Reminders In Life About ten years ago, now, in December, I sat with my parents watching the CNN coverage of the Granada military action. This is significant only because at the time I was a ten year veteran in the military, working Special Operations, and those units were my own, those guys in BDUs running around, the gunship crews, they were all friends of mine and I was sitting home recovering from successful surgery to remove an ovarian tumor instead of working on the mission. It’s the only action I missed, and the funny thing was, it didn’t bother me to not be on the inside knowing what was actually going on. For me, the prospect of cancer had been a wake up call, one of those reminders in life, which made me think about what I wanted to use my time and mind and energy for. Travelling to foreign places and blowing things up, for whatever reason, wasn’t what I wished to be remembered for. I recovered, returned to work, finished my hitch and left the military to become a deputy sheriff here in Okaloosa County, Florida instead. It seemed a worthier form of warfare to me, and at least this way, if I died, it would be on my own ground and for a cause I personally believe in rather than one I got told to believe in. It was the right decision for me. However, my old nemesis came back to hassle with me again and about three years ago I had two more operations, both successful, to beat tumors, this time trying the breast cancer route. This second “go round” was harder than the first, really knocked me down and took a long time to recover from. In ways, I am still trying to recover the energy I once had. Just another reminder, and I started Books By Blondie, an online business, to have something to fall back on should another round be ahead of me and I not prove able to continue as a cop. Shortly after this, I got recruited into IOBA by Rik Pavlesak, one of the best friends anyone can have and the owner of Blue Monkey Books. I poured a lot into it, because I believed it could be important for me and others as a small, independent bookseller. I wanted it to be here and be strong in case I ever needed it. IOBA was just an idea then. I had the pleasure and heartburn both of being one of the Founders and working with the others as we struggled to define and give birth to this dream. Life is strange at times. I started by working as the webmaster for the website, then was drawn in to be the interim Vice President and later was voted in as the first acting President of IOBA. It’s been a very long couple years, full of challenges and hard work to learn the job and juggle this responsibility along with being a cop and a bookstore owner and, occasionally, having a life, too. I’d never done anything like starting and then running a corporation with a board. I was still learning the book business as well. Did mistakes get made? Yep. Did I lose some battles? Yep. I also was in on some great calls and big wins. Life is like that. One battle won or lost doesn’t make the whole war, and it is good to keep your eye on the long term perspective as much as you can to weather occasional setbacks and losses. Next week, I have another date with the surgeons for another battle with the old nemesis. It will be old news by the time this goes to press. I’m not worried about it, I feel really positive and haven’t chosen to share some of my personal world with you out of some maudlin sense of self pity or doom and gloom. I’m smiling a lot as I type this up. It’s just another one of those reminders in life to run a self check on where I am, where I’m going, what I stand for and what I’d be remembered for if I lost the war today. I like the answers better than I did ten years ago, but I still have a long way to go. I haven’t gotten it right, yet, but I’m learning. A couple weeks ago, I sent a call for volunteers to the membership for help in the coming elections. Last time around, people lacked confidence, perhaps, and the interim board had to handle it and ended up fortunate to get one candidate for each office. Later, we took some criticism for that, there were some mutters about it. I’d like to avoid that, this time, however NO ONE, not ONE, volunteered or even enquired what we had in mind or needed. There’s a lot of reasons for this. The biggest one is, you don’t realize how much IOBA needs YOUR help. It really does. Secondly, some of you don’t know that most of your current board had no prior experience, learned as we went along, and are still learning and making mistakes along with the good moves, and this is OK. Our members have never demanded perfection, just candor, from me. I believe the entire current board would say the same. All you need is the desire to make a difference, to learn and grow some more, to have an effect, to work with your peers, argue and agree and all the usual work of a relationship, be it working or personal. Having a tough skin also helps. Thirdly, secretly, maybe you lack self confidence to speak up, feeling you are too new, or not good enough in some talent or area or way. Facing the unknown is scary. I was scared to accept the nomination for president last year, if you want to know the truth. My reasons included all of the above ones. I’m not a fighter by nature, but I’ve learned it’s not being afraid which makes a person a coward. It is what you do despite being afraid which determines whether you face your battles with courage. Win some, lose some, what really matters in life is how you play the game. IOBA needs volunteers to oversee and help with the election process. IOBA needs several candidates for office to step forward to be the ones to take our association from here. Consider this a personal reminder in life and decide what you’d like to be remembered for a year from now. I really hope and pray with all my heart it will be that, among other things, you choose to add to your short list being much more active in our association, however your volunteerism takes form. No one gets paid here, we’re all volunteers. No more volunteers, no more IOBA. That would be a damn shame.

Q: Peter, how did you get involved in creating book Web sites? A: I owned a new and used bookstore for 23 years and I began selling on eBay and Bibliofind in 1997. Internet bookselling was changing rapidly and new opportunities seemed to be knocking everywhere. I was particularly fascinated by eBay and I wanted to build a “children’s books only” auction. I closed my store in 2000 and began a crash course in web development and I have been learning ever since. Q: Many children’s books are very collectible. Do Collector’s Book Market and Children’s Book Market overlap? A: It’s inevitable that they overlap a little bit, but they are aimed at different buying audiences. One has a book Auction and a Fine Book Mart for collectors who want to browse investment quality books and the other has a low-fee children’s book auction for educators and parents who want to promote reading. Q: I see the Fine Book Mart has a $25 minimum selling price. In what other way is Collector’s Book Market different from the other used book sites? A: The Fine Book Mart is structured unlike any other site. This is a hard thing to get across because the meta-search sites like Bookfinder and AddAll create the expectation that fixed-price sites will all work in the same way. There are many fine “classic” format online databases already available to booksellers, so I wanted to design something different. The Fine Book Mart is a gallery where you can advertise or “showcase” your best items for a modest 90-day listing fee and no commission. We can’t compete with the big sites if you want to search their huge databases for a specific title, but we hope to build a site where they can’t compete with us if you want to just browse for something quality to buy. We are not an alternative to the other sites; we are complimentary to them. Our databases (fixed-price and auction) are visually oriented and built for browsing. Each listing is allowed up to 6 free image uploads, all search and browse lists include a free extra-large thumbnail image (and free 1st printing and/or signed item icons where appropriate), and sellers can enhance their item descriptions with our WYSIWYG HTML editor (no HTML knowledge required). Our most important browsing feature is our “nested” book category system that allows buyers to browse by broad “top-level” categories or narrower subcategories, but we also have additional browsing options that allow buyers to view ‘all’ items with (or without) any combination of characteristics. For example, you can browse either or both databases for “All signed items”, or “All first printings”, or “All signed first printings”, or “ALL signed, first printing, non-ex-lib, non-book club, non-remainder, hardback, new listings in NF or better condition with a VG or better dust jacket, that was published between 1940 and 1945, and priced from $100 to $1000, and . . . (there are more options but you get the idea). By adding an author, title, or publisher to the text search box, you can use these same options to perform an “Advanced Search”. Q: You didn’t mention auction pricing. Is there a minimum price on auctions, also? A: No, there are no minimum prices on the auctions. Low starting bids often create bidding activity that in turn attracts more bids. We even have two special “Bargain Bin” categories for our special “dollar” auctions that have $1 starting bids with no reserve. Q: How do the book auctions work? A: They are similar to eBay; we have “proxy” bidding and fixed ending times, but there are also special “book” features built in that facilitate the advanced search and browse functions mentioned above. If you use eBay, you can use our auctions. Our goal is to keep everything simple and easy to use. And much less expensive. There will be one low 25-cent insertion fee regardless of your starting bid or reserve price. We offer free image uploads that automatically create a free gallery thumbnail. You can list your auction for up to 15 days and set the exact ending time with no extra charge. In addition to the standard and “dollar” auction formats, we also have “fixed-price” and “linked” auctions. The fixed-price auctions give sellers a place to sell their books priced under $25 and the linked auctions give them an easy way to “advertise” their auctions running on eBay and other sites. Q: Does the children’s book site work the same way as the collector’s book site? A: The auction is very similar (except for a special “reading level” field and a few other differences), but instead of a Fine Book Mart, the children’s site has a special Literacy/Donor Mart where teachers (and others) can post free requests for donor help. These requests can be for anything from Gift Certificates to hand out as achievement awards to providing books or funding for school libraries. Donors can also post free ads to give away books they want to donate. Q: Tell me more about this donations program for children’s books. A: The Literacy/Donor Mart concept is new, and the details are not tested, but it could be an opportunity to recycle a lot of great children’s books that would otherwise end up collecting dust. It’s basically a classified ad system for requests and donation offers. The ChildrensBookMarket.com Gift Certificates are a central part. The plan is to donate back 50% of all (future) auction fees as Gift Certificates, which will be awarded to the most compelling requests posted to the Literacy/Donor Mart. The recipients in turn will use the Gift Certificates to bid on the auctions, creating a built-in demand for the sellers (sellers will be reimbursed 100% for the Gift Certificates they accept as payment). We already have 12,000 books listed on the children’s book auction, so we are ready to start and we will soon be giving away $1,000 worth of gift certificates to begin our promotion of the children’s book site. Q: You said “future” fees. What are the current fees and what changes in the fees can sellers expect in the future? A: Right now there are no fees; we are still putting the finishing touches on both of the sites. We should be finished by the time this interview is published and that will mark the beginning of our promotion. Fees won’t begin until we have reached a “critical mass” of activity for each site. I’m not sure what that is, exactly, but we want the sellers to be able to expect a decent number of “hits” on their items. We are being crawled by the search engines and you can see by the hit counters on each listing that we are already getting some good traffic. Unlike the larger sites, our individual listings show up in many search engine results. Google the exact title of any ad or an auction; you can see we usually get the #1 ranking. As for future fees, our plan is to keep them low by keeping the overhead as simple as possible. All transactions are direct between the buyer and seller, we don’t process credit cards for transactions, and we will only get involved if there is a dispute or a problem. We hope to stay with a “no commission/listing fee only” format if we can make it profitable. The seller simply pays to “advertise” their item and we don’t have to worry about “off-site” sales. Q: What else do you want to mention about your sites? A: There are several other integrated features we have built into these sites, a link