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Medium Rare
What can you do with old books?
by Jack Neely
My great aunt was a high-toned lady who had been a high-school English teacher for decades in a small coal-mining town. She lived in a prim little two-story house behind a hedge on the main street. She spent most of her life in this mountain hamlet, but she had traveled in Europe, had been to college, had survived two husbands. She was, perhaps, the last Victorian in town. She wore broad-brimmed hats, and she never had a suntan in her life.
When she died this past spring at the age of 96, she left us some fine Victorian furniture; some interesting kitchenware from the prewar years, some of it unstylish for so long it has slipped back around into style; and a couple thousand hardback books. Some of them were very old, dating to the early 1800s. But most were 20th-century novels, especially au currant books of the sort that no self-respecting sophisticate would attend a mid-century cocktail party without having at least skimmed.
She kept a neat house with the curtains drawn, and the books were in better shape than most of my own. It helped that she didn’t have pets, or kids. She was friendly to nieces and nephews, always smiling and full of stories, but I think she preferred to see us in places other than her house, which had a mature hush about it. I’d been in there a few times as an adult, but the quantity and quality of Aunt Mabel’s books were, to me, a big surprise.
Some of them were very famous novels, some in very early editions: Hemingway, Steinbeck, Willa Cather, Pearl Buck, Thomas Mann, John P. Marquand, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Wolfe, Somerset Maugham. Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki. Several still had their dust jackets. A few of the regional books were signed by the authors, some of them with a personal note to Aunt Mabel.
No one in the family wanted them much. My parents, my sister, my cousins, we’ve all got bookcases and attics full of old books. My family is one of those that doesn’t grow with the years, even dwindles a little. We’re a slowly shrinking family trying to herd the possessions of a slightly larger number of literate ancestors.
There was talk of leaving the books there in the house. My parents had a strong prejudice in favor of donating them to the local library, and we invited the librarian over to take his pick. The laconic young man came over and told us politely that he didn’t think he could use any that were more than a decade old. That eliminated all but one or two.
Then, noticing the Methodist church across the street was having a rummage sale, I stepped over and inquired whether they wanted some more merchandise.
The first couple of church ladies were welcoming, curious, grateful. It was clear they’d rarely seen so many old books at once. I brought over load after load, and they thanked me for each one, and for a while stood there poring over them.
But then a third lady joined them. “Old books,” she said. “You can’t give ‘em away. You can’t even dump them out by the side of the road.” The other two ladies grew very quiet. I didn’t bring them any more books.
So I picked out about 200 that either looked interesting or funny or had authors I knew of or were apparent first editions, piled them into the car, and drove back to Knoxville.
Knoxville’s used-book market is so various in motive that there should be two or three different names to describe it. People who want a cheap, quick read, a romance, or mystery, or how-to book, or something for the kids’ summer reading lists, might be best served by McKay Used Books, one of the most prodigious retail businesses in the Bearden area and seemingly one of the most unlikely. Here it is, the 21st century, the era of cable TV, DVDs, and the Internet. Do modern people still read that much? McKay’s parking lot, which is generally more packed than it was even when Pero’s Steak House was here, is evidence that, yes, maybe they do.
Lots of retailers carry used books on a more modest scale. Even the new downtown shop, Market Square Booksellers, sells used books on its shelve, alongside new ones.
But the folks who do the buying and selling at McKay and elsewhere don’t care much whether a book is a first edition or not, and people don’t come to McKay for rarities. Until recently, another Bearden merchant, the Incurable Collector, did traffic in the rare and the ancient: that small place catered mostly to collectors and decorators who valued books as antiques. It’s safe to say that most of its customers didn’t buy books principally to read them. That shop is, alas, no longer in business, its owner reportedly retired, perhaps cured. There’s still business in books-as-showpieces; you can even find them through interior decorators’ services.
Of serious collectors of genuinely rare books, Knoxville seems to have few. Antiquarian Ron Allen, retired insurance man who’s a student of old Knoxville and of early Tennessee printing, makes a specialty of rare Tennessee books. He suspects he’s the only serious rare-book collector in town. He attempted to open a couple of rare-book shops in the ‘60s and ‘70s. “Neither of those operations lasted for as long as a year,” he says, “because nobody around here was interested in rare books.”
