Book Find of the Year

Hit the Cambria library sale today. It's expensive if you're not careful- $1.50 an inch doesn't sound like a lot, but it adds up when you buy in bulk- but they always have really good books, and as a bonus for people who genuinely know books they don't allow bar code scanners. So you can browse around after the first mad rush and still find good stuff.

My Find of the Year wasn't from the sale- it came from the ten odd boxes of free stuff they had stacked outside the front door. A free box carries an implied challenge to a book dealer- "this crap is worthless, I dare you to haul it away!" I always check them out and usually find a few things- every little bit helps.

Today was one for the record books.

I pulled four books I was sure I could sell out of the free boxes- a circa 1930 Ring of the Nibelung libretto in German, a neat old hardcover New Testament and two unassuming hardcovers by Napoleon Hill, best known for his ubiquitous motivational title Think and Grow Rich: Think Your Way to Wealth and The Master-Key to Riches (are you sensing a theme?)

One of the benefits of looking at metric tons of books is a sense of what's not that common. Master Key to Riches I'd seen before, but never in hardcover. Think Your Way to Wealth I'd never seen before. Whenever I see uncommon books by well known (to book dealers, anyway) authors I pick them up.

I tucked my little stack in one of the boxed I'd brought and, once they opened the doors, proceeded with the sale. It was a good one, as expected, and I ended up with six boxes of goodies.

I unloaded at home and sorted them again (there's a whole lot of sorting in the used book game), pulling out the likely internet stuff to look up. There isn't as much of this as there used to be- we've reached the point where anyone with a smartphone can check a title and have a ballpark valuation in a few seconds, so it isn't surprising various branches of the Friends of the Library have started skimming books off the top, either institutionally (if you spend a lot of time on Amazon you'll see listings from this or that FOL organization) or individually (I've seen volunteers at the Los Osos library going through donations with their own barcode scanners weeks before the sale).

But with a store to feed they're still wothwhile, and I always find enough stuff everyone else missed to make it worth my while.

So, I look up my two weird Napoleon Hill titles from the free box.

First, Think Your Way to Wealth.
Okay, that's ridiculous. You get occasional outlier prices like this on Amazon, especially for older books. So I check my other site, which often provides a harsh dose of reality on older book prices.
Nope....still ridiculous.

Wheeeeeeee!

Emboldened, I check my other one- not in quite as good shape, but (checking it closely) also a 1st edition. Nothing on Amazon (or rather, none of the right edition). Off to ABE...
Nice!


I'll price them about half the 'going rate' to inspire a quick turnover, which should just about cover the cost of this month's gamut of asthma medication for the wife. Not bad for a couple of books I was expecting to price $8.00!