directory mall (list your website), a book news and headlines module (members submit stories and announcements), auction and ad “alerts” (get notified when a item is listed), seller and donor profiles, book wanted ads, and more, but these are new and should evolve, so I shouldn’t try to go into detail about those now. Instead, because most of your readers are online booksellers, I would like to mention a few of the solutions we have developed to address the common complaints everyone has been reading about on the major bookseller lists for the past few years. These problems get ignored when sites are only interested in getting as many listing fees as possible. “Too many misdescribed books.” Like other quality sites, sellers must agree to a Code of Ethics and a “guaranteed-to-be-as-described” policy, but we take it a step further to create more buyer confidence. Each listing has a “Report Item” button that is part of a member-enforced quality control system. If an item is inaccurately graded, incorrectly described (called a 1st printing when it’s not, not called an ex-library when it is, etc.), obviously miscategorized, or there is any other problem with a listing, any member can use the (anonymous) Report Item button to notify the administrator. If the complaint is judged to be valid, a polite “reported item” notice is sent to the seller with the appropriate options and time frame in which to correct the problem or dispute it. “Too many penny-sellers are listing common or unwanted titles, clogging the search results.” The “per-item” listing fees should slow this problem down dramatically, but it also takes a little more time to list an auction or a Fine Book Mart ad, so sellers will hopefully restrict their listings to those books that have genuine value and a good chance of selling. “Third-party sellers are cross-listing from other sites.” No third-party, Print-on-Demand, or e-book listings are allowed. Sellers must have physical possession of every item they list. “No enforcement of policies and rules.” We have strict enforcement. Sellers who are repeatedly reported, willfully evade following the rules, or sell improper items will be removed. Winning bidders or buyers who fail to pay for an item without a legitimate reason will also be removed (one strike and you’re out on that one). “Ever increasing fees and ever more restrictive policies.” I discussed our fee strategy above, a nd because we don’t have to worry about “off-site” sales, we don’t want to restrict contact between the buyers and the sellers; we want to encourage it. If the sellers are happy, they will come back. Q: What about Niche Market Solutions? Do you have other projects in the works? A: I formed Niche Market Solutions a few years ago with my business partner, Bill Paulsen, who is an IT wizard with over ten years of programming and server administration experience (our servers are lightning fast). As the dominant e-commerce sites continue to expand at a rapid pace and bury any direct competition, we see opportunity in smaller niche sites. The quest for more and more listing fees and higher quarterly profit reports is creating the problems complained about above. We have built a variety of e-commerce solutions to give specialists the tools to establish their own niche market websites. Our next project is OklahomaBookMarket.com, one of 50 online state and regional book marketplaces we plan to build and host. We have all 49 other “StateBookMarket” domain names and we will be offering them as custom turnkey consumer-to-consumer e-commerce sites in the near future. Each of the state sites will be owned and operated independently, but they will all link together and have a similar format (owners will have control over all decisions: fees, categories, logos, colors, etc.). Booksellers who specialize in regional material can contact us now if they want information about their state’s BookMarket site. Bill has also just finished a remarkable “shopping cart” system and we will soon be offering custom turnkey, hosted websites for booksellers. These websites will automatically be included in our Link Directory Malls that we will be promoting as a major part of our websites, so we can offer the additional advantage of built-in traffic. Q: You seem to have your hands full. Do you have a staff and a budget to promote the sites? A: Not yet. We built these sites with the idea that someone would want to purchase them or partner with us. We don’t want to run the day-to-day operations; we want to build and host other websites. We have been refining these sites for a long time now and we are finally ready to hand them over to someone else, whether that is an individual, an organization, another website, or a silent partner. Once we get some funding, we think these sites will take off in a hurry. Q: Good luck, and thank you for talking with us. A: Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to be included in The Standard; it is a great resource for booksellers. Peter Thomas is the founder of Niche Market Solutions, LLC, a Web site development company that has created two used book websites, http://www.CollectorsBookMarket.com andhttp://www.ChildrensBookMarket.com, as well as other non-book e-commerce sites. He can be reached at admin@collectorsbookmarket.com . Shirley Bryant is the proprietor of Authors & Artists at http://www.aaabooks.com #CollectorsBookMarketcom

Q. I’ve been looking for ways to supplement the low sales recently. Is there any market for book searches and if so, what kind of fees do you charge? What are the mechanics – i.e. collect fee up front or upon producing results, time spans allowed, et al.? Is it worth it? Any feedback will be appreciated. – Cynthia Putt, Parnassus On Wheels A. There is still a market for search services, though obviously much smaller than it once was. I don’t pursue them but still get a fair number of requests, so I provide the service for a fee. People are funny. They tend to feel gouged by a “free” search service that finds them a $10 book for $25, but readily accept the same total cost as reasonable when they understand what they’re paying for–i.e., a service. I explain my charges up front though I don’t charge anything unless the book is found. For run-of-the mill OP searches I charge a flat fee ($10 for the first book, $5 each additional) plus a markup of 20% on the book(s). For example, the total cost of finding a $10 book might go like this: Say the book ($10) plus inbound shipping ($3.50) is $13.50. Mark that total up 20% (dividing by .8) which gives you $16.88. Add the flat search fee of $10 search fee for a total of $26.88. In this example you make $13.38 Used to be that you could confidently have searched books drop-shipped directly from the other bookseller to your customer. I don’t do that anymore unless I know the drop-shipper, so in most cases you will add your regular shipping charge to the above. – Rock, Back Creek Books Q. Am I supposed to collect/pay sales tax on a book order that comes from ABE and gets shipped to a buyer in my state? If so, is there a place on ABE where I can specify the percentage to add to an order if it originates in my state as can be done on eBay? And I always wondered about drop-shipping – if a book dealer in another state orders and pays for a book and asks for it to be drop-shipped in my state, am I supposed to collect state sales tax on that? – Suzanne Carter, Bookseller A. We email the customer and tell them what the sales tax is, quoting the final cost, and ask them to acknowledge the extra charge. Dealers often have resale tax id numbers and don’t pay sales tax. They will tell you when you mention the sales tax. – Fran Morris A. Not that I am aware of. You have to pay it yourself or perhaps you can add it on in the extra shipping field and explain that it is tax. No (regarding drop-shipping). You are wholesaling it to the other dealer. Any sales tax is the responsibility of the latter – that is the party with whom the retail sale has been transacted. – Darrel Griffin A. Essentially, one should note in terms what taxes will be charged, and use the “extra shipping charges” option to add the sales tax when processing a taxable order. Email will then be sent to the buyer showing the extra charge and reason and the seller will be notified if everything is going through. – Suzanne Carter Q. I have a court hearing in which I will certainly be grilled on how I determine my beginning of the year inventory value and my ending of the year inventory value. I spend anywhere from 30,000 to 45,000 a year on books. Most of these come in large lots. I do not assign a value to each book, per se, but generally apply the purchase price to the better books in the lot in the hopes of recovering my money more quickly. Eventually, the lesser material either gets added to inventory or donated to the local library. My computer program has crashed several time in the past 8 years, and the values it gives are questionable. I tend to deduct whatever I spend on books in a year as the cost of goods for that year. Does anyone else do this? If not, how do you do it? – A bookseller A. I use the purchase price of the books as COGS (cost of goods sold). I don’t have a massive inventory, so I do keep track of the cost for each individual book. When sold, the individual COGS is deducted from the inventory value. You need a tax-oriented CPA right now. Actually, you needed this a long time ago. $200-300 spent on a CPA’s time will either ease your mind or tell you how much trouble you’re in. Either way, it’s well worth it to know before your hearing: you don’t want to be surprised in there. -Michael Watson, 20ants.com A. We have been using the cost as a percentage of selling price, and if we see that the ratio between cost and inventory is getting out-of-line, we adjust the percentage upward or downward. This was set up by a professional accountant, and while I’ve been examined by the IRS a few times over the 30 years I’ve been in business, there was never any question about my method of figuring out inventory valuations. It’s really difficult to keep track of the cost of books that might stay on the shelf for years, were bought individually and in bulk, and, of course, those books we have the choice of eating or donating. – A Bookseller Q. I need desperate help in trying to combat glare. I’ve got some books that I MUST take pictures of and do it better than my normal mid range thing – the problem is GLARE. I can’t seem to find a good combination of things to get rid of the glare. I’m using a digital camera and the books have a bit of a sheen anyway, but there has got to be a way to get rid of most of the glare. If anyone has any easy & not expensive (read homemade) ways to do so, please let me know. – Stephanie Howlett-West A. One solution is to get a polarizing filter for the lens. A good camera store will have one for about $25. You turn the filter until the glare is gone, then snap the picture. Be sure to get one with a circular grid, otherwise the autofocus might not work right. – P. Scott Brown, Bookseller Q. This is probably a silly question…but why on older books are some of the pages “uncut.” I purchased a set of nice Dickens off of PBA. I was hoping to read them, But no! Every other page is uncut and obviously unread. I find this annoying as I can also presume if one carefully cuts the pages, the so called collector value drops faster than the dotcom bust. I would appreciate some insight on this. Forgive me if its been discussed before as must have missed it. – John Porterfield Editor’s Note: In this case ‘uncut’ is not the correct term. The pages in question are actually ‘unopened.’ -mw A. This is not so. unless those PARTICULAR books have a recorded provenance somewhere stating it has uncut pages then no one has ever noticed it but you. Uncut pages are a manufacturing error, obviously they were meant to be cut open so the pages could be read. They are an erratum such as a misprinted dust jacket, unless you are holding a very rare 1st edition in 1st state, no one really cares. Even if a dealer says they do they don’t. You can fix the error in an non-destructive manner by sliding a serrated knife such as a steak or tomato knife inside the pages and gently cut outward in a sawing motion. Then may read the pages and no one but you will know they had ever been attached. – Joyce Godsey Q. I recently purchased a stack (over 2 feet tall) of ‘The Westerners : New York Posse Brand Book’ A number of these were stored, by year, in manila envelopes. Some of these have been subjected to water on one edge, causing not only the pages to adhere to one another, but even multiple issues are stuck together. I think that the text will be basically un-affected, if I can figure out how to separate these without undue damage. The paper is coated, if that makes any difference. How can I go about separating issues and/or pages with the least amount of damage? – G’Jim c):{- A. Heat: always try heat. Buy a 9 bucks clothes iron with a Teflon surface; start on low, use computer paper to protect the pages from the iron. Get a nylon cake frosting spatula…the thin sharp ones and as you loosen the clay coating with the iron slide the nylon between the pages and wiggle. remember slow and steady. wiggle don’t force it. – Joyce Godsey Q. I have two inquiries about shipping books abroad. Can you send M-bags to Russia? To Italy? What’s the minimum weight? I couldn’t find the info on the postal service site. Is there another name for them. Do M-bags go air or sea? – Susan Halas, Wailuku, Maui A. Basic reference is: http://www.usps.com/global/mbags.htm Complete rules: http://pe.usps.gov/text/Imm/immc2_015.html#n1O$w151wats Anywhere is ok for M-bags. No minimum. You pay for 11 pounds min though Go air or sea – surface is much cheaper. Example Books to Italy 11 lbs or less: 9.90 Airmail to Italy : 27.50 – George Cross Q. What are ‘French wrappers’ ???? The mind produces many possibilities, none of which have ANYTHING to do with books. – G’Jim c):{- A. French wrappers is a softcover with no dj but dj flaps. The pasted cover extends over the fore-edge the same distance as dj flaps and then they are folded back to resemble them. Think of FRENCH CUFFS on a nice shirt. – Joyce Godsey Q. Why is it that the word “page” is abbreviated by “pp”? I’ve never understood that. Or is “pp” something else entirely? – Larry Burdick, Book Oasis A. “Page” is not abbreviated by “pp”, but rather by “p”. “pp” is the abbreviation for two or more pages. It’s the plural of “p”. – Don Lindgren A. I previously pointed out MS./MSS.; also common is n./nn. for note/notes. As with p./pp., these abbreviations come from the Latin where there is not a single form of the plural. Latin, of course, used to be the universal scholarly language – and some of us are still hoping for a comeback: http://www.economist.com/diversions/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2281926 The latest edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed. 2003) indicates that p./pp. are still the standard abbreviations (sect. 17.132). Continuing to use them is also a nod to scholarly universalism. – William M. Klimon Q. Anyone have any luck with mold and mildew? The live stuff, not the dead stuff. Once it’s dead it’s just a stain and a smell. – Joyce Godsey A. What seems to work for me in the capitol of Mildewlandia is an application of the purest rubbing alcohol you can buy at the pharmacy (95% or above). Apply liberally with a soft cloth, put clean plastic bags between pages before application. Leave the bags in the book & put a weight on it, leave until dry. The high test alcohol kills ’em dead & with very little water in it doesn’t seem to damage the paper – and dries fast. I would exercise extreme caution with any paper the first time, especially fancy papers that have a bigger chance of waving. Try a teeny bit on an obscure corner. – Lynn Q. Another question for which I once knew the answer: what is the correct way to catalogue a “junior”? Specifically Marshall Bond, Jr. – I checked a data base and found: Bond, Marshall, Jr. Bond, Jr., Marshall Bond, Marshall (Jr.) Bond Jr., Marshall Bond, Marshall (not so cleverly avoiding the problem) …and numerous other variations. What is right and what is your authority for thinking so? – Lynn A. Chicago Manual of Style, Chapter 18. Subhead 37 (18.37), INDEXES: Persons with same names. Bond, Marshall, Jr. – Joyce Godsey Q. As a rank amateur am wondering what basis for pricing is used if there are NO copies of a certain volume on any search site , and I have too little experience to hazard what could be a costly guess ?? I suppose I could let eBay set the price , but am trying to do better on my own . Thanks for any input . – Jim Menzel, Second Thoughts Used Books A. The following answers the above question and elucidates further: As to the poster’s question on NO listings, the first thing would be to double check your typing and spelling. Then maybe search on title but not author; finally try author but not title, to see what the author’s other books are listed at Bookfinder.com, on the other hand, seems a bit more useful for the layman, especially if they are not clear on author/title/spelling, etc. It saves you having to scroll through hundreds of responses. But I normally use AddAll.com. AddAll allows you to pre-set for hb/pb/all bindings. A problem, however, is that their software defaults to whatever your last search specified. So if you search for hardbacks only, your next search will be preset for hardbacks; you have to remember to change the setting on the next search if you want paperbacks or all bindings. An alternative is to group your searches into batches of hb and pb. I am not up on eBay or Amazon searches. They are a definite part of the market. eBay will search completed auctions. Using AddAll.com, you get all the listed copies (or at least lots of them) in one list, regardless of catalogers’ variant title entries. AddAll can be set to sort in descending order by price, thus leaving the dreck (and the sleepers) toward the end of the list. If you wish, you can limit the search to hardbacks, etc. (You can also exclude the Alibris listings, which are mostly duplications. Unfortunately, I know of no reliable way to automatically eliminate ex-library, book club, or jacketless books.) At the bottom of the results page, there are options that can eliminate or limit the findings to certain publishers or other words. Any sample has limited reliability. (Listed books are a sample of the whole world.) If a book is really scarce, you won’t see enough to use. If it’s really common, you may be wasting your time. In the mid range, the AddAll findings can be quite instructive. The top of the AddAll report will indicate the total number of books found. The first screen will display only the top 50. Let’s say it finds 40. You can find the median price at No. 20, (or just move the scrollbar up to about halfway; with a little practice you can hit No. 20 most of the time.) Then look for No.10 and No. 30, which define the midrange (remember quartiles from Stat class?). None of this eliminates the need for judgment, but it surely gives a good picture of the competition. You also need to pay attention to condition descriptions, and of course edition. And needless to say, the existing listings can be quite useful in descriptions of points, various editions or bindings, etc. – Don Ramsey, http://www.AllBooksConsidered.com A. research. research. research. research. research. research. research. research. Try American Book Prices Current, auction records, BAL (Bibliography of American Literature) , dealer catalogues, ask around…. – Joyce Godsey A. All good sources and most should be available in the public library. I’d add bibliographies of all kinds. A lot of additional research can be done on line beyond a check of the data bases. Sometimes I just Google the author & title. You may find someone like myself who puts items on their own web page before putting them on a data base. (My good stock is usually sold long before any data base ever sees it.) You may find that something you never heard of is actually well known or sought after. You might even find a group of people who are fanatics. Or you may find out that you seem to be the only person who has ever hears of the item. Even negative information helps. I also always check WorldCat. Editor’s Note: “WorldCat is a worldwide union catalog created and maintained collectively by more than 9,000 member institutions. With millions of online records built from the bibliographic and ownership information of contributing libraries, it is the largest and most comprehensive database of its kind. WorldCat is the foundation of many OCLC services that let your library process, manage and share information resources and let your users search for and obtain them.” – Lynn A. If you sell all or most of your books via the internet, you can’t IGNORE the prices there totally – after all, those books are your direct competition – but sometimes if one looks at the pricing trend objectively, booksellers look like a bunch of sheep – If the first bookseller to list a book goes high, then all of the other booksellers will more or less follow that price. If the first bookseller goes low, ditto – NEVER MIND THE FACT THAT THIS LOW-PRICED BOOK MIGHT BE HARDER TO FIND AND BETTER than the higher priced one! So….. #1. It never hurts to leave a little on the table (in other words, to price a book so another dealer can make a profit or so a collector will be happy with a bargain) as long as you have made a decent profit. This is what keeps people coming back. I didn’t make this up: it’s something I learned from another bookseller, back when I first started selling books. Don’t be scared about not getting top dollar – that is a moving target and you can’t keep up with it anyhow. #2. Use some common sense when researching on the Internet – and broaden your search if necessary. We recently bought a signed F/F 1st of a nice poetry anthology. I look up the book and all copies on line are exlibs $25 and under. I look up the editor who signed it, and more recent and more common anthologies by this same editor are up to $150 (unsigned). I looked at “signed” books by the author/editor and they are not terrible uncommon, with most in the $25-50 range. So $25 for an exlib is too high, $150 (followed by the next sheep who went for $145, etc.) is ridiculous. A reasonable price is probably $30-40 for our signed copy – and that gives us a good profit, etc….. With luck this book will sell reasonably quickly, since our copy is the only “good” one, and I will write a better description than any of the others….. I never rely on a price when there are only a few copies listed (unless the price really matches my “gut feeling” when I bought it) – I try and look at other books by the same author, or the same publisher, or on the same topic – or whatever it takes. #3 – if a book is REALLY worth a lot of money there MUST be a good reason for that. “No other copies on line” is not a good reason. Neither is “only one copy listed and it is an exlib for $250.” Don’t let greed define your pricing. Let your KNOWLEDGE of books determine how you price a book – that is why bookselling has traditionally been considered a profession! If you have a book that is a first hand account of exploring xxxx and it seems to be earlier than anything else on the same topic, and you find it absolutely fascinating and there are no other copies on line – then go for the moon in pricing it – and say WHY this is such an incredible book in your description. Read it (or parts of it), research it, research the topic – (even if you never buy a book from them, read Forrest’s and Susan’s descriptions of the books they o ffer for sale) #4. Assume a knowledgeable buyer – don’t try to get every last penny out of an unwary buyer who wants a copy and thinks just because you priced it at $250 it is really worth that! At the end of the day – or at the end of your career – you want to feel good about yourself, and you are going to feel a lot better if you sold a few bargains and made people happy, than if you overpriced common dreck just because “you can get a lot of money for these books on Amazon” We all know that most “booksellers” – that is, those who are selling books because they find them fascinating (as opposed to those who are selling them because they are a commodity easy to find cheap/easy to pack and ship, etc.) – are not motivated solely by money (if we were we’d be doing something else and making more money) – so when you look up a book on the internet, don’t be doing it just for the price – do it as part of researching the book. If the book is a common one, that you are pretty familiar with, there is no need to research it (or look up the price), just stick a reasonable price on it, and be done with it…. – Christine Volk A. Internet prices can still be quite useful if you are willing to accept them for what they are, and not for what they are not. Using AddAll.com, you get all the listed copies (or at least lots of them) in one list, regardless of catalogers’ variant title entries. AddAll can be set to sort in descending order by price, thus leaving the dreck (and the sleepers) toward the end of the list. If you wish, you can limit the search to hardbacks, etc. (You can also exclude the Alibris listings, which are mostly duplications. Unfortunately, I know of no reliable way to automatically eliminate ex-library, book club, or jacketless books.) At the bottom of the results page, there are options that can eliminate or limit the findings to certain publishers or other words. Any sample has limited reliability. (Listed books are a sample of the whole world.) If a book is really scarce, you won’t see enough to use. If it’s really common, you may be wasting your time. In the mid range, the AddAll findings can be quite instructive. The top of the AddAll report will indicate the total number of books found. The first screen will display only the top 50. Let’s say it finds 40. You can find the median price at No. 20, (or just move the scrollbar up to about halfway; with a little practice you can hit No. 20 most of the time.) Then look for No.10 and No. 30, which define the midrange (remember quartiles from Stat class?). None of this eliminates the need for judgment, but it surely gives a good picture of the competition. You also need to pay attention to condition descriptions, and of course edition. And needless to say, the existing listings can be quite useful in descriptions of points, various editions or bindings, etc. As to the poster’s question on NO listings, the first thing