The Bookseller's Reward

I caught one of those oh, look, this attic/barn/garage/shed is full of books! buys earlier, the first one in a few months.

It's the kind of thing we used to see all the time but they've been dying off as society's bipolarity about books worsens- people figure they're worthless and throw them out or else they've found an Ebay goldmine and prize them above rubies.

This buy was archetypal, a zigguraut of mouldering boxes with a 98/2 ratio of worthless, ruined junk to good stuff, arriving in the back of a beat up old pickup.

It's the sort of buy that drains your lifeforce.

You know somewhere in that mass of water damaged Reader's Digest Condensed Books, mid-70s Harlequin romances and Book Club sociology texts is one really interesting book, so you sort through each disintigrating box with care and attention, abrading precious brain cells against a seemingly endless wall of concretized mediocrity.

And of course sometimes you come up empty, a reality which births a goblin crouched in a dusty corner of your mind whispering poison.

This time, happily, I found The One.
A 1st edition of Victoria by Knut Hamsun, world famous Nobel winning Norwegian writer rendered persona non grata for enthusiastically embracing Hitler and Nazism during WWII. He's one of those authors you almost never find in the wild who has a devoted following- I automatically grab anything of his I see.

After sorting the books and arranging payment it was time to check on dear Knut and check my assumption of value. I figured a 1st in a partial DJ was a good bet for $35-50, which would justify the drudgery of a buy yielding little else in the way of salable merchandise.

To my amazement and delight there were preciselyzero copies for sale with jackets of any kind.
On the whole internet.

Over the years I must've given The Dust Jacket Speech to enough people to fill the Rose Bowl. People come in with 'valuable 1st editions' they think are worth a mint only to learn that collectible books (fiction, anyway) carry nearly their entire value in their fragile paper dust jackets. That book the internet tells you is 'worth' $500 is worth $20 without a jacket, if you're lucky.

So this was like a reverse judo kick. I'd ignored the DJ because it was in tatters, but as tricky as it can be to get an accurate value from the internet, it's really great at letting you know when something's really, really really hard to find.

And a copy of Victoria in a DJ, even a chewed up DJ, is really, really really hard to find.
=)