#secondhand bookstores

[between-the-stacks]

Confessions of a Bookseller #11: A Fruitless Search

A man comes in with two big boxes of books and drops them on the counter with a deep sigh. He is looking for this one uber specific book about the assassination of JFK. I am not able to find it online. When I peak into the boxes of books he left with us, every single book is about the assassination of JFK.

[newyorkthegoldenage]

For around 70 years, Fourth Avenue between Astor Place and Union Square was lined with used bookstores. At their peak in the 1920s, there were nearly 50 of them.

The first stores opened around 1890 and soon began to attract others. They were dim, scruffy shops stuffed to the gills with old books, full of that old book fragrance. Most did not sell antiquarian or valuable stuff, but more like the curated contents of attics and thrift shops. Most had bins or carts outside on the street to attract foot traffic and get rid of their hardest-to- sell volumes.

As the stores proliferated, they began to specialize. There was a shop for cookbooks, paperbacks (a novelty back then), theatrical memorabilia, science fiction and the occult. 

The area was a magnet for writers and readers. Robert Frost, Andre Breton, and Jack Kerouac were among those going on bookshop crawls.

You know how the story ends: soaring rents put an end to this only marginally profitable business. Books take up a lot of room, and there are always more in storage. That required a good bit of real estate. Now the last vestige of these shops are Strand Books, a huge store (1 million books, it boasts), which moved one block west to Broadway, and Alabaster Books, a new (ca. 1996) shop on Booksellers Row itself. They hold up the tradition.

Top Photo: Secondhand bookstores on Lower Fourth Avenue. ca. 1941-1953, Andreas Feininger via The Museum of the City of New York.

Second Photo: Biblo & Tannen, one of the last shops to give up the ghost, in a picture by Roy Perry, ca. 1940.

[jeffersonbluejay]

Sappho Books ~ Glebe, Sydney Australia

[ourfriendsthejays]

Books for November: Sadly, I can't remember further details about this instructive book, which may be part of a series? "Bead Arithmetic. The Fundamental Operations. How To Use The Chinese Abacus."

[falseandrealultravival]

Books that sell at secondhand bookstores are the valuable ones (Essay)

Nipping Disasters in the Buds

At one time, I was interested in the hippie lifestyle and was working hard to build up that kind of network. I fell in love with a woman I met then, but it broke up, and she chose another man and started a hippie lifestyle in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture, Japan. She used to work at a publishing company and edited a memorial collection of essays for a fellow hippie who had died at that time.

I also bought a copy of that book, "Dirt on My Feet," but it was a terrible book, just a collection of miscellaneous writings by hippies who admired the man. I wrote her a letter: "This book doesn't deserve to be called a book. I admit that he seems to be a good guy, but it can't be called an objective book unless it can appeal to society about his achievements. What did you learn in the publishing industry?" She was extremely indignant about this letter.

At the very least, "Dirt on My Feet" would not sell for a price at a secondhand bookstore. It has no objectivity or generality. In other words, It’s appropriate that it was published for self-satisfaction, and it would have been good to share it as an internal document among colleagues. Incidentally, I also published a book around that time, and that book, "Nipping Disasters in the Buds" is selling for 30 times its original selling price at second-hand bookstores.

Rei Morishita

2024.06.10

古本屋で値段の付く本こそ価値がある（エッセイ）

私は一時期、ヒッピー的生活に憧れ、その種の人脈作りに励んでいた。その頃知り合った女性と恋愛関係に陥ったが破綻し、彼女は別の男を選んで、日本の長野県の山奥でヒッピー生活を始めた。出版社に勤めていたことのある彼女は、そのころ死んだヒッピー仲間の追悼文集の編集を行った。

私もその本「足に土」を一冊買ったが、出来は散々で、その男を慕うヒッピーたちの雑文を寄せ集めただけの本だった。私は彼女に手紙を書いた：「こんな本は、本と呼ぶに値しない。彼が優れているらしいことは認めるが、どんな業績かを社会に訴えることが書けなくては客観的な本とは言えない。貴女は、出版業界で何を学んだのか？」と。彼女はこの手紙にこの上なく憤慨していた。

少なくとも、「足に土」は、古本屋では値段が付くまい。客観性・一般性が皆無だからだ。つまりは自己満足のための出版で、仲間内で見せ合う内部資料にするのが妥当だったと言える。ちなみにその時期、私も本を出版したが、その本「災害の芽を摘む」は、古本屋で当初の売値の３０倍の値段が付いている。

[between-the-stacks]

Confessions of a Bookseller #23: Interesting

A woman rushes into the store about 10 minutes before closing asking for me for a favor. I ask what the favor is. She says that she needs to fax something to the United Nations. I tell her that we do not have a fax machine in the store, and ask her why she needs to find one. She responds by saying that the Library of Alexandria never actually burnt down, and that all the books were distributed amongst the Freemason families of the day. She said that she was a part of one of those lucky families and needed to fax proof over to the UN, as they were putting together a collection. 

[between-the-stacks]

Confessions of a Bookseller #22: Righteous

A woman lingers in the Christian Fiction section for about half an hour, making glances and looking down her nose at me from across the shop. When she came to purchase her books, she asked if I would like something to read and slid a pamphlet in front of me that read, in bright, red, dripping font, ‘FOR SINNERS ONLY’

[between-the-stacks]

Confessions of a Bookseller #21: Pining

A man comes in with an assortment of Sci-Fi and Fantasy books to exchange for credit. There are a couple ones that I can’t accept because they are, in essence, porn. I hand them back to the man and he tsks his tongue and says it’s quite a shame. He said that they were gifts from an old girlfriend of his that looked quite similar to the women in the illustrations (he said, while staring at the illustration’s breasts). He said that he did not want them back and didn’t know what to do with them if I couldn’t accept them. I offered to recycle them for him and he got defensive. “You only throw away books on leftist garbage like communism and global warming.”