would be to double check your typing and spelling. Then maybe search on title but not author; finally try author but not title, to see what the author’s other books are listed at. Bookfinder.com, on the other hand, seems a bit more useful for the layman, especially if they are not clear on author/title/spelling, etc. It saves you having to scroll through hundreds of responses. But I normally use AddAll.com. AddAll allows you to pre-set for hb/pb/all bindings. A problem, however, is that their software defaults to whatever your last search specified. So if you search for hardbacks only, your next search will be preset for hardbacks; you have to remember to change the setting on the next search if you want paperbacks or all bindings. An alternative is to group your searches into batches of hb and pb. I am not up on eBay or Amazon searches. They are a definite part of the market. eBay will search completed auctions. – Don Ramsey, All Books Considered A. We recently had a very similar experience. We picked up a recently published (within 25 years) ex-library book on Spanish (gilt) leather, primarily because of the unusual topic. Initially we saw a copy listed on the net for hundreds. I just couldn’t think that the book was that valuable. I used Google and found out the book is the bible for craftsfolk in that area of work. I priced it at less than a 1/3 of the high price found on the net, even then I made sure I cleaned it up a lot before I listed it. It sold within a month to a gilt worker in Europe. We also regularly check our more expensive items that are over a year old to see if more copies have appeared on the net. In some cases we have had $100.00 books drop to $40.00 but they usually sell in a timely manner after I adjust the price. Good description can be a great help, as Chris Volk mentioned. Definitely true in the cases I mentioned here. – Gene Alloway, Motte & Bailey Booksellers,www.mottebooks.com Q&A is compiled by Jean S. McKenna, Education Chairwoman for the Independent Online Booksellers Association (IOBA). Questions and comments may be sent to Jean ateducation@ioba.org. As usual, thanks to all of our contributors, especially Lynn and his Bibliophile mailing list at http://bibliophilegroup.com/mailman/listinfo/biblio_bibliophilegroup.com Subscribe to the Standard

“Customers will buy our books to read them” was just one of our naive assumptions when we began selling books. We also believed that we could make a lot of money selling books and that there really was a Santa Claus. We can’t say how many customers who buy online from Dog Lovers Bookshop never read the books we sell them. What we do know is that, when we had a bricks-and-mortar store in midtown Manhattan, some of our customers told us that they bought books primarily for decoration, to give their homes that warm “bookish” feeling. To those customers, the appearance and smell of a book were frequently more important than the book’s content. An attractive binding or the original dust jacket often made the sale, as did a book’s lack of something material: odor. At the very least these putative nonreaders reinforced our belief in the importance of maintaining our stock in the best possible condition. What’s good for books before they’re bought and paid for is good for them in their new homes. Most obvious is keeping books free of surface dirt and dust. Routine, gentle dusting with a soft, lint-free cloth is essential for the well-being of books, the environment in which they live, and the people who handle them. A factor that cannot be overemphasized, though it’s too often ignored, is smell. A book may smell unpleasant from exposure to damp, smoke, pungent cooking, and the combination of dust, dirt, age, and deterioration. Fortunately, it’s a very rare bad-smelling book that can’t be helped. In our book The Care and Feeding of Books Old and New: A Simple Repair Manual for Book Lovers (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2002) we describe our favorite method : the stinky box. The basic method employs a clean, dry carton – we favor liquor boxes from our neighborhood merchants and the plastic or archival storage containers available from Brodart and many office supply dealers. Avoid cartons that have contained food products. The carton should be big enough to let the books undergoing treatment stand upright and open (with proper support). Joining the books, one or more solid room air fresheners; we favor the “outdoorsy” scents. Close the container and give the books and the fresheners time alone together. Check every 24 hours or so at first; let the books breathe for a while outside the box to see if the treatment has worked or if another session is needed. We’ve waited as long as three weeks for improvement and always found it worthwhile. If you object to using air freshening products, try good old-fashioned baking soda (but not the box that’s been open in the refrigerator!). It does the trick, though it may absorb odors very slowly. If you use a carton that is clean, dry, and the right size, but it doesn’t close tightly (which speeds the process), or if you object to an air freshener’s scent escaping from the stinky box, enclose the carton in plastic sheeting or a plastic sack. By all means be sure that your stinky box sits where it cannot get wet or knocked about. Books that smell better don’t need creased pages or bumped corners! Bern and Margot are co-owners of Dog Lovers Bookshop at http:// www.dogbooks.com, and the co-authors of “Care and Feeding of Books Old and New: A Simple Repair Manual for Book Lovers”, St. Martin’s Press, and they are consultants to the Products Division of The Brodart Company. For more of their book care information go to http:// www.shopbrodart.com, and click on “How-Tos and Guides”.

Table of Contents I’ll Get Straight To The Point Biblio Finds Its Way in the Used, Rare, and Out-of-print Book Market Is a “Stand-Alone” Signature Better? Selling Books Is Like Fly-fishing Discarded Books: The Facelift for Ex-Library Books Slipcases and Clamshell Boxes A Little History of The History of Woman Suffrage Are Used Book Sales Hurting New Book Sales ? The Bookstores of Madison Wisconsin 28th Annual Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair, Ephemeral Assays – Jane Jackets Updated Edition of Children’s & Illustrated Books Price Guide & Bibliographic Check List from 1880-1970 Beautifying the Tattered Book Jacket Cover BookWriter Professional: An Interview with Thomas A. Sawyer A Comprehensive Guide to Book Listing Sites Why I Belong to the IOBA Why a Successful Book Collecting Magazine Is Good for Your Business The History of Abracadabra Bookshop

Many in the book and paper trade have had occasion to ponder early family history items that come our way. Family Bibles, journals, letters, and images are fairly common at auctions and estate sales. We have all wondered if this material is worth anything in general, and some of us would even like to find interested descendants in particular. When profit and genealogy intersect, that’s even better. I’ve been working with amateur and professional genealogists for many years now. They tend to be patient and persistent, plowing through early vital records and making pilgrimages along the ancestor trail, which typically runs from places like Connecticut where younger sons felt stifled, through gateway states like New York, and on to good farmlands in Ohio and other parts west. Experienced researchers generally find all the big shiny nuggets early on, and are simply panning for gold dust by now. Some wear tee shirts with sayings like, “My ancestors must have been part of a witness protection program.” When seasoned family researchers stumble upon rich, unexpected finds, they are sublimely delighted. How to unite widely scattered family history objects and those who would covet them? More often than not, it’s a lost cause. Large charcoal portraits and stern photos of ancient couples are seldom identified by surname. The auctioneer makes a joke about buying yourself some instant relatives, the pair gets knocked down for $20.00, and the winner finally lays them to rest as the gilt frames are busted out for resale. Old country store journals from the mid-1800s which report what dozens of townspeople bought every week were pasted over with Victorian cutouts fifty years later and are rarely restored a century after that. Dealers will go through large boxes of images looking for a few handsome figures before discarding the rest. A common Lincoln CDV or something out of the ordinary like a Saint Bernard standing on a tavern table is worth more than dozens of nondescript head shots. I’ve known several in the trade who chuck any ephemera relating to family history as a matter of policy. No market for it, they tell me. Not worth the effort. When you perform extended research for a lousy extra ten bucks, or are altogether rebuffed by contemporary relatives who accuse you of hucksterism, thick skins result. If this kind of marginal field work does not appeal to you, read no further. No harm, no foul. Just don’t throw this stuff out though, okay? For anything from single images to large hoards of family lore, the more unique the name in question, the better your chances. John Smith or Michael Sullivan from early 1900s New York City is probably not worth your time. If you can’t sell that piece on its own non-genealogical merits, gently return it to the stream and hope it finds its way back home some day. Cornelius Van Slyke from 1700s Schenectady County, on the other hand, will be fairly easy to place. A retired math teacher turned genealogist told me that in math you need two points to describe a line, but in genealogy you need three…a name, a time, and a place. Unique names improve the efficacy of that equation. To start at the top of the genealogy food chain, in terms of what booksellers come across most often, old family Bibles can be mother lodes of information. Examples from the 1800s are typically leather bound, wonderfully illustrated, and run to 1,000 pages or so. Find the hidden cache contained in the family register pages between the Old Testament and the New Testament. If the recipients did their job, it will record marriages, births, and deaths in several nice hands as it was passed from generation to generation. Sometimes these notations overflow onto any available blank pages. I’ve been battling with a couple of local Bible collectors at auction for years now. I argue that most Bibles say pretty much the same thing, so why lock up that important family history for another thirty years just to gain a new imprint? Like all good ephemera, the genealogical variety comes in a myriad of forms. We are only scratching the surface in this consideration. Journals, diaries, documents, scrapbooks, billheads, postcards, captioned photo albums, and even the movies Grandpa shot can tell a lot about those who came before, though not always. What a disappointment it is to find a daily diary that does little more than record the weather or complain about ailments. The best journal I ever had contained more family history tidbits and printed ephemera than would ever be admitted into a rigid Bible. It even included full page dress and vest fabric samples from half a dozen weddings going back to the 1700s, and several locks of young hair in all colors. DNA! One of my neighbors hosts a trendy scrapbooking club where you buy all the products through her, and they were astounded at this early example of their craft. I worked hard to find the right descendants for this one. When it comes to old letters in their original envelopes, the pertinent information is more inherent and you often stand a good chance of determining where to market them. Seemingly valueless pieces like little illustrated business cards can still ring the register all these years later if you promote them properly. Scarce privately printed genealogies may benefit from some marketing, but simply pricing them a bit below market value and listing them in your catalog is usually good enough. Stellar items like graphic Civil War diaries generally gravitate toward the specialist collector with deep pockets, regardless of family ties. Next in the cavalcade of common family history treasures comes images. Daguerreotypes, tintypes, cabinet cards, cartes de visite, and snapshots, to name a few. Early cased images sometimes contain a note or lock of hair behind the glass. You can carefully lift it out with a small suction cup to check. It is very common for cabinet cards-rectangular commercial studio photos mounted on thick stock-to carry name and date inscriptions on the reverse. If the small home town or city of the studio is printed on the front, you have your three points. Untethered images are perhaps the most bittersweet example of lost family history. Current and future family researchers would swoon over such pictures that are worth a thousand words. I’d love to find one of Martin Purcell, the first over from Ireland in the 1840s, as no image is known to exist. There’s probably about a 3% chance one is floating around somewhere, but I would never stumble on this myself. It would have to be brought to my attention somehow, and I would pay dearly for the effort. Ten years ago, before the internet was widely up and running, I came across a large box of material which