Sorting

Two years after closing my little bookshop (which was really a glorified flea market booth - but dammit, I tried!) I'm finally undepressed enough to deal with the store inventory. I've started with the 54 boxes that I catalogued and listed online. They're now divided into three categories. I'm keeping a bunch for myself: important literary titles, information I think I might need in the next fifty years, antique editions with bindings too pretty to pass up. That's a couple hundred books, altogether.

About three hundred more are worth putting the effort into listings that might actually sell. I've sold about a dozen books in the two years I've had the half-assed "full description pending; please inquire" listings up. I can write a killer description, but they take time. Pricing research takes time too, and must be revisited because the market fluctuates. I just sold a 1910 motorcycle repair manual for a pittance, because I didn't keep up and eventually discover that I had the only copy available on the whole internet.

That leaves some 750 titles that aren't worth the space they take up, or the trip to the post office if one actually sells. I can get a little cash (or trade credit!) for some of them at a couple of better-established used bookshops. Half Price Books is out because they lowball insultingly low. Still, I'm left with scads of ex-library, no dustjacket, cocked spine, book club edition, unhelpful self-help, or just plain oversaturated titles, like the ones everyone's great-aunt has on the shelf.

They seemed like interesting stock at the time.

What to do, then, with several hundred unwanted books? Donating is not the easy option one might think: the obvious recipients such as libraries and prisons usually can't keep up with the influx, frequently rejecting donations or even throwing them away. (source: a booksellers' Yahoo group and a phone call to Lansing). Maybe a shelter would take ten books, and a school would take ten more... the law of diminishing return comes into play quickly.

If you (Gentle Reader!) want a chance to sift through the boxes (because you love M*A*S*H enough to need a large-format, slightly worn paperback on the making of the series), I'm open to making arrangements for that. These aren't the scary, dusty, spider-hiding-place boxes of books; they're in neat little Office Depot boxes. You can have a whole bunch. Like, for a cup of coffee or something. Just don't give them back to me.

Ultimately, I'm going for an environmentally friendly angle. Please bear in mind: these are books that have had plenty of opportunities to find homes. Pretty much all they do is take up space. Also remember (she said, pulling out her Snob Card) that I can recognize a book that should be preserved for its scarcity or significance, and I err on the safer side.

There's a recycling center in Pittsburg, KS that takes in books, and has a couple of "last chance" sales per year before turning household hints and religious platitudes into fresh paper products. That's actually where I got a notable percentage of these unmovable books... so back they'll have to go.

I've set aside a bunch of them, though, to eliminate the middleman between me and the brand-new recycled paperstuff. I think it would be really cool to have a little handmade notebook that used to be a coffee-stained, loose-hinged Anna Karenina, or write a grocery list on what was once a potboiler mystery. I've never tried papermaking, but I'll probably get the hang of it after a few gooey attempts. I'll update you on that, and maybe someday you'll get an original Inky Neverwhere bookmark!