book ‘em

Their House to Yours, via the Trash – New York Times

Is there any other industry in which such high-quality goods regularly make their way to consumers via a trash bin? Stand in the bookselling line at the Strand and the store starts to feel less like a dusty bastion of erudition and more like a messy, mulchy place where old ideas struggle to find new life.

Even in better days than these for books, the economy of publishing was bloated, based on guesswork, mercurial taste and the talents of people whose keenest interests rarely included making money. Book recycling in Manhattan is just the opposite, a perfectly efficient system with no fat at all: So many discarded books go from someone’s garbage to a scavenger to a bookseller and, often enough, land gently in someone else’s home. Feel guilty, if you must, for never finishing Tony Judt’s “Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945;” but don’t feel guilty for chucking it. It will most likely live to haunt someone else’s bedside table. It will find a new home.

When we lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and had books to get rid of, we’d just put them in a pile at curbside and they’d be gone within an hour. The article gives short shrift to street booksellers, who set up tables (or just blankets) at high-traffic spots throughout the city and sell “reclaimed” books for pennies on the original dollar. Many of these folks have very sharp eyes, and some of them develop specialties (politics, memoirs, etc.) and a dedicated clientel. They are also shielded from harassment by the police in a way that the handbag and DVD street vendors are not — selling literature is protected by the First Amendment.

And then there’s the first time you pause at a street vendor’s table, glance down, and notice a beat-up copy of a book you wrote….  But that’s still not as bad as browsing through a used bookstore and finding an autographed copy of one of your books.