was obviously the work of an early genealogist. It all had to do with the Brooks family and ten or so related lines, including one all the way back to William Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower and served as the second governor of Massachusetts. The first compiler was trying to join the Daughters of the American Revolution and several other blue blood societies around the turn of the century. Her daughter took up the cause right into the 1930s. These applications require careful documentation. All their notes, charts, deeds, wills, newspaper obituaries, church, military, court and census records, and correspondence with distant relatives and researchers was included. There were charming New England research trip postcards which detailed how the owners of ancestral homes asked why they were taking photos and then invited them to stay when they discovered who they were, or how museum curators gave them access to closed parts of the collections relating to their lines. Among the treasures in this box was a well executed silhouette portrait of husband and wife probably from the early 1800s or so, which would exceed the wildest expectations of most family researchers. This mother and daughter team would surely have been dismayed to learn that all their hard work ended up in boxes on the dusty floor of an auction hall. It was much easier to market/repatriate this material in 2005 than it would have been in 1995 when I found it, and that gets us back to the How. Keeping in mind that we must put business before philanthropy and librarianship, I try to flip such items over pretty quickly these days, without a lot of time-consuming marketing. EBay is one of the best venues for this. Rather than seeking out and approaching individuals with hat in hand and arbitrary price in mind, let the huge open marketplace decide. The eBay category for genealogy is rather convoluted (Everything Else/Genealogy, which is not far from Everything Else/Weird Stuff). Very few people search large eBay categories any more, as there are too many listings and too much dreck, so it’s just as effective to list items under Photographic Images or whatever rather than worrying about the best category. The key words in your 55 character title are how interested parties can find your item. Include the family name, variant spellings where applicable, an indication that the item is old (either a date if known or “early”), a town or city, and both forms of the state (e.g., Iowa IA) when possible. There are lots of new duplicate items being hawked to family researchers these days, like CDs full of stuff they have already, and lots of reproductions of historic photos, so make sure you note down in the description field that your offering is original. This field is searchable for live auctions, by the way, though many shoppers are not aware of this option. Give the dimensions, number of pages, and any other details. Needless to say, a good scan or digital picture is paramount as well. I run ten day auctions, which gives people more time to find things. Dedicated researchers check eBay all the time, but not everyone is so diligent. Pinning all your hopes on eBay eyeballs would prove somewhat unproductive, so you need to do a little outreach. This is where Cyndi’s List comes in handy. Although the name does not sound all that promising, Cyndi’s List has become the premier destination for free online genealogical research. It currently provides nearly 250,000 links. Go to the homepage at http://www.cyndislist.com, pull down to the Surnames, Family Associations & Family Newsletters section, and click on the appropriate letter. When it comes to family associations, there is wide variety. Most are interactive email forums that are free to subscribe to and participate in. Some of these lists are incredibly active, while others are completely moribund. Some embrace variant spellings and others shy away from them. There can be more than one group for a given surname, usually split along lines of primary place of origin or settlement. Family researchers follow the subscription directions, delve into their archives, and often listen in for a few weeks before politely posting a query. If you don’t find the name in question in this Surname list, pull down to the very bottom of the page and you will find mailing list links to the vast Genealogy Resources on the Internet site, or you can access these directly through http://www.rootsweb.com. I formerly used the Directory of Family Associations for contact information, but the vast capabilities of the internet have greatly eclipsed such print resources. It is taboo to join such a list for the express purpose of marketing your items. One could debate whether this constitutes true spamming until the cows come home, but most groups take exception, so don’t go there. The better approach is to contact list administrators directly and ask for their assistance. Once your eBay auction is live, click on “Email to a Friend.” Fill in the recipient’s email address, tailor your message, and fire away. They see the whole auction, complete with pictures, and can bid right from there. My message usually reads something like, “I came across this early (whatever) some time ago at an auction. I’ve just listed it on eBay, the online auction service, and thought that the (whatever) family list might be interested in copying the images and information or bidding on it. As list administrator, please consider posting a notice about it. Thank you.” The response is usually favorable. Often they will alert their members to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, either privately or through the list. More than once, list members have pooled their resources to win the item in question. Even if list administrators keep the notice to themselves in order to avoid competition, at least you have one more interested party on board. On rare occasions, list administrators get crabby when contacted. Such contact is not a violation of list rules, however, and again I don’t consider this classic spamming. As my Grandmother used to say, “Who died and left you boss?,” and chances are some of that grumpy gatekeeper’s list members would pose the same question if they knew what was going on. After all, what better place is there to alert family researchers about extremely unique and potentially important pieces of their past? The Cyndi’s List part of the various Surname pages usually gives direct email addresses. The lower Genealogy Resources on the Internet lists have uniform procedures for subscribing. Just substitute “admin” for the mail or digest mode options provided, as in smith-admin@rootsweb.com, and you have a valid list administrator’s email address. As an aside, one can employ the same technique with historical items pertaining to a particular town or city. Email the same eBay notice to the proper town historian or local historical society. These entities are increasingly easy to find on the web. In checking the Cyndi’s List surname resources just now in the preparation of this article, I was surprised to see a link dedicated to the very 1729 Van Slyke Bible I recall selling several years ago. This was a massive book with wooden boards covered in leather and adorned with ornamental brass fittings. I paid a pretty penny for this Bible, to the amusement of the auction hall regulars, but it sold for over $1,000.00. Transactions like that make up for all the extra effort and modest returns more often associated with genealogical marketing. The URL ishttp://olivetreegenealogy.com/nn/surnames/vslyke_Bible.shtml. “The following pictures are from the Van Slyke Bible that was recently auctioned off on e-Bay. The successful bidder phoned me and after a lengthy chat, he drove up from the States to visit me here in Northern Ontario. What a great time we had! Of course he brought the Bible with him and we eagerly went through it page by page. Beautiful engravings (100 or more) fill its pages, and you can easily imagine how impressive it must have been for the Van Slyke family to gather around.” Reading on further, the present caretakers have made some reasonable assumptions about the entries in and journey of this Bible, and they have provided lots of extra information from other sources. In conclusion, I’m gratified, the descendants are delighted, and we can assume that the old Van Slykes would be most pleased that this long lost keepsake is now back in the family. Shawn Purcell is the principle of Balopticon Books & Ephemera in Delmar NY, online at www.balopticon.com, and may be e-mailed atmail@balopticon.com” Copyright 2004 Shawn Purcell #ephemera

MP: Tom, what’s different about BookWriter Professional? Why would a bookseller be interested in this program? TS: A number of reasons, but if I had to choose one aspect it would be the program’s prime directive of “empowering” a bookseller. Having the tools needed to get the job done and making them easily accessible and intuitive to operate makes it much easier for a bookseller to be productive. It also helps them to make good business decisions. They might even have a little fun and discover that computerized bookselling doesn’t have to be drudgery. MP: Are you saying you’ve found a “magic bullet” solution? TS: No, but BookWriter does offer an attractive alternative. Every bookseller does things a little differently. Many use multiple programs to get their daily tasks done. That poses a problem for a software developer. There are two traditional approaches to program design: (1) compel the user to follow specific procedures, or (2) put a variety of capabilities in place, create a generic environment and let them figure it out for themselves (Microsoft Excel is a good example of this). In my opinion, neither of these approaches has been particularly successful to date. The first approach is too limiting and the second approach requires the user to become conversant with the environment to use it effectively. The learning curve is usually steep. A surprising amount of time can be wasted just trying to make simple things work as expected. MP: How does BookWriter solve the problem? TS: Booksellers have specialized needs and I doubt any program will ever completely solve it. There’s no question improvements have been made, but humans and computers still only interact well in the movies at this stage of their evolution. But I believe BookWriter makes significant strides towards improving that. It provides a broad scope of possibilities within a structured framework. BookWriter is constructed rather like a well-organized briefcase. Instead of a big empty space where everything gets dumped randomly, or a partitioned container with sections and lids and separators and covers you must open and close repeatedly to get at things, all of BookWriter’s pockets and compartments are visible and accessible at once — and they interrelate intuitively. It is well-organized from the start, which makes it easier for the user to also be well-organized. Best of all, everyone knows intuitively how to use a well-organized briefcase. It has a short learning curve. Within each area there are usually a lot of options. There is generally a core functionality at work, but there be many ways in which the bookseller can apply it to their business needs. MP: Can you give a specific example of how this philosophy applies to BookWriter? TS: For instance: BookWriter’s invoicing capabilities are well defined, but the manner in which information is entered is largely freeform. You are not compelled to follow a strict set of accounting procedures — though you can certainly do that if you so choose. The program allows you to tell it which accounting fields are required and which are not (none are required by default). You can instantly pull up a group of invoices that are related in some way and generate useful reports through a very powerful reporting system. You can create customized layouts that suit your needs instead of selecting from a list of canned choices that may or may not be suitable for your business. You can produce invoices, quotes, packing slips, etc., all from the same basic information, in real time. You can even service multiple businesses within the same accounting framework, just by selecting a different identity. These are just some of the functional considerations that went into it. Again, you are not compelled to settle for someone else’s idea of what they think you should be doing. Instead, you can organize things to suit what you need to get done. It’s not a perfect solution, but it is powerful. MP: It sounds like versatility and individuality have been elevated over conformity and procedure. Aren’t you concerned this will cause problems? Or that people won’t understand what to do or how to do it? TS: No, because no one knows better than the bookseller how their own business is run. The landscape is changing rapidly and versatility is becoming increasingly important across all venues. Adaptation is essential to survival, but booksellers are highly-individualistic and tend to stick with a method once they’ve settled on it. And, no two sellers do things in quite the same way. Bookselling is no longer a black and white business. For example, some dealers sell both their own and other dealer’s books. Some offer books in their own web site, through multiple