The Black Friday of Book Sales

July 28, 2019

That particular time of my particular year has come and gone once again: the annual weekend-long book sale put on by one of the local research libraries. I’ve discussed with another bibliophile how this event irritates me in a way I can’t quite identify; after all, there’s nothing especially unique about the chaos that ensues, the destruction of categorized sections, when greedy crowds flock in with their cardboard boxes and foldable dollies, staking their territory with the carton they’re currently in the business of filling almost haphazardly, blocking not only the stack of books on offer underneath said carton, but also clogging the already too-narrow aisles that force together the glutes of strangers who would never consent to such frottage in normal life.

Public domain image by Eli Francis, available from Wikimedia Commons.

Maybe the slight resentment arises when faced with the sheer volume of books on offer, and within all that tonnage, with the inevitable amount of crap and/or things that every respectable college freshman should already have on hand somewhere—pure bargain ballast that kills the hope of uncovering the truly great finds we’re led to expect from a place that specializes in classy historical seminars and snooty reading groups.

I always end up wondering what happens to all those mass-produced editions of The Symposium or Siddhartha. How it is that anyone at these sales doesn’t already have a copy? Is it that the brittle yellow pages are reproducing themselves, Magician’s Nephew-fashion, in some weird attempt to take over even the smallest garage sale in the most backwater corner of non-reading America? I still hear talk of too many PhDs being churned out, that there aren’t nearly enough positions for these over-educated debtors to fill—but even that horde, combined with all the incoming first-years at all of the colleges still requiring actual books, couldn’t consume this glut of prescribed greats. Do these things just keep circulating from one sale to the next? Do they have semi-interesting histories, as in those tales of violins or pearl earrings or, hell, tissues, hundreds of hands have traded over the centuries?

I don’t know. All I’m aware of is the fact that I was lured in once again—that I made, in fact, two trips, resulting in a total of eight books that will have to find some place on my already crowded shelves. And that, after scanning table after table filled with 19th-century British and American classics and slabs of Wallace Stegners and Richard Russos,* I am exhausted and completely unable to open even one of the volumes I bought. And finally, that I will be back again next year, grumbling at nuisances so vague, I wonder whether I’m just making them up, an ineffectual excuse to counter my addiction to books, plain and simple.

 

* Had Richard Russo, as in the author himself, been lying on a table, I would have been oddly charmed. Maybe it would have helped for him to hold all of his works atop his body, or use them as a sort of pallet, as a way of maintaining order. I don’t know what sorts of conversations he and Stegner could have had with that arrangement made for both of them; the set-up might have been even more interesting had the latter’s own preserved corpse been present, Lenin-like under glass.

Written by Special K Posted in absurdity, book sales, bookbuying Tagged with book sales, crowds, Richard Russo, Siddhartha, Symposium, Wallace Stegner