Hit the Morro Bay Library Sale this morning before work and in 20 minutes of frenzied activity bought five boxes of books for $140.
After sorting, two boxes are getting listed and three are heading to the shop.
Morro Bay offers a member pre-sale that lets Friends of the Library in an hour early. It's five bucks well spent- multiply the mass of books I pulled in by the hunger of all the other dealers & the scanner borg in the long line and there isn't much meat left on the bone for the general public.
One reason I love library sales is you never know where 'the good stuff' will be. I nearly always find a really interesting cluster of books clearly donated by the same person. This time out it was a nice collection of model train books, nicely camouflaged on the 'Arts & Crafts' table. Dealers tend to bee-line for the tables that have treated them well in the past- I started out at the New Age & Astrology section then swung through Psychology & Business, finding some okay stuff but nothing special.
Arts & Crafts is usually a dead zone for resale, but on my way to Military History I spotted a nice hardcover model train book and braked hard. I combed the section and pulled out two big stacks of model train stuff, which ended up being my big 'find' of the sale.
They were all marked up- the main irritation of this sale is the preponderance of stickered books. The announced price is 'fifty cents a book', but roughly 3/4ths of the titles are $1 plus. It's an annoyance to grab a book you'd like for a buck or so and find that some joker's priced it $5, or just about retail. Plus, peeling off stickers in bulk gets old fast.
Total cost of train books: $68.00
15 of them were solid internet fodder and priced out at $200.00. Experience tells me they'll all sell, eventually. I made one mistake, picking up two copies of a book stickered $10.00 that I thought were $5.00 (same colored sticker- grr).
So that takes care of the entire buy, with a taste of profit. The miscellaneous other internet books should price out around $5-600, although the sell through won't be as total as with the train books. The stuff that doesn't work online gets traded in at the shop, I expect this batch to bring in $150 or so, which I should be able to convert into $200 or so worth of internet salable titles.
Grand total: $140 invested, $800 in estimated sales.
Which sounds pretty good, but back before libraries started skimming the *really* good books off the top (several area libraries have Amazon & Ebay stores themselves) I would regularly find a few books at every sale worth $50-100+ each, and I'd have paid substantially less- those train books were $3-10 each, whereas in the past they'd have been fifty cents or a buck each.
Still worthwhile, but a far cry from the good old days.
2 comments:
My friend described the internet once as: "The internet, ruiner of things."
it's a mixed bag- back in the day *my* only outlet to sell books for 'retail' would have been to start my own store, with attendant massive overhead. Online it quite a bit more convinient. But minus the internet we'd have avoided the last decade or so of used book store decimation and starting my own shop would've been a viable career choice. Nowadays, you'd have to be a little crazy to open a real used book shop.
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