Books: On Little Golden Pond

Just bought 100 or so old childrens picture books in the Little Golden Books style.
Golden Books, a few Bonnie Books, a good stack of Elf books and a handful of Wonder Books.

We used to see them all the time but over the last while the supply has dried up- my first instinct is to blame Ebay, the boneyard where overpriced 'collectibles' go to die. As with most things there are genuinely valuable specimens out there, dependent on condition, but the vast bulk sell briskly for us between one and five bucks.

Given the recent dearth of supply I'll bump the price on these a bit. Over the past few years we've been able to ask (and get) 'big city' prices for our 'vintage' pocket books, defined as anything pre 60's with cool cover art. With low supply and people asking silly prices online the nicer ones are flying off our shelves at $5-10. I'm betting this batch of kids books will follow the same pattern.

There's been a very noticeable uptick in our sales of "old books" lately, defined more by appearance than content- books that look like books, something a set designer would grab for their INT. LIBRARY, DAY scene.

The vintage paperbacks are one example, here's another- five odd years ago the boss bought a dozen or so boxes of undistinguished turn of the century fiction as part of a larger buy, hundreds and hundreds of smallish, nondescript hardcovers, contemporary bestsellers of the 1900's now largely forgotten. He'd gotten them cheap so we priced them cheap, $3-5 each, a bit more for the few authors, like Hamlin Garland, who's names still resonated.

And they sat. And they sat. And they sat.

We had a display by the front of the store for maybe a year. The authors people recognized sold, the rest didn't. We moved them around, we shelved some in with the fiction, we tried different displays, we marked some down.
Nothing worked.

Cut to around last Christmas- suddenly they're like catnip, making customers frisk about and dig. We'd divided them between two shelving units, one under the buying counter and one by the new arrivals table, two layers per shelf. More or less out of the blue people started sitting down on the floor and scrupulously sorting through them, finding things to buy. Books we'd about given up on, allowed to stick around until we needed the shelf space. We've sold roughly half of them- they've transformed from experimental buy gone wrong to point of interest with no explanation.

My guess is ereaders.
Last Christmas saw a huge Kindle push from Amazon and Nook sales paroled B&N from death row, where they'd been sharing a cell with Borders. As lasting literature these old tomes may have failed, but as objects they triumph handily over their cost effective modern ancestors. As the vinyl LP has risen to battle the brittle, unsympathetic CD, so to are profoundly analog 'old books' rebuking the sterility of ereaders with the physicality of well-handled cloth bindings and age tanned signatures of careful typography.

It's not much, but out here on the cracked, dusty bottom of the increasingly dry economic riverbed any glad portent should be celebrated as an old friend, given bearhugs and greeted with exclamations of happy camaraderie.

So welcome to the shop, neat old childrens books!
Let us band together in this twilight of the industry, pleasuring in one other's company and seeking soul-hungering readers eager to bear you back out into the wide world!