Rare Book Monthly
Articles - December - 2002 Issue
The Means of Book Trading That Dares Not Speak Its Name: eBay
DO THEY USE IT PRIMARILY AS A BUYER OR A SELLER?
Librarian X: “I use eBay as both a buyer and a seller. I buy for the special collection for which I work – mostly ephemera and other odd material on our regional collection. As a part time independent bookseller, I sell products on eBay that I can’t unload elsewhere. I also buy low on eBay for my business and then sell higher on abe or one of the other more prestigious rare book sites.”
Zubal: “I use eBay to sell books and other materials, mostly. In terms of buying, I use it to find the kind of books called for by my customers that I can’t otherwise get my hands on. So once in a while I check eBay for a customer’s particular needs. However this can be problematic as there is no order to its listings, so if you don’t know what you’re doing you end up literally going through item by item. For instance if I wanted a book on the history of Brazil for a customer I would do a keyword search with “Brazil” and “history”; otherwise it’s just insane to plow through, though I’m sure for those with enough patience there are occasional nuggets of gold amongst the drek.”
Barlow: “I don’t sell, I only buy on eBay.”
Dealer Y: “Although eBay is good for buying and selling I use it only for buying. The prices you can realize on eBay as a seller are just consistently lower than high-end retail and thus don’t justify its use for us as a store as a selling tool. The amounts realized simply would not justify the sales. But for a buyer that same formula works out wonderfully. In summary I’d say that eBay is a great buying tool but paradoxically not a great selling tool for the same reason, at least for a sophisticated dealer in high quality goods in an urban environment: as such we can command higher prices with traditional retail interactions than we can with eBay, on which the majority of items sell for less than wholesale retail dealer prices.”
THE FOCUS OF THEIR BUYING/SELLING/COLLECTING INTERESTS GENERALLY
Librarian X: “For my independent book business I collect Hogarth Press imprints and other literary highpoints. For the local history unit for which I work as a special collections librarian I collect a whole range of material, ephemera as well as books, about this local community.”
Zubal: “I specialize in older scholarly books, older antiquarian books, pre 1950.”
Barlow: “My main book collections are John Baskerville, the best 18th century English private printer; antiquarian bibliographies from the 15th century to the present; private library and book auction catalogues (of which I have literally tens of thousands); and early fine printing. Most of these – besides obviously Baskerville and texts printed before the discovery of the New World– would fall under the rubric of Americana. And as I’ve mentioned I also collect a lot of ephemera, such as restaurant menus from Duncan Hines restaurants, stamps, matchbooks, and the like.”
Dealer Y: “There is an overlap between my personal collections and those for the shop. Personally, I collect rare modern art and photography books, primarily. For the shop, I buy a broader circle of rare or uncommon modern art, design, and photography material along with occasional objects d’art. The collections that are on display in the shop are a reflection of my own collecting and buying interests.”
