Rare Book Monthly
Going Ex-Libris
Peter Howard of Berkeley, still buying collections and inventories.
Today's bookseller has many options for selling inventory one book at a time. Those that can often display books at shows. The audience is traditional, wants to see the material and speak to the seller. Those with shops also continue traditional bookselling although everywhere lower traffic is reported. Many dealers issue catalogues although these too are fewer. In fact every form of traditional bookselling now competes for time and dollars with evergreen internet listings that, once posted, are baited hooks on lines maintained for years.
The battle between traditional and electronic selling now goes on every day, the outcome as certain as buffalos stampeding toward a cliff. Dealers continue to close shops and shows are fewer and farther between because buyers increasingly obtain better selection and lower prices on line and at auction. These days most new book dealers start on the net and seem disinclined to move beyond it. For them catalogues, shows and retail shops may never be part of the equation. For such sellers it's simply a question of how to describe and price and where to offer. In time their career questions may include how to incorporate auctions, both traditional and eBay, into their buying and selling mix but this is not how they have started. Opening a shop seems a remote possibility. In any event the number of book sellers increases even as the number of bookstores decline. Competition and transparency too increase and prices decline. This is the world that booksellers at the end of their career sell their inventories into today.
The listing sites seem to be embracing the Dylan lyric "If you are not busy being born you are busy dying," focusing on the first possibility and ignoring the second. There should of course be an option on listing sites to categorically signal price reduction consistent with a business closing but it might raise havoc with other sellers who would be standing by while prices were publicly slashed. It happens on Main Street every day but we haven't yet seen it on the listing sites where a close-out sale would be visible in a way not seen before. Could Abe and Alibris host such mayhem? Probably but I'm not sure they're ready to do it. Certainly in time it will happen.
In any event to stage a public online going out of business sale all material needs to be online and that's a problem for folks at the end of their career. Nelda has 1% online and Sue 40 % and neither is going to be able to post a significant portion of their unlisted material.
One alternative is to hire an auctioneer to sell on site a lifetime's accumulation in a few days. It's been done before. Such an event should attract a large crowd and be done quickly. Material can also be sent to catalogued and uncatalogued auctions. Many local and regional houses will take such material on consignment although they may not take it all. Serious material will be attractive to sellers of every stripe but deciding how to handle it very tricky. Auction houses are open to discussion and many will send representatives to evaluate and negotiate. In our directory of auction houses 109 are listed. Based on location and level the material seems appropriate for Baltimore Book, Waverly, Cowan's, New England Book, and possibly Books by the Falls, a new service in Connecticut. Swann looks seriously at these opportunities as well. Documented sales will do much better than undocumented and shelf sales. A group of ten titles that is documented can be seen across the net. An undocumented lot can not.
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