Caite Stevens of Vivarte Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

It wasn't long before the non-essential furniture was moved out of our loft and replaced with towering bookshelves. And it wasn't long after the bookshelves arrived that stacks of books began to appear on the floor because the shelves couldn't handle any more titles! Although my husband enjoyed the extra money that was coming in, it drove him nuts to navigate the obstacle course of books that had become our loft just to check his email.

I quickly discovered that buying every used non-fiction book I found wasn't the best business plan I could have developed. More than half of the books I was lugging home were worthless for my business and were subsequently donated to my local library.

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

I had to streamline my business if I was going to turn it around. So I spent about two months physically examining each title in my collection, donating every book that I felt wasn't worth my time. Then I surveyed what was left. Nearly every art book Id acquired remained on the shelves. I knew that my most profitable books were those that were art-related, even though they made up a small portion of my overall inventory. They were the most costly to obtain, the hardest to find, and the most labor-intensive to list, but they offered the best return on the dollar by far and were the most interesting to work with. So the decision was made. The focus of Vivarte Books would now be on art and art-related subjects.

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

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

Although I still sell odds and ends on eBay and a small selection of general non-fiction books on assorted bookselling sites, the crux of my business has become centered on art, and I couldn't be happier about it. I sell on eBay, Half, Amazon, Alibris, Biblio, and IOBAbooks.com.

A native of the DC area, I now live in a house in Olney, Maryland, with my husband and newborn daughter, and still work full-time in finance. My inventory fits neatly into five tall bookshelves that line the walls of my office. There is a clear path to the computer, and my husband doesn't have to step over a single book to check his email.

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

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

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

Dan Glaeser Books, Modesto, CA

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

Lessons Learned – Life in the Book Business

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