Longtime readers will not be surprised to learn her books weren't worth hundreds of dollars.
They were definitely old, and certainly in Norwegian, but they were also beat to hell and on a variety of totally unappealing topics.
"This one is someone's college thesis!" she stated proudly.
Another was on Socialism.
All of them were copiously underlined.
Sigh.
I did my 'let them down easy' thing- they're really interesting, but the condition isn't what we need, blah blah blah. And she did what folk mostly do, cling to their beliefs in the face of expert contradiction.
"Well, I looke them up on this antique book web site, and one of them I couldn't even FIND, it was so rare. And the other ones were all worth hundreds of dollars."
"Well, good luck with them. They aren't really our thing."
She couldn't find it because all of the old books in Norwegian are......in Norway.
And the others were "worth" hundreds of dollars because whoever was selling them poked around, didn't see many copies, and thought "why not price them a million dollars?"
File under 'a little knowledge...'
If I could imbue the book selling public at large with one bit of my knowledge, it would be that made up prices on the internet have absolutely zero bearing on what a book is worth.
These days I'd say most people selling books online have no idea what they're doing. They buy a scanner, the listen to it go 'bleep bloop' and they list junk at whatever it tells them the junk is 'worth'.
And nothing in that process is (necessarily) linked to reality.
It works great for a lot of things, but had no idea how to handle genuinely uncommon stuff, valuable or not.
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