Another exception is Edgar G. Archer, a collector and dealer in rare and out-of-print books strictly concerning one subject: the American Civil War. He has run his small bookshop, Bohemian Brigade, for 16 years. Located for years on Middlebrook Pike, it’s now on Kingston Pike in Farragut. “I work with clients trying to build a collection,” he says. Many of the books he handles are valued in the thousands of dollars. A few of them are local drop-ins, but he does more than 95 percent of his business “worldwide,” online.
In the broad littoral zone between the elusive rare-book market and the plebeian paperback frenzy of McKay, dwells the Book Eddy. Opened in Bearden in 1991 by John Coleman, it moved downtown before opening at its current location on Chapman Highway about six years ago. They’ve recently spun off a smaller, second store near UT’s campus, the Book Eddy, Too, a.k.a. Eddy’s Books, on Melrose Place. But the Chapman Highway store is by far the bigger one, with about five times as many books. Not half a mile south of the bridge, it’s in the most culturally interesting strip mall in Knox County, home to the main Disc Exchange record store, two authentic Mexican restaurants, one with an attached mercado, La Tapatia—and the Book Eddy.
It’s the best-known rare-book market in East Tennessee and maybe beyond. Coleman says that since a similar store in Chattanooga recently closed, his nearest peers are in Atlanta and Lexington. Nashville has nothing like it. It may also be the most interesting browsing establishment in town. An intriguingly odd place where the books share space with strange curios: ancient maps, yellowed old globes, a gas mask, a ceramic peanut with an eyeless Jimmy Carter smile, a stage-prop diving helmet, jack-o-lantern gourds, a raven, a stuffed duck under glass, the remains of a spiny pufferfish that seems to have expired in full puff. A card warns, “Caution: extremely sharp fish.”
Penelope, the black cat, is the disdainful hostess. My 13-year-old daughter remarked that the Book Eddy seems like a perfect setting for a murder. On hundreds of shelves are books from many eras about many subjects. Railroading, enzymology, lesbianism, Napoleonic warfare, electro-chemical engineering. They have a total of about 150,000 books in this store alone. Browsing is dangerous. Even if you quit your job, you don’t have enough time in your life to read half of the books at the Book Eddy. Looking at each book at the Book Eddy for one minute each, during their business hours, will take you a full year. And by then they’ll have thousands more.
Coleman, an admitted generalist, is vague about what kind of books he wants. “Good out-of-print books that have lasting value,” he says. “We carry clean books, in good shape. A lot of scholarly books, things that are important, but important only to a certain group of people.” An electronics professor at Pellissippi State is a special fan of the store’s eccentric collection, and often sends his students there.
“My job as a generalist is to make a market in books,” Coleman says. “I buy them and sell them and take care of them in the meantime. I am not a specialist and do not ever intend on specializing, but I recognize quality and am always seeking it regardless of genre.”
One of the first surprises to the layman is that a book’s age doesn’t necessarily mean much. “We get calls every day from people selling books from the turn of the century,” Bolding says. “They’re certain that because they’re from 1899 or 1904, they’re valuable. But 80 percent of them are textbooks, inspirational books, and classics”—republished books that hardly have any market value. “Almost everybody had, in their household, Dickens, Byron, Longfellow. They’re all over the place.”
Some old books are indeed very valuable. Coleman says the most valuable book he ever sold was a rare copy of Haywood’s The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee, published in Knoxville in 1823. It went for almost $7,000. He has handled some very old books, including books in German or Latin from the 1500s, but he does so reluctantly. “They’re hard to sell,” he says. “They’re expensive, a very specialized market. At a certain point, they become an object instead of a book.” He has dealt with such antiques, but he believes most of his customers buy books to read them.
He says his customer base is a broad range of types. Men and women, all ages, some professorial types, but mostly “solid, middle-class people who put a certain amount of their money into books.” A few serious collectors, but also “a guy who puts in ductwork; a baker; collectors of little stuff. We’re just as interested in seeing a kid who trades in 10 of his dimes for a book.” Coleman says about 40 or 50 of his customers have special enthusiasms, and he sometimes gives one a call when something interesting comes in. He says of those who come into the shop, about a third have traveled there from out of town. “We sell more books to people from Michigan some months than to people from Farragut,” he says.