listing services, by auction, in their own store, in bulk lots — in any combination or even all of them simultaneously. Some deal only in collectible books, some in remainders, some sell both new and used, some sell ephemera and antiques and collectibles — the list goes on and on. Keeping all this under tight control can be a huge job. Hence, managing it in one comprehensive environment is an essential capability if a seller is to be productive and competitive. That’s part of the reason BookWriter has taken so long to produce. The user interface has by far been the biggest effort, going through multiple iterations of simplification. At this point, it should be possible for a novice to use it as easily as a seasoned veteran — or at least, that’s my goal. MP: Tom, you said on your web site that BookWriter professional has turned into the biggest coding project you’ve attempted in a long time, and you grossly underestimated the time that would be required to do a good job. Any further comments on that? TS: It’s true. I originally envisioned a finished product and saw a clear way to get from here to there. What I didn’t count on was the enormous amount of time required to deal with data quality issues and simplify and polish the user interface. I would say 75% of my time has been spent on that alone. MP: Do you think people who have known of the project and have been following your progress will realize that the BwPro of then is vastly different to the BwPro that is shortly to be launched? TS: Some will, others won’t. More important to me is the fact that the booksellers who placed advance orders have been extraordinarily supportive and patient. I’m grateful for that. They have been very good to me. Now I hope I can be good to them. MP: Would you give an outline of the innovations and suggestions that booksellers have requested, over and above what was originally planned, that have been built in and helped to greatly extend the launch date? TS: New features were really only a part of the problem. A lot of trial-and-error experimentation was involved in getting things right. I can’t really give an outline because it wasn’t a predictable cause-and-effect scenario, but here’s an example: While coding the Homebase Import utility many data quality issues arose that had to be addressed. For instance, ABE’s treatment of keywords is such that they treat each individual word “as” a keyword. Consequently, even articles like “a” “an” and “the” are treated as keywords. That’s silly, but that’s what they’ve done. Worse, the keyword terms lose their phraseological integrity when exported from Homebase. Subsequently dumping disassociated words into one long sentence is a poor solution. In addition, Homebase databases are usually full of duplicate records and these have to be pre-purged to avoid problems after the fact. Presumably these steps were taken by ABE as a result of expediency or the desire to limit use of records outside of their system. Whatever the reason, they create huge problems for the bookseller. One can argue these are all comparatively minor aspects in the broader scheme of things, but they are unquestionably serious obstacles to producing book data that is both coherent and universally compatible in all sales venues. Achieving that compatibility in the least number of steps is very difficult. So, an entirely new means of adapting data and handling the import had to be implemented. Just doing the user interface and testing for this alone took two weeks. MP: Can you give any insights into the ease and facility of associating images with inventory? I.e. how many images per title are available to show salient details etc.? TS: Up to 10 images can be directly associated with each Inventory or Wants record. These can be added manually, or they can be selected through a scanning process whereby the program associates images with records by file name, or they can be captured from the web and associated based on ISBN or other retrieval criteria. MP: From what countries have you had buyers? TS: So far the US, Canada, England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Japan. MP: Will the ISBN Extractor tool validate ISBN’s issued in other countries and bring up the relevant data? TS: ISBN extraction is based on the same Modulo-11 math that all ISBN’s are built upon, so as far as I know there are no country-specific issues in this regard. The program is also set up to handle the forthcoming expanded-length ISBN’s. MP: Maybe down the track would it be feasible to bolt on, say, the post (zip) codes of Australia? TS: Yes. BookWriter is linked to the USPS (United States Postal Service) database, presently. The plan is to eventually put all country codes in place and to electronically link them to any/all facilities provided by each country for instant address validations. The underlying database is built into the program and also contains both latitude/longitude information, allowing you to instantly bring up a map of any location. You can also pre-configure the desired service, such as Yahoo Maps, MapQuest, etc so you can use your favorite. MP: I’ve long had the idea that it would be handy to have the facility of having a ‘want’ listed in the database and, quite some time later, on adding the title to inventory, have the want flagged automatically. Is that possible yet? TS: It is indeed. There are several ways the program will do this, either manually or automatically. There is a dedicated Matching feature that will find matching Inventory for a new Want, and/or find matching Want(s) for new Inventory. You can also run a comparative analysis against the entire database. MP: Have you had any experience with voice-recognition software being used to load data into BwPro? TS: Yes, and it is astonishing how much better the software is now than just a couple of years ago. I believe the error rates are now sufficiently low that this is now a feasible and productive solution. If you had asked me 18 months ago whether or not you should consider using voice recognition software, I would have said No. MP: Would 64 bit rather 32 bit have any consequences? TS: Not really, except it will be more efficient. BookWriter has very few operating system dependencies and it uses its own DLL library. The executable is around 4 MB and the entire download is less than 10 MB. I have reduced Microsoft “baggage” to the bare minimum. MP: I understand there is a non-bookselling aspect to BookWriter. Can you elaborate? TS: Yes, BookWriter provides multiple database support. It contains field-configuration capabilities and specific applications can be selected on a per-database basis. More will be published about this shortly, as the UIEE specification is also being updated in tandem. MP: For those who use BwWeb, will there be any changes brought about by the improved/extended scope of BwPro? TS: Yes indeed. There is a lot of emphasis on managing your own independent web site and BookWriter Web is an intrinsic component in that. I’m still doing integration so that’s all I’ll say about it for now, but I think people are going to be very pleased with the results — at least, I hope they will be. MP: During the two plus years of work and as the comprehensive ability of the program became apparent to those in the industry, were any outside efforts made to head you off at the pass? TS: Not exactly. Let’s say that there were those who were happy to hear of what I was doing, and a very few who were not. Overall, the support has been phenomenal and I’m very encouraged by it all. When you’re operating on the edge, that kind of support is a powerful motivator to finish the project. There were times when things looked pretty bleak. Now, I’d have to say we’re back on track and gathering steam. MP: Will booksellers have the opportunity to test-drive the program? TS: Yes, a free download will be made available as soon as the Beta version is ready to go. MP: What’s your release schedule at this point? TS: The Beta version is scheduled to go out on/about the end of July. The entire month of August will be devoted to finalizing the Beta, and formal rollout will take place the first week of September. MP: After all this effort and stress is your wife still talking to you? TS: Yes, she is my anchor and my life partner. We’ve been through a lot together and all of this has served to strengthen us, though I admit we’ll both be glad to see the project completed. Having additional hands to help out is making a huge difference. MP: Tom, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Where can dealers get more information? TS: You’re welcome, thank you for giving me the opportunity. Mike Pengelly is a bookseller in Australia. Additional information about BookWriter Professional software is available at http://www.bookwritersoftware.com/bwpro/bwpro.htm #apps #services

Most book dealers have a story about how they found themselves in the book trade and I am no exception.\ I don’t think there are many small kids who aspire to grow up to be used book dealers, but I may be as close as they come. From my earliest memories of childhood, I have been fascinated by commerce. I loved everything that had to do with just about any aspect of commerce. I can remember when I was 6, teaching my 2 year old brother how to count using play money as my media for teaching. Whenever friends came over to play I would often suggest playing “store.” Of course, I wanted to run the cash register: that was my favorite part. Add to this the fact that I was an early reader: I was already reading before I got to pre-school and when we arrived in Modesto mid-way through first grade I angered my teacher by reading the entire reading textbook (a year’s worth of curriculum) my first weekend in her class. Books and commerce, commerce and books – I guess my childhood was a foreshadowing of what was to come. During college I truly became a voracious reader. In addition to the textbooks for my business classes (no surprise there), I was often reading as many as 10 books at once, just for fun. I never did find much interest in novels, but loved non-fiction, especially theology and church history. I also discovered the joy of used book stores. Every Thursday night the main street in downtown San Luis Obispo, California was closed off for a local Farmer’s Market. For most of my 4 years at Cal Poly Thursday nights meant the trek downtown for fresh veggie’s, ribs at McClintock’s, and an hour or so at Leon’s Book Store which was a favorite among Cal Poly students. Just 2 weeks after graduation from Cal Poly, back in my hometown of Modesto, California, I received a phone call from the owners of Modesto’s premier used book store Yesterday’s Books. Since I had grown up with their children and had known them for over 10 years already, the invitation to work at the store was an easy one. In fact I was called at 10 in the morning, and started at 1 that afternoon. What started out as a six-week temporary position grew into a full-time position, one that I held for six years. During that time I started my seminary training, feeling a call into full time ministry. To help pay my seminary bills I started selling books mail-order and even signed up with a new Internet based dealer-to-dealer network called Interloc. My employers were aware of my moonlighting in the same industry and even gave it their blessing. I left my employ with the Dorman’s at Yesterday’s Books in the spring of 1997, having joined a music-based missionary troupe based in California. For the next 6 years I spent my life on a bus traveling throughout the United States and 18 foreign countries, giving as many as 300 concerts a year. In 2002 I completed my third two-year tour of duty and knew it was time to come home, but not sure what I was to do when I returned. What I knew is that I needed a non-traditional job because I wanted a flexible schedule that would leave the door open for ministry opportunities that would open up locally. Well, the Internet market for books had changed dramatically while I was on the road and it was easy to step back into what I knew well. Plus, I could run the business from my parent’s home while I re-established myself financially and explored the next chapter in my saga. So that’s the current chapter in the life of this book dealer. I specialize in religion (surprise, surprise) hoping that a good inventory of Protestant and Catholic theology and history reference will enable me to be of service to busy pastors and seminarians. In addition to the Internet business, I exhibit at several book fairs each year as well as several home schooling conventions. And yes, the flexibility of a home-based on-line business has allowed time for local missionary opportunities. For the past three years I have worked as the assistant Christmas Kettle Co-coordinator for the Salvation Army in Modesto where I also serve as the Church Worship Leader. Blessings! Dan Glaeser operates Dan Glaeser Books in Modesto, CA and can be contacted at http://www.DanGlaeserBooks.com

