the usual plaintive wail you have seen other places about the Big Bad Databases. I like the databases. For the most part they make my job of locating good books easier. But there is also a downside, and that downside is represented by IGFs- Ignorant Greedy Fucks.

A quick story will illustrate. Last year I was buying books from one of my usual private sources, an ex-antiques dealer selling off her library. The last book she brought she laid proudly in front of me and proclaimed- "I'll bet you don't know what this is worth!"

I looked at the book, an uncommon and good silver title, and said "As a matter of fact I do, because I just sold a copy. $750."

"No, No," she said smiling. "It's worth $5000!"

"Um, no," I said, frowning, "it's not."

Upon returning to the office I found the source of the problem- a copy listed on a major database for $5000. Now let's get real- I have been selling books in the very specialized field of the decorative arts for 25 years. We deal with major collectors, dealers and institutions. I know and monitor the other specialists in my field. That book was worth $750.

Yet one ignorant idiot, with pretensions of grandeur almost spoiled my opportunity to buy a saleable book at a fair price (fortunately my seller had faith in me, and I got the book).

But the plague continues. Just today I got a want-match on an out of print 1990s furniture book which is, possibly, on a good day, with a tailwind, worth $1000, and the price was $4500. I've sold 17th century decorative arts books for that price.

That's all fine and well- it's a free country after all, except that other dealers use the databases to price. How much do you want to bet that a new copy comes up tomorrow for $3000, that dealer also being ignorant, and thinking to undercut the current price? I love dealers undercutting other dealers prices, except where the original price was hatched in a crack dream. And not long in the future I will have that price quoted to me by a collector looking to sell.

What can be done? Not a damn thing that I can see. There have always been dealers, like this one, who simply add an extra digit to the highest number they can think of. The problem is that, with the internet, everyone else takes their cue from those fantasy prices. The other ethical problem is what if someone actually pays that price? I know, I know, a "fair price" is determined by a willing seller and informed buyer, but the key here is "informed". Everyone in the book business knows that many buyers are not informed. A certain Ebay seller has made a fortune taking advantage of uniformed and deep-pocketed buyers. Does that make it right? The greedy preying on the ignorant?

I dunno.

But it's a problem.

What's Veronica Lake have to do with all this? Nothing, I'm just a fan, and they were talking about her on Biblio the other day.

Ye Olde Booksellers

The True and Genuin Elegy of Matthew Gun Bookseller, Who Departed, &c.

This is a one page sheet, probably printed in Dublin in 1724. The elegy itself rambles a bit, and starts off with puns about Guns last name. A couple of couplets are reproduced, along with his epitaph in its entirety. The early printers convention for the letter s is retained.

In his own Books he might his Fate forefee,

They felt the Teeth of Worms, and fo will He.

and

Fanatick Writers on his Shelves did rife,

But now alas! Theyll fall to Tarts and Pies.

EPITAPH

Reader my Name was Matthew Gun,

Ive loft my Stock and out Ive run;

I hope it cannot be denied

But that I livd, and that I died:

My choiceft Books were never Read;

Few Liftnd eer to what I faid;

And So their Fate the fame with mine is,

You Read their Title-Page and

FINIS

From my Death Bed, January 20th 1723-4. This is my true ELEGY and no other.

Matthew Gun.

Made in IOBA

Are you an IOBA member who has authored some work, or who has unique services or products to offer? Let us highlight them here.

House Calls

Of all the ways to find books, house calls are now better than ever, what with all the competition in other venues. House calls are generated through direct contact if you have your own book store, through advertisement, and through referral or word of mouth. This is not an in-depth tutorial on house calls, but here are a few points to remember.

It really pays to weed out those likely to be unproductive right in person or on the phone, before you make the trip. This takes a bit of practice. Have a list of questions ready. Type and approximate number of books, hardcover or softcover, on shelves or in boxes already, have all the family members taken what they want yet, etc. Condition is paramount. Were they in a damp basement, did they belong to smokers, etc. I also like to get a rough idea of what they expect for them, which is an age-old game in which the seller is usually in the drivers seat. Most are wary enough not to name an amount, in case you offer much more. What I am more concerned about though, is that they dont have extremely inflated ideas about what the stock is worth. If it seems helpful, I often provide a quick explanation of how we pay a certain percentage of what the retail value may be worth for stock that we may have to carry for many years, and how many copies are probably available online since The Glut. I also mention other options, like getting a second opinion from another book buyer, running them through an auction, yard sales, donations, etc.