If you look up the Book Eddy online, you’ll find that some websites that describe it are in German. Today, rare books fly fast and furious around the globe via the Internet, but it has hardly put Coleman and Co. out of business; in some ways, it has helped. Before the Internet, Coleman says, “If I got a really rare book I had a hard time selling it.” Sometimes he’d have to attend large book fairs just to unload a book he couldn’t sell in Knoxville. Now he does that on the Internet. He estimates about 40 percent of his sales are on the web.
Coleman says the Internet has made the book market more “transparent” than ever before. “The guru factor is going away,” he says, now that everyone can Google a book and get a rough idea of its value. He says the Internet seems to have depressed the prices for used fiction. “Fiction is probably the hardest hit of any genre—but, on the other hand, a nice first edition is worth three times what it was.”
Thanks to the Internet, though, he says “we’re all going to be working for $6 an hour eventually.”
Coleman does go to fairs occasionally, but only when they’re convenient. Like, right across the bridge. He had a booth at the Rossini Festival in April, mainly as a publicity gesture, but was surprised to make some substantial sales. “I had a seven-volume set of Hermann Hesse in the original German. In this last 15 minutes of the festival, this German couple from West Knoxville sees it, and says, Wow.” They took their Hesse home.
Book Eddy gets some of its books off the web, some arrive in dribs and drabs, like the ones I brought in, but the biggest bulk of them comes from estate sales and what some antique retailers call the three D’s: downsizing, divorce, and death. “We do housecalls,” Coleman says. “We do a triage. The books we have to have, we fight tooth and nail for them. Then, there’s the good, solid books. Then, the common books we don’t need, because we already have seven copies of Durant’s Greece.”
He doesn’t have much use for textbooks or most cookbooks or how-to books—which, unfortunately for most of us, are the books that tend to accumulate in our houses.
I took my aunt’s collection to the Book Eddy. Co-owner Beci Bolding was in charge that day. She knows a good deal about books but depends heavily on the prevailing sales prices on the Internet, along with their current inventory, to determine what they’ll buy.
One of the surprises on Aunt Mabel’s shelf was what looked to me like a first edition of Hemingway’s great novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. No dust jacket, but I looked carefully at the publication information; no mention of it being a second printing, and the only date was 1940, the original year of publication. To me, it was the prize of Aunt Mabel’s collection. It’s my favorite Hemingway novel, and meant a lot to me once; when I read it at 19, I could almost taste and smell and hear it. I had read it in paperback, and was tickled to have this early copy in my hands. But I’ve got kids in school; I figured I’d have to part with it if they’d offer $500 or so.
But first editions with no jackets don’t go for that much. And, as it turned out, this copy wasn’t even a first edition. It was indeed an early copy printed by the original publisher, Scribner’s, Bolding explained; but Scribner’s always typed an A on their first editions, and this one didn’t have an A. She didn’t even want it in the store.
On the other hand, she did want a copy of a book I might have been a little embarrassed to have around, a goofy-looking old book with a cartoonish black woman on the cover, called Miss Minerva’s Problem. It was an entry in that popular 1930s series, but a rare one, especially with the original jacket, and was being bought and sold for $100. So she offered me $20. That was their deal for that book, 20 percent of retail price. I took it.
That is, by the way, roughly competitive. Buying used books is a risk. “We own it, once it’s ours, and there is no one to bail us out of unsold inventory,” Coleman says. “We have to average in a lot of marginal material,” some of which gets marked way down just to get it off the shelf. “Basically, a bookseller has to base their buying price on a worst-case scenario system,” Bolding says. “We buy the average book, hope to get $6.50 for it, but buy it assuming that we might have to mark it down to $1 or $3 before we can actually sell it. Which happens quite frequently.” Bolding and Coleman explain that the percentage they pay slides based on the condition and quality of the book: sometimes 25 or 30 percent for a relatively rare book, sometimes as low as 10 percent for a more common one.
