[HN Gopher] Occupational Hazards of the Second-Hand Book Trade
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Occupational Hazards of the Second-Hand Book Trade
Author : pilfered
Score : 67 points
Date : 2022-12-08 20:53 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lithub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lithub.com)
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| I always used to try to take a run past Wigtown when I was
| working in the far distant end of Galloway. It's well worth a
| trip if you're into books, or better yet bookshops.
| randcraw wrote:
| I read his earlier book, "Confessions of a Bookseller".
| Recommended, esp if you love used book shops and those in their
| orbits.
| coding123 wrote:
| Has anyone held a garage sale in the Portland area and had people
| with barcode readers pricing every book your selling? (And at
| 8am)
| bombcar wrote:
| My dad has a friend who has been a book hound for half a
| century and says coders are everywhere now and relatively bad
| at it - they're utterly flummoxed by books without isbns for
| example.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Now I'm wondering if there's a publishing equivalent of the
| "dead wax" on a record: some little marks that a printer
| makes that you have to know to look for.
| akiselev wrote:
| Yes publishers often have first edition logos that are
| different from or accompany their normal logo but it's far
| from a fool proof method, especially for pre-20th century
| publications.
|
| Book collectors depend on bibliographies that catalog
| publications and their print runs, sometimes providing
| detail on identifying features (like spelling mistakes
| fixed in later editions). Most bibliographies focus on a
| specific niche, era, or even an especially large
| collection. For particularly interesting books, provenance
| is often just as important as with artifacts.
| bombcar wrote:
| There are indicators used to show which printing it is on
| some (most) books, but there are details that people can
| use to determine if a book is a first printing.
| sockaddr wrote:
| Where's your 'ttoo?
|
| Unscanable! An unscanable!
| akiselev wrote:
| I don't even bother collecting anything with an ISBN unless
| it's a rare short run nonfiction book. Completely pointless
| exercise with all the brainless competition.
|
| There's something about having to pour over paper
| bibliographies to identify first editions by spelling
| mistakes and print errors that really separates the wheat
| from the chaff.
| dorchadas wrote:
| > There's something about having to pour over paper
| bibliographies to identify first editions by spelling
| mistakes and print errors that really separates the wheat
| from the chaff.
|
| It truly is fun. In my case, it's trolling through old
| biographies of a minority language, hunting down authors
| names and then the names of their books. But it's great fun
| as often there's never been a complete list of these works
| compiled, so I'm sorta now the go-to person for a specific
| dialect region with regards to books by authors of the
| region.
|
| My particular specialty is pre-Standard books written by
| authors from Conamara, in Ireland. I'm at the point where I
| have _most_ of the first editions I know about from before
| the standard, with only three, at most (I need to get to a
| library to compare editions of one, as I think I have the
| school edition but am not sure if the school was the first
| edition published), eluding me. Then I 'll branch out into
| other, similar dialectal regions.
|
| It's so fun hitting up used bookshops for books in another
| language, and types of books like that. I'm kinda looking
| forward to expanding my dialectal region as it'll allow me
| to basically start the hunt all over again.
| JetSetWilly wrote:
| > Williamson's astonishment that a Kilmarnock edition of Burns
| could have made PS350 in the early twentieth century would
| doubtless have been surpassed had he known that a copy sold for
| PS40,000 in 2012 through the Edinburgh saleroom Lyon & Turnbull.
|
| I couldn't help but use the Bank of England inflation calculator.
| 350 quid in 1902 is the same as about PS25K in 2012. So the rate
| of return of holding onto the book for 110 years isn't actually
| that high.
| bonecrusher2102 wrote:
| A nice slice-of-life article. The world of used and rare
| booksellers has always been fascinating and alluring to me, a
| lover of books.
|
| Books like "Club Dumas" (upon which the great yet unfortunately
| directed movie "Ninth Gate" is based) as well that offer a
| fictionalized peek into the world I find utterly captivating.
|
| For folks that enjoy the article I highly recommend the 2019
| documentary "The Booksellers." Such great stuff. I someday hope
| to be fortunate enough to be something more than an amateur
| collector, though I wonder if having the means to simply buy the
| editions you want outright rather than having to hunt them down
| might somewhat diminish the thrill :)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I'm wondering if there's an equivalent to Discogs for old books?
|
| They have pretty much every record ever recorded, in every
| release, in every country. If you have a release you think is
| rare, the buyer might ask you about the "dead wax", the writing
| on the space near the label after the last track. You can accept
| bids on it. They know all about shipping costs. I found it all to
| be a very pleasant experience.
|
| But it would be nice if the used book market stayed old-
| fashioned.
| akiselev wrote:
| The old and rare book market is still completely old fashioned.
| Most of the best books on the field are out of print and
| themselves hard to find (we collectors horde them).
|
| See my other reply to you about bibliographies. There isn't a
| central repository because we're talking about millennia worth
| of very messy data [1]. Instead we have to first find a
| bibliography (usually itself an old or rare book from the same
| decade or century), make sure its not full of shit, then use
| that to identify the books we're actually interested in.
|
| Edit: should have added a disclaimer that I collect books that
| were published before the ISBN was a thing. There's definitely
| an ISBN database
|
| [1] collecting pre-Gutenberg manuscripts is insanely fun, hard,
| and eye wateringly expensive
| lazlee wrote:
| I've never used discog but abebooks.com might be like what you
| are describing.
| jfk13 wrote:
| I felt better about Abebooks before Amazon got their hands on
| it. Now, I'll only turn to it as a last resort.
| lazlee wrote:
| Oh, I didn't know amazon had bought them out. The whole
| project was first developed by a local second hand
| bookstore here on Vancouver island.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| I didn't, either. From what I can tell, they have a
| fairly light touch with their acquired companies (Zappos,
| Goodreads, IMDb). At least at first.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| It varies, the one called bookpages.co.uk became
| amazon.co.uk almost immediately, mobipocket sort of
| disappeared into Kindle services, bookdepository (a later
| UK purchase) continues to operate in its own fashion,
| shipping books for free in padded envelopes one at a
| time.
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