Like most people in the used and rare book business today, I was not trained for this career. I did not have access to the generations of knowledge and experience enjoyed by the children and grandchildren of the founders of Dawson’s Book Shop in Los Angeles, the Arthur H. Clark Company now in Spokane, Washington, and The Argosy Book Shop in New York City. I had to learn this business by listening to mentors, watching how other booksellers worked, and by making mistakes more experienced people would never have made. Sure – I was a reader. My father took me to bookstores in Seattle to look at used books and I grew up just down the street from Elizabeth Rider Montgomery, one of the authors of the Dick and Jane stories, who encouraged me to read. But none of that taught me to be a bookseller any more than looking at pictures of a lake taught me to swim. I had to jump into bookselling in order to learn its lessons, and since most of those lessons involved my making or losing money, I tended to learn and remember them pretty well. My first book sale list, issued 33 years ago, had 10 items in it. Nine of these were rather common, inexpensive books, and the other item was an 8 volume leather bound set in nice condition of some famous writer whose name I have now forgotten. The cheap books were priced in the $2 to $5 range, and none of them sold. The leather bound set was priced at the outrageous sum of $100, and it sold right away. The lesson here was obvious: cheap books are so easy to find that there was no compelling need for my little group of customers to buy any of those. They could find them anywhere and buy them anytime. The leather set was unusual, though, and priced at $100 was obviously scarce and desirable. People were looking for them, but they were not looking for the cheaper books because they did not have to. My next lesson came from the variety of catalogs I began receiving from other booksellers. Since I was teaching English, I naturally assumed I was going to specialize in literature. But Ohio has a long history and I began to find it easier to purchase scarce books, maps, and ephemera on Ohio and Midwest history, Native Americans, and the Civil War. In the first few years I was fortunate to have met and learned from some of the great Midwestern booksellers including Robert Younger of Morningside Books in Dayton, Ohio, the legendary book scout Arthur H. Phillips who lived in Columbus, the bookseller and writer Jack Matthews, whose books remain among my favorites for stories about booking in the Midwest, and some of the most knowledgeable collectors in the state, including Joe Dush of Willard, Ohio, and Bill Barth of Youngstown. Without exception, these and other booksellers and collectors freely shared their wisdom and experience. Among the important lessons I learned from them was that the book business is as much about the customer as it is about the books. Books, they said, are out there, available in quantity, yours to find and buy, including the rare ones. But customers are hard to find and difficult to keep. They must always be treated with respect and the bookseller must always deal with them honestly – anything less than that will result in the loss of the customer. Since the collecting and bookselling community, especially for scarcer material, is relatively small, dishonest dealing will always garner attention. Fortunately my father had also taught me that lesson early on, so I had no problem guaranteeing everything I sold. Sometimes the guarantee was hard to support, as in the case of an expensive book I sold to a customer that had a finely crafted facsimile leaf I had not detected. I cheerfully refunded the $10,000 purchase price, plus shipping costs both to and from the customer, and I think now that it was one of the best experiences I ever had because that customer told everyone how honest and pleasant I was in the face of this disappointment. It is clear, now, that just about anyone can become a bookseller. The bar to entering the trade is very low. Penny sellers abound and there are all too many who do not know the terms, customs, and techniques of bookselling. Fortunately most of the sellers who are new to the trade focus on selling more popular, less-expensive books. Gathering the information necessary to be able to acquire and sell antiquarian and more valuable modern books is still difficult, though. I learned that when, in the dawn of the personal computer age, Jake Chernofsky called to ask me to write a column for AB Bookman’s Weekly and to attend the Antiquarian Book Seminar in Colorado (http://www.bookseminars.com/) to give a talk on what computers could do to take over some tedious jobs booksellers had to do, like keeping mailing lists up to date and printing catalogs and lists of books. My first day at the Colorado Seminar was interesting. There was some hostility to using computers in a trade that believed in old ways of doing things, but Jake had warned me that might happen so I prepared myself for the worst. Jake invited me to stay for the full seminar as part of the faculty and that week changed my bookselling career forever. Much of the information given at the seminar was, I now realize, crucial to my advancing from a mere bookseller to a knowledgeable antiquarian bookseller. There I became comfortable with a wide range of reference sources. I was able to associate with some of the best and most respected booksellers in the trade, both as friends and as mentors to whom I could turn for help, if needed. I was able to spend a week immersed in every aspect of the trade, from information sources, to cataloging, to book repair and restoration, to running a store. The faculty was open and available to help at all times and I realized after the end of the seminar that I could not possibly have had access to all that information and those contacts without the seminar. The information made it possible for me to move, with confidence, from selling cheap books to trading in scarcer, more interesting, and more valuable books, maps, documents, photographs, and ephemera. Fortunately, I was able to return as lecturer and faculty member several more times and I always considered myself both a teacher and a student, always learning, always open to new ideas. Those were some of the best days of my professional career and the seminar made it possible for me to make a nice living outside of teaching. But can that still be done? Is learning the antiquarian book business still relevant to a trade that appears to be focused on penny books and fast turnover? I believe strongly that it is. There are still many collectors looking for good and great books. They need and want the assistance of knowledgeable booksellers. The fact is that for more common books the customers set the prices. If someone wants a copy, but doesn’t want to pay much for it, there is always another copy somewhere else that is priced attractively. That is not as true with the antiquarian book business. As we say, “rare books are getting scarcer and scarcer.” When demand is greater than supply, the seller sets the price and usually gets it. That is why selling scarce books is so attractive. People can spend a great deal of time buying, cataloging, shipping, and accounting for cheap books, all for very little profit. Scarce books demand more research, careful cataloging, and secure packaging for shipping, yet frequently are quite profitable because the seller who handles them has a customer who wants or needs a copy and is willing to pay for it because she or he can not find it anyplace else. What the Internet has done is to expose, in an even more obvious way, what has been true for the past few decades: up to a point, customers set prices on books. If you have books that are relatively common, price them to sell. The Alibris Pricing Service was created to help sellers re-price and move this inventory. If you don’t re-price you will probably see prices continue to fall and your copy will remain stale, perhaps taking up room and funds you could use for better inventory. If you want to work with scarcer, more valuable books, learn all you can about the trade. Develop your sense of what is valuable, but be open to learning some of the same hard, sometimes-expensive lessons I have had to learn over the past 33 years. Richard Weatherford is Founder of Alibris, an online bookselling venue at http://www.alibris.com

Not yet, though. Bookselling may feel more like a ride on a Tilt-A-Whirl than the cultured, slow-paced trade we used to dream of. We didn’t dream that thousands of new sellers would make good stock more difficult to find and that those thousands would flood the market with common books of ever-sinking prices. Our dream didn’t include so many booksellers wondering how bills would get paid and so many bookselling businesses turning out the lights for the last time. My point? The Independent Online Booksellers Association offers you some stability in this trade. Every quarter the Standard presents useful information and solutions that you might translate into profit or otherwise employ to make your business a bit less tenuous. The IOBA itself brings like-minded online (and open shop) sellers together to solve common problems and promote the best parts of our chosen trade. If you find this issue of the Standard useful, tell other booksellers: they might benefit. If you feel something is missing from this issue, suggest it for the next issue: an e-mail to editor@ioba.org will get things started. If you want to promote the stability of our trade through higher bookselling standards, then visit us at www.ioba.org or join us today. There may not be safety in numbers, but be one of our number and enjoy a bit of stability in difficult times. Best regards. Michael Watson, Editor, editor@ioba.org

In a world of commoditized physical and online retail offerings, consumers are looking for more diverse shopping experiences. Buyers are again searching for things that meet their needs, and wants, and are favoring quality over price. This is where Biblio.com fits in. In 2000, the original Biblio.com was launched as metasearch engine for new, used, rare, and out-of-print books: it quickly gained recognition for its speed and simplicity of use. In 2002, the name of this metasearch engine was changed to SearchBiblio.com to prepare the way for the upcoming new listings service. During this time, development continued on the core product that was later to resemble the Biblio we all know today, with the revenues generated by the metasearch engine helping to provide seed money for the eventual launch of Biblio. Biblio was ready to launch with its new product in February, 2003, initially with 14 booksellers. One of the hurdles was the difficulty of acquiring adequate inventory in order to attract buyers. At the same time, gaining a sufficient bookseller membership required active customers. Fortuitously, in early February the listing site Bookopoly.com was offered for sale. Recognizing a unique opportunity for acquiring an existing base of booksellers and customers, and the market exposure which the acquisition would provide, Biblio purchased Bookopoly.com. One week later, Biblio.com officially launched under its own brand. For the next several months Biblio.com and Bookopoly.com were both run independently. In June 2003 Bookopoly was closed down and its bookseller and customer bases were folded into Biblio.com. Approaching its second anniversary this February, Biblio.com has grown to become the world’s third-largest site dedicated to used, rare, and out-of-print books, with more than 2,250 independent booksellers from 21 different countries representing an aggregate inventory of over 14 million books. The little engine that could Biblio differs from its larger competitors in more ways than just size. Built from the beginning with managed growth in mind, Biblio has received no external investment or capital and all shares in the company are privately held by individuals who are actively involved in the daily operations of the company. Chief Executive Officer and founder Brendan Sherar notes that its larger competitors also have a radically different business strategy than Biblio. Their sales are largely reliant on partnerships with major corporations such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, whereas Biblio’s primary sales and customer bases are independently cultivated. Sherar says “This gives us two strategic advantages moving forward in the marketplace. First, our resources are not exhausted in maintaining such demanding partnerships. Instead we are able to focus our attention on building partnerships with our booksellers and relationships with our customers. Second, it clearly stabilizes our position in the market when the bulk of our business is supported across a base of hundreds of thousands of customers.” “This is not to say that we will not be announcing some key strategic partnerships in 2005. The difference s that we are looking to form mutually-beneficial partnerships with like-minded companies, where it is clear that we have common goals and both hold equal sway in our relationship, and that it is in the best interests of our bookseller members and customers.” Standing out in the crowd Biblio is, of course, not the only small company to recognize the opportunity in the market for a company which focuses its attention on its relationships with its booksellers. It is, however, the largest of these. “While our fundamental philosophy towards our independent booksellers is very similar to most of our smaller competitors, the chief thing that has made Biblio stand out is the sales results we generate