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What is AuctionExplorerBooks, in a nutshell? AuctionExplorerBooks is an on-line auction site dedicated to the sale of rare and out-of-print books. Only booksellers who are members of the major trade associations may become sellers. This is to give buyers confidence in the accuracy of the descriptions when bidding. Fees are low: $1 per lot to list and 5% commission on successful sales. There is no buyer’s premium. Sales are held monthly running for a week at a time. Viewing an

Born in New England, and a New Yorker by adoption, I have lived all of my life on the northeastern coast. I have flown across the country numerous times, both for business and for pleasure, but until recently I have rarely set foot in that vast tract known as “Middle America.” In the past few months I have made brief forays to three non-coastal, Middle American cities. Each time I was there for a purpose other than book-buying, but I did try to carve out some time to scout th

Organizations often produce very dry and seemingly worthless records and publications. I remember an early book show where my young daughter and I felt sorry for the woman next to our four table spread, as she only filled up part of a single table with a handful of Alcoholics Anonymous books. It really looked pretty pathetic until she sold the first one for $15,000 or so. One of the biggest surprises I have had in what might be called the “organizational ephemera” market is t

Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co., by Lynne Tillman. NY: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999. Books & Co. was situated in a wonderful location on the Upper East Side of Manhattan not far from the Whitney Museum. It was the kind of place where you’d see somebody like Woody Allen browsing the shelves, as he fondly recalls doing in his foreword. Allen even included the shop in one of his later films. An excerpt from the author’s introduction follows. “

This is the first in a series of proposed articles taking a brief look at the pros and cons of the various multi-dealer book listing databases. The three largest of these databases—AbeBooks.com, Alibris.com and Amazon.com’s Marketplace—all have two things in common. So far, at least, they have the most traffic, the most books listed, and they generate the most sales; and they are also the sites which have changed the most over the past 11 years, for better or for worse, and t

Hi, we are Cathy Graham and Serena Wyckoff, owners of Copperfish Books, LLC, in sunny southwest Florida. Before going full time in January 2006, we had “real” jobs and sold books online as a hobby. Well, as often happens in this business, the hobby grew and we said a not-so-tearful goodbye to the time clock. Becoming Booksellers We have both always loved books—reading them, looking at them, touching them, collecting them, and just having them around. And yes, hanging out in l

Booksellers in America sometimes ask me how we run a successful antiquarian and secondhand book business in “darkest Africa.” I usually reply that the cleft-stick is a remarkably efficient way of distributing letters, and porters with boxes on their heads can be as reliable as the USPS in delivering parcels of books in good condition to far-flung outposts at very reasonable cost. Now, as I answer my last email for the day, close our on-line auction site after another successf

I’m Tami Zawistowski of Resource Books, LLC, based in East Granby, Connecticut, USA. Resource Books offers its books almost exclusively online, with our current stock numbering about 7500 books dating from 1582 to 2006, with most from between the 1850s and 1950s. We also offer some ephemera and select accessories—unusual bookends and inkwells, other reading and writing related objects—anything that would look at home in a personal or institutional library. While our focus is