Secondhand Books

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

If It’s Secondhand, It Must Be Good

I love shopping for secondhand books. Or third hand, fourth hand, I’m not particular.

Now this pursuit takes in a wider range of experience than you might at first think. There are a few different sources of good secondhand material.

My favorite is the Thrift Shop/Value Village/Salvation Army experience. We did a lot of every bit of our shopping at Value Village once, when our son was first born. To the extent that we couldn’t fool him with any of those “the stork brought you” stories. Oh no. He was convinced at an early age that we got him at Value Village. The experience was also the source of one of his first jokes. “Where does the one-armed man shop?” The second hand store, obviously.

However, as much as I enjoy still shopping for books in such venues these days, my brother-in-law Brian from Saskatchewan is the acknowledged master. In a whirlwind tour this summer, over a couple of weeks he scored well over a hundred books (mostly children’s) for less than a hundred bucks, scouring Saskatoon, Regina and Winnipeg. The two of us hit six venues in one notable day in July.

The selection you discover in these places is what thrills me the most. Sure, you have to push your way through the badly sorted copies of Waterfowl in Iowa and Table Saw Techniques (actual titles) to discover the real prizes, but the hunt is worth it. A number of years ago I decided I was going to read all the Hugo and Nebula Science Fiction Award winners. I didn’t do badly finding most of my missing titles in the Library and actual Secondhand Bookstores, but there were a couple of titles that just would not appear. It seems winning an internationally recognized Science Fiction book award doesn’t automatically guarantee your work unlimited availability.

For five years I searched for a copy of 1955’s The Forever Machine, by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley, the second book ever to win the Hugo award. Could only find it online, at a cost of about five dollars for the book and sixteen dollars for shipping and handling. Which did not appeal. I had completely given up, when my wife dragged me to the Salvation Army on St. James Street one night so she could look for clothes. Naturally, I gravitated to their tiny assortment of books. And there it was. The Forever Machine, a steal at fifty cents. Practically mint condition.

If anyone has any hot tips, I’m still looking for 1977’s Where the Sweet Birds Sang, by Kate Wilhelm.

The next step up from thrift shops is the legitimate Secondhand Book Store, where you can expect to pay maybe five bucks for a paperback that came out originally at twelve or fourteen these days. My all time favorite in Winnipeg of course has to be the classic Red River Books, downtown in the Artspace building in the Exchange. Shopping in Red River is like embarking on an archeological dig. Quite literally. The floors are stacked high with piles of loosely sorted books. But again the finds are always worth it. Especially if some son or daughter clearing out their recently deceased parent’s collection of late fifties/early sixties UFO and paranormal nonfiction classics has recently been by. Red River sells videos, CDs, records and comics as well. There might even be an eight-track or two if you dig deep enough.

Moving on from there however, there is the odd establishment that insists that if a book is being sold secondhand it should cost more than the original list price, as it must be a collectible. I’m convinced these places must be a front for illegal drug money laundering. I can’t understand how they stay in business otherwise. Sort of like Christian knick-knack shops in malls.

Finally of course there is the wonderful Internet. I’ve found this hit and miss. I didn’t have any luck finding The Forever Machine at a reasonable price, but my sister had no trouble scoring a vintage hard-covered Peanuts anthology for five dollars. As always the trick seems to be shopping from a source within your own country, to cut down on shipping and handling. And once again, it’s amazing what you find available online.

For instance, at one point some kid in Japan was trying to sell a copy of my poetry book, Destination Mutable, on Amazon for fifty bucks. If he pulls it off, he’ll make more money on the damn book than I did. And according to the Internet, my collection of Jason Midnight stories, Midnight’s Delight, was once a recommended read on a Chinese airline.

Further to Midnight’s Delight and Amazon: considering that I can practically identify everyone who bought a hard copy of that book by name, you can bet my suspicions surged when I discovered no less than five secondhand copies available for re-sale on the Internet. I have a list of likely suspects ...

Which of course also leads to the obvious question. As a writer myself how do I feel about any venue selling my work secondhand? Since I barely got a cut out of the primary sales of my two published books, not that bad really. I remember feeling quite chuffed actually when I walked into some thrift store and found a copy of an anthology that had a story by me in it. That meant someone actually bought the book in the first place!

I take my books inevitably being dropped off at the thrift store as being part of the entire weird writing experience. There’s getting the idea. There’s getting the words down. There’s revising and editing. There’s trying to get a publisher interested. There’s the endless rejections. There’s waiting two years after you finally get a publisher interested for the damn thing to come out. There’s the book launch. There’s the thrill of seeing your work in a real bookstore, lost among tens of thousands of other titles. Maybe you even get a review or two. Five months later there’s the thunderous annoyance of having to store two hundred remaindered copies in your basement and front porch. And then ...

Resurrection! Fifty-five years after you win the Hugo Award, your book reappears on the shelves of the Salvation Army Thrift Store! Immortality, at last!

And if you’re lucky, at only fifty cents a copy.

*******

REALITY FICTION UPDATE!

And what is Reality Fiction, you may well ask?

Simple. The concept of the Reality Television Series translated to the printed page. 40 characters from my backlog of generally unpublished material are gathered together to compete in a different theme each Episode, with one or two characters being eliminated each sequence until there are only two left to fight it out in the final. The winner gets a short novel of their own as the grand prize.

But somehow, things always seem to go horribly wrong ...

What’s happening now? As I mentioned last time, I keep thinking one certain story is going to make this thing explode. Flying turned out not to be that story. In fact, I must admit I think the numbers were down a little bit from usual. However, when I announced the Episode starting this week on Facebook as being Erotic Supernatural Romance, the interest shown there was four times as high as usual. Sex sells, right? We’ll see. I’ve hinted at trying that before, but this time I actually deliver the goods. I’m even putting on a content warning. Will telling people they might not want to enter the site really draw them in in droves? I’ll let you know next time. Story-wise, the Contestants have to be warned as well. There’s one nasty-minded Vampire out to get the rest of them still at large.

Starts Friday at:  realficone.blogspot.ca

REALITY FICTION TOO! EPISODES TO DATE

EPISODE FOURTEEN:     FLYING:     “Sky Calling”

EPISODE THIRTEEN:     SLAPSTICK:     “The Phantom of the Werewolf”

EPISODE TWELVE:     DAIRY FARMING:     “Early One Morning”

EPISODE ELEVEN:     BURROUGHS:     “Chapter Nine”

EPISODE TEN:     WEREWOLVES:   “The Silver Solution”

EPISODE NINE:     WRESTLING:   “Suckerslam XIV”

EPISODE EIGHT:     JANE AUSTEN ROMANCE:   “The Proud and the Senseless”

EPISODE SEVEN:     THE JAZZ AGE:   “The Bucky-Dusky-Ruby Red Hop!”

EPISODE SIX:     SUBMISSION:   “Re-Org”

EPISODE FIVE:     MASQUERADE:   “The Eyes Behind the Mask”

EPISODE FOUR:     SELF HELP:   “Sausage Stew for the Slightly Overweight Presents:

Some Several Suggestions Guaranteeing Success for the Mildly Neurotic”

EPISODE THREE:     NUDIST:   “If You Have To Ask ...”

EPISODE TWO:     FRENCH BEDROOM FARCE:   “Un Nuit a Fifi’s!”

EPISODE ONE:          STEAMPUNK:   “The Chase of the Purple Squid!”

A J.H.B. Original!