My preference is usually to take the good with the bad all in one lot for one money. It is very time-consuming to cherry pick the titles you want, and if the deal falls through you have just provided the seller with your valuable knowledge free of charge. I prefer clients who simply want everything cleared out because they are moving, settling an estate, or whatever. I triage these books as soon as I get home, out in the driveway. Usually about 5% get listed online, 10% or so are good for the shop, and the rest go to auction, get donated, or get recycled or dumped.

You have more of an obligation to be above board when making house calls than in any other situation, such as an auction or estate sale where everyone had the same opportunity that you did. First of all, you should be qualified to make house calls to begin with. You wont find many booksellers who will take you along for lessons, for obvious reasons, but you should know something about the trade from the regular school of hard knocks before you presume to claim expertise. There is a big difference between an appraisal and an offer to buy. Appraisals are more properly reserved for experienced professionals, as there is probably more at stake for the seller. Appraisal fees are often steep, and the bookseller will sometimes ask to purchase materials of interest separately. In most cases, however, the stock is not worth that much, and if you can pay ten to fifty cents on the dollar (depending on how quickly you can flip the winners) and the seller is happy with that, both sides can make out well. Practice with these common transactions and work your way up to estate books and fine libraries. If you come across one that is way over your head, work with a more established bookseller or auction house on a shared or commission basis. I recall an early house call where I was very nervous borrowing most of the $12,000 necessary to close a deal for a large collection of newspaper file photos and books. It probably took me two years to make $20,000, and there was a ton of work involved, but it was a great learning experience. The seller was very happy, and at one point his wife took me aside and said, I want to thank you. I havent been able to sew on this front porch since the 1950s.

Here are a few more recent examples from my own experience, starting with a poor one. An astute elderly woman one town away said she was trying to sell a house that had nothing left in it but books, which needed to go. They sounded common and I was not interested, but she persisted, and upon inspection I finally agreed to take them all for $100. This took two full van loads and the better part of a day, and I was quite sorry I agreed, though she was sort of an early independent-minded university graduate and I enjoyed meeting her. Loads of book club editions, biographies, and the like, and she had a bad habit of slicing up the front dust jacket panel and lumpily pasting it down on the inside front cover. My favorite title in the otherwise bland lot was a nice first of The Rubaiyat of a Scotch Terrier, fairly common but sweet. Anyway, a few days later a wealthy son who she mentioned was not very helpful called up and accused me of ripping her off. I was finally able to convince him that if I hadnt already dropped off 98% of this common dreck for donation or disposal, I would have been very happy for him to come pick up the whole load for a full refund. It was a good reminder to avoid bad house calls, and to be extra careful when dealing with senior citizens. I usually try to ascertain if there are any relatives who can be present during the transaction, though in this case she understood getting rid of crappy old books better than her son or I did.

On a happier note, I just completed my third house call over several years to the widow of a magician. They met in 1945 when she was a young blonde in the Black Forest of Germany and he was with a passing U.S.O. show. She became his professional assistant back in the states, but he succumbed to Alzheimers decades ago. Once she came home to find that an unidentified colleague had stopped by and basically stole all the props and artifacts from the confused man, along with some books, which is about as low as you can get. She finally decided it was time to divest herself of his remaining professional literature, which spanned the mid-1900s, and she heard about me through the lovely woman who cuts our hair. First came all the booklets, laid out in piles on some card tables for my inspection. I took my time cataloging them, and learned a lot about the magic scene. Many were on specific tricks, with cards or coins or silks, and they all stressed practice and patter. I did well with the booklets, but a year or so later I paid more than I should have for runs of journals with great names like The Linking Ring, Ibidem, and The Jinx. This last trip was for the books, quite a few of which were signed first editions. I bought my wife along this time as I wanted her to meet this remarkable and charming person. I volunteered that a signed Harry Blackstone second printing with decorated covers and cracked hinges was probably the pick of the litter, and she pulled a little magic of her own just before the final settlement by keeping it, but that was fine. Some of the scavenger booksellers in this area would have seriously lowballed her, and many

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