Old Books

Each year the AAUW, the American Association of University Women, holds a massive used book sale in my small Northern Virginia town. The basement of the rec center becomes a forest of folding tables, signs denoting categories, citizens of all genders, colors and shape looking for a bargain. I always look forward to the sale because, well, on two occasions, I found books there that I HAD WRITTEN. This, in and of itself, is not massively important save that it implies someone read them and kept them quite a long time.

Last year, when I took The IFO Report (my not-so-great American novel) to the check out line, I told the lady at the register that it was a very special book.  

She looked up, walked into the trap. “Why?”

“Because I wrote it.”

She put it to one aside with the other paperbacks. “That’ll be two dollars.”   Recognition is sometimes hard to come by.

Used book sales have a very special aura. First, of course, they attract readers, not an easy lot to entice. The ladies with the plastic shopping bags, the older men carrying empty cardboard boxes, the collectors looking for first editions are all in soft competition. I remember a few years ago when two elderly gentlemen where arguing over who had first spotted Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Imagine that: In our modern times, two scholars arguing over the works of a long-dead Italian poet!

The recycling of books is also a pleasant thought. That an edition may go though three or four owners in one lifetime is one reason writers ply their trade. I’m pretty sure if we were assured only one reading per book that a lot of us would stop writing altogether.

The other side of the coin, of course, is that people are willing—eager—to rid themselves of so many books, books that authors and editors spent long years putting together…

But it certainly could be worse.  I remember once going into a book superstore and seeing an employee rip the front covers off novels stacked on the floor. I asked what he was doing and he told me this was the standard procedure for getting refunds from the publisher of unsold books. Send back the cover, save on postage. Hard to imagine anything nastier…