for our booksellers. We believe what we do best is to find the balance between sales results and independence for our booksellers, and achieve that equilibrium.” According to Director of Sales and Marketing, Kevin Donaldson, Biblio currently averages more than one million unique visitors to their site monthly, with millions of page views. With the substantial traffic that Biblio has built up over two years, sales have increased proportionately. “We often hear reports from booksellers that the sales we generate for them exceed those of the other independent sites they list their inventory on – in some cases, rivaling even the sales of our larger competitors,” says Donaldson. He believes this trend in sales growth will continue, saying, “Our sales numbers in 2004 were up nearly 400 percent over the prior year and we project similar gains in 2005.” Beyond the numbers Biblio’s identity as a company extends beyond pursuing the bottom line and profits. Their vision statement reads: Biblio.com Inc. will lead our market through providing exemplary customer service, creating opportunities for our partners, and fostering the growth of the communities we serve. Allen Singleton, Biblio’s Chief Operations Officer, explains what their vision means; “It has been part of our vision for Biblio to be much more than a traditional corporate entity. In short, we wanted to build a company that, through its operations, through its day-to-day contacts with customers, through the products and services it offers, through its colleagues, and through every aspect of its business, would give expression to the highest ideals of excellence. Additionally, we wanted to make sure we were able to make a difference through charitable work and funding community enriching projects”. Just recently, Biblio announced the completion of La Biblioteca – Morado K’asa, a joint construction project which Biblio began with the municipal and state governments in Bolivia in August 2004, and through highly successful fundraising contributions from its bookseller members. This library places resources for education and learning in the hands of some 3,000 members of the rural community of Morado K’asa, where before, they did not even have access to books in their elementary or secondary schools (located 30 minutes away). Biblio plans for the La Biblioteca project to be just one of many similar undertakings as they continue to grow and diversify in the marketplace. A Customer Focus “I think there is an untapped market of customers out there that are looking for that book that they loved so dearly from their childhood, or they have gotten the run around from the big box retailers on out-of-print books.” Donaldson says, “There are so many customers out there that want our products, we all have to spend our time and effort letting them know they are out there!” Biblio’s focus in 2005 and beyond is to enhance the customer experience even further by making Biblio.com a destination for customers. In the works are monthly newsletters for customers, enhanced Want List management, coupons, an improved Rare Book Room, and much more. “Where our Bookseller Members can help us is in ways that obviously assist us in getting their listings online, but also, and most importantly, enhancing the customer experience. When we are able to successfully connect a customer with a Biblio.com Bookseller Member, we all benefit,” Donaldson says. Pulling it all together It is clear that everyone at Biblio is genuinely excited about where their company has come from in such a short time, and the direction they are headed in the future. Market growth, enabling independent businesses to thrive, and taking an active leadership role in communities are the primary business focuses of Biblio. “I truly enjoy what we do together as a community of people ultimately joined together by the love of books,” Sherar says. “As the saying goes, ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’. I believe this is what we see happening with Biblio, whether one is considering the collective resources we provide to empower our bookseller members to succeed, or the collaboration in building a library for a community in need. Our growing position in the marketplace is enabling us to facilitate positive progress and change.” Biblio offers used, out-of-print, and rare books, with over 14 million titles offered for sale by over 2200 booksellers and bookstores worldwide. Visit Biblio at http://www.biblio.com #bibliocom

This (or a variant of it) is probably the most often asked question I hear. What I’m talking about is, of course, whether it is better to buy a book (or get it autographed by the author) with just a signature alone or whether it is better to have it with a personalized inscription. With modern books by living authors, the popular wisdom states that it is better to have a “flat” (I hate that term) signed book – that is to say, a “stand-alone” signature, not a book with an inscription to an “unknown” person. For example, if I wrote a book, would you like me to sign it for you: “For (your first name here) – Hope you like it, Barry R. Levin,” or just, “Barry R. Levin.” Many dealers will tell you that it is easier to resell your modern signed books if they are just simply signed. “No one named ‘Bill,'” they will say, “wants a book signed ‘For Bob.'” Is this bit of popular wisdom true, are simply-signed books better? Well, yes and no. The very best autograph dealers and authorities will tell you quite candidly that, in many cases, “a stand-alone” (or “flat” – if you must) signature in a modern book can be all but impossible to authenticate. Yes, he or she can rule out most fakes, but still can only tell you most of the time that a modern stand-alone signature “looks good,” not that it is 100% authentic if the piece has no provenance. A signature is almost (and, in some languages, in reality) a pictograph or symbol that represents a person’s name, a stylized form of script often unlike the person’s normal handwriting. It is possible, with practice, to copy that symbol. Yes, it helps if you know something about the mechanics of handwriting – also of pens, inks, papers, etc., but a fair number of people can do a passable job of copying a given person’s signature. It is extremely difficult, however, to copy a person’s script, or handwriting in general. (I am not going to give you a primer here on the whys and wherefores of this for obvious reasons). Take my word for it, that is one of the reasons why the names of the handful of great forgers that have been caught are so well remembered – it is a true (if despicable) art form. For instance, I talked to an important collector of Stephen King the other day. He told me a very interesting story. He bought a copy of a proof for a new Stephen King novel, over the Internet. The copy was described as being “flat signed” by the author. When the proof came, it was not signed. He e-mailed the seller and the seller told him to send it back and he would send him a signed copy. Suspicious, the collector took a soft lead pencil and put a very small mark on a given page and sent the proof back. A week went by, and a signed copy of the proof was delivered to him. He looked at the signature (one that he is very familiar with) and it “looked good.” He opened the proof to the page on which he had placed his mark on the copy that he had sent back, and lo and behold there was his mark. Now the collector knew that King was on vacation that week, and knew it was not possible for the seller to have gotten this particular copy signed in the time allotted – so even if the signature “looked good” it had to be a forgery. Another collector sent me a scan of a very popular British author’s stand-alone autograph. Once again, the “signed” book had been purchased on the internet. She wanted to know if the signature was authentic. Now, it is almost impossible to truly authenticate an autograph from a scan and with no provenance, and it is not a free service I normally have time to render. Saying that, I did have time that day to look at the scan, so I did. This author’s signature is one that is a little hard to get in this country, mostly because of the overwhelming demand at the moment. It is also, unfortunately, a particularly easy autograph to forge. I sent the collector an emailed note to that effect, along with an example I had of a signature known to be authentic. My advice was, and is, to only buy autograph material from an expert, one with proper credentials, especially stand-alone examples of signatures. In the last few years, I have seen a rise in the number of forged autographs of science fiction, fantasy, and horror authors – including Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Stephen King, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and even those of Ray Bradbury, whose signature is the most common authentic autograph in the field. My point in telling you all of this is simply to point out that the more words on your autographed items, the better! The number of people who can fool an autograph expert drops in direct proportion to the number of words on the page. If you are buying a stand-alone signed book the provenance for the piece can be as important as the honesty and knowledge of the seller. It is also important to note that it is always a good idea, when having a book signed for you by an author, to have the author date the signature, especially if the book is being signed in the year, or, better yet, the month and year of publication. Books so signed are very desirable to collectors. Also, because the handwriting of authors often change over time, sometimes dramatically, the dating of the signature becomes doubly important. Ray Bradbury and Clark Ashton Smith are two notable examples of striking signature changes that come to mind. None of us will live forever; no one is immortal. Collectors are one of the greatest conservators of our cultural heritage. The signed books we buy, or have autographed for us today, will one day bear the signature of a deceased author. How will people in the future know for sure that a particular signature is authentic? Some collectors put a note in their signed books (hopefully on acid-free paper) saying that they got the book signed at such and such a time and place. This is harmless and can be used as provenance to a point, but in the future it will be only as good as the reputation of the individual collector who wrote it. If he is not of note, it may prove to be almost as good in the future as a letter of authentication from a dishonest dealer or forger. No, the best measure of an item’s authenticity is that which is integral and internal. Few if any collectors today care if Jules Verne or H. G. Wells inscribed a book to an unknown person. Just the opposite, a long inscription is preferred. Why is that true? Because, of course, these authors are now no longer signing anything and it is easier to authenticate an inscribed and signed copy, so the more words from the master’s hand, the better. Who knows, maybe in a hundred years, Ray Bradbury’s signature may be worth something and a book with a long inscription and maybe one of his drawings-priceless? At this point, it would be wise to point out that even those collectors who do not like personalized inscriptions in their modern books will eagerly buy the following types of inscribed books: association copy – An inscribed or signed book that once belonged to someone the author knew or to someone very well-known (i.e., another author, a movie star, a former president, etc.). dedication copy (sometimes called, “THE copy”) – The copy inscribed by the author to the person or persons to whom the book is dedicated. presentation copy – A copy of a book given by the author as a gift to the recipient. It is usually inscribed and often dated very near the time of publication. Note: not a copy signed by the author at the request of the autograph’s recipient. inscribed sentiment – A copy of a book that is inscribed without being personalized. An example would be a copy of my imaginary book, inscribed, “This is my favorite of all of my books. Barry R. Levin,” or, “With my warmest regards, Barry R Levin.” My favorite inscription of this type was on a book I once owned, signed by the author with the note, “This is the first copy of this book I ever signed.” The “inscribed sentiment” may be the best of all worlds, for the collector of modern signed first editions by living authors. So now you know why I have answered the question of “Is a ‘Stand-Alone’ Signature Better?” with the answer, “yes and no.” For the purpose of resale in the lifetime of the author: “yes”, if there is no question of authenticity, And, “no”, because an inscription makes it far easier to authenticate the handwriting of the author, and ipso facto, the signature. Thus, the dictum applies, “the more words from the master’s hand, the better.” So, how would you like me to sign my next imaginary book for you? The author is principal of Barry R. Levin Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature, A. B. A. A.; Santa Monica CA, U.S.A. and specializes in rare and first editions of science fiction, fantasy, and horror with a strong emphasis on autographs, manuscripts, literary correspondence, and original art. More information is available at http://www.raresf.com