Re: I love used book sales

Evelyn C. Leeper <eleeper@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I assume you got all this on "Box and Bag Day", because around here
even the cheapest prices wouldn't let you get that much.

Yes.

For example, many FotL sales now ban scanners. While some people
seem to think the laser scanner is a liability issue, I tend to
believe the people on the FotL boards who say that it is not that,
and it is also not just the fact that "normal" patrons were upset
that the dealers would grab huge quantities of books and then sit
and scan them to see which were valuable.

I've seen a few people using bar-code scanners at sales, and never
heard of them being banned anywhere. I assumed they were ordinary
people making sure they didn't buy duplicates.

And sometimes they would just commandeer some stretch of table space
and inconvenience everyone else in the process as well.

I sometimes briefly "commandeer" some empty table space, if I can find
any, to repack the books I've been putting in my box to buy. Lots of
space in the box is wasted if I just leave them in the order I picked
them up. I don't want to pay for air.

Checking the book sales web site, I see many have also ended the
preview sales as well.

Not the ones around here. Not that I would mind if they did, since I
never go to the preview sale or even the full-price day. Since I'm
something of a contrarian, and have a taste for quirky and unusual
books, the books I'm interested in are almost as likely to be there
at the end of the sale as at the beginning.

Many sales have also either discontinued "Box and Bag Day" on the
last day or put a size limit on the boxes and bags.

Generally they provide their own. One sale works by selling empty
grocery bags with special tags attached. When you leave, you just
have to show them the tag, which they then remove from the bag.

I was talking about this to another patron at the Bryn Mawr sale and
he said he had been there one year when someone had shown up with a
*refrigerator* box on a dolly, which he filled for $5!

To fill that in the four or however many hours the sale lasted, he
must have not looked at the books, but just tossed them in blindly.
Presumably he was a dealer? That many books would take a lot of space
in one's home. My take from last weekend took five feet of shelf
space. (If I had bought that many books every weekend since I moved
here, I'd need nearly two miles of shelf space.)

The East Brunswick FotL does not have a "Box and Bag Day"; instead,
non-profit organizations can make arrangements ahead of time to come
after the sale closes and take what they want for free.

I'm not sure I want to know what happens to books that aren't taken by
the end of a sale.

(A friend says that she was at one sale where arrangements had been
made to send large amounts of what was left to a prison library.)

Good.

The East Brunswick FotL sale was very disappointing, for a couple
of reasons. First of all, the mall has cut back on the space the
sale can use by insisting that there be a wide walkway right through
the center of the area. This seems to have cut down the number of
tables by about a third. The result is a lot more boxes of books
under the table at the start of the sale--and less room in the
aisles for those trying to go hrough the boxes.

Of the ones I regularly go to, one takes over one floor of a large
parking garage, another takes over three adjacent school gymnasiums,
and a third is held outdoors. So there's plenty of space.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
.

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