I obviously had a lot to learn. In my aunt’s collection were several novels by Alfred Leland Crabb (1884-1979), a Kentucky writer of regional romantic historical tales, and the object of much veneration of a generation of educated Southern Appalachians. Most of my grandparents’ generation, not just Aunt Mabel, had a set of Crabb books, and talked about the author as if he were a family friend. Aunt Mabel had several of Crabb’s books, several of them autographed, some of them in “special editions.”
I’ve hardly heard of him except through older family members. I looked him up on the Internet and found relatively few sites. I’d assumed there might not be much of a market, but gamely brought a copy in. I was surprised that Bolding was instantly familiar with the name, and said there is such a market, around here, at least, though principally among readers over 60. Bolding said the special editions don’t mean anything much, but she could probably sell the autographed ones for about $25.
She was offering just $5. Maybe I could sell it for more at a garage sale. But to do so I’d have to have a garage sale. And to sell it online I’d have to come up with a posting, wait, and assuming somebody bit, pack it up and ship it off.
One of the prizes was a flaking two-volume set I’d never heard of, an 1830 collection of the essays of an early Christian intellectual named Hannah Moore. Bolding did want to buy that, and offered $35, considering that it trades on the market for over $100. However, it was rare evidence that anybody in my family had abolitionist or feminist sympathies. And when I heard it was monetarily valuable, I suffered the peculiar impulse to hang on to it.
Unfortunately for me, she didn’t have any use for the set I was most anxious to find a good home for, The People’s Cyclopedia of Universal Knowledge, a whole string of weighty tomes that takes up a whole shelf at home. It’s a complete set of that popular 1880s encyclopedia, and goes for over $100 on the Internet, but Bolding has the same problem with it that I do. It takes up too much room.
Bolding gestured to the rest of the box. Some titles she was all too familiar with. Others she’d looked up on the Internet.
“Those are pretty run-of-the-mill,” she said. “A lot of it’s old fiction that, beyond its initial publication, didn’t make a big splash.” For whatever reason, some old writers just don’t have any legs, and I brought several examples of their work: Frances Parkinson Keyes, Taylor Caldwell, A.J. Cronin, James Hilton. To get an idea of what old books don’t have any value, Bolding suggests, peruse any thrift shop. She says Frances Parkinson Keyes is all over the place.
What old fiction does sell? “Faulkner, Hemingway,” she says. “Agee, Kerouac. Some Patrick O’Brien. It sold even before the movie.” (Master and Commander, that is: it’s based on a couple of the late British author’s early seafaring novels.)
“We have people from out of town expecting to find a first edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” an especially rare nonfiction book. “We can’t even keep a paperback copy in stock.”
It turns out another Knoxvillian’s work is especially sought after, not only here, but nationally. Cormac McCarthy’s early novels, the ones printed before major prizes and movies made the author a national bestseller, are especially valuable. A first edition of McCarthy’s 1979 Knoxville-based novel, Suttree, is worth at least $700.
The Book Eddy has an especially various children’s collection, and some children’s fiction is hard to keep in stock. Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books which sold for a dollar or less at Miller’s half a century ago might now go for $15, or even as much as $40. “The Hardy Boys are still really hot,” Bolding says. “It’s hard to keep that shelf full.”
One lot that Coleman says sold extraordinarily well was a little alarming. “We bought a large collection of books on torture and punishment, maybe 60 books,” he says. “They sold very fast.”
I double-checked, but unfortunately, my Aunt Mabel didn’t have any books about torture. In the end, the Book Eddy wanted only about one tenth of what I brought. At the end, I’d made nearly enough to cover gasoline and labor—but I also had the bulk of obscure mid-century novels that my relatives dreaded.
Later, discussing his buying policies, Coleman remarked, without specific reference to my aunt’s collection, “I certainly understand how much effort I must make to keep my space from being inundated with the tons and literal tons of crap that is out there in the world trying to find a home.” By then, I’d already tried to sell some of these old ‘30s novels at McKay. Some are in like-new condition, and look like exciting reads. McKay didn’t want them either, though they do have a bin of giveaways out front that I’ve found handy more than once. Most of what we brought back from my aunt’s house was still in the car. The Methodist lady’s words were ringing in my ears. Can’t even dump them out by the side of the road. I hefted them back into the car, and checked Chapman Highway for cops.
June 10, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 24
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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