> He looked around at the faces in the crowd and said, “I’m opening the bidding at one dollar.” I about shit myself. I bid the $1 immediately to get things rolling. Well, after I bid, he looked around and said, “Once, twice, sold that man there for $1.” I just laughed… and wondered how the Hell I was going to get this pallet home and what I was going to do with all those books.
> When I asked the auctioneer afterwards why he’d let it go so cheaply, he said, “Did you see anyone trampling you to get in a bid?” I said no, I didn’t. His reply, with a smirk on his face, was, “Gotta’ know your audience in this job.”
> Well, needless to say, I got the books home and spent a few years going through them and selling some, giving some away, etc. However, that’s not the point of this story. The point was finding things in books. So, with that in mind…
Dude goes to an auction and finds books. Nobody bids on the books. Dude is amazed that the auctioneer is willing to sell him something nobody wants for a low price. Dude spends years going through those books.
The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars (sold individually on the second-hand book market, after being carefully catalogued etc.), but nobody interested in buying books happened to be at the auction and the auctioneer set a $1 minimum bid because he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale. The auction house could surely get significantly more for their books if they knew the right venue to sell them (somewhere frequented by used booksellers), but I guess it wasn’t worth their trouble to figure out where that might be.
This is sort of like the time I went to a car auction as a kid and some college students bought a lightly used stretch limo in perfect working order for (the minimum bid of) $100.
In the late 90s in Atlanta I got my first ever Mac computer (Performa iirc??) at an estate sale for free because it was "broken". The way we established that it was broken was because the power switch on the back of it did not do anything. I got home, did some light digging on the internet and determined that the power switch on the back is the main power, and that actually turning on the computer involved pushing one of the keys on the keyboard.
> he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale.
This reminds me of one of the strangest things I ever read in the books:
My Arabic Library
About eighteen months before I arrived in Iraq, one of my predecessors had ordered My Arabic Library, $88,000 worth of books, an entire shipping container. My Arabic Library was a Bush-era, US government–wide project to translate classic American books, so we now have Tom Sawyer, The House of the Seven Gables, and Of Mice and Men in Arabic. The Embassy had big plans for the books, claiming, “It is so important that the children of Baghdad, the next generation of leaders of Iraq, obtain basic literacy skills. A love of learning and literacy will mean better job opportunities for them when they grow up. They will be able to better support their families and help build a more prosperous Iraq.”
Everyone forgot about the books until we learned that a truck was bringing them in from Jordan. After our prayers that the driver would abandon the truck en route failed, my team was stuck with the problem of what to do with a container of books that no one wanted. Apparently, there was little interest among Iraqi schools in reading The Crucible or Moby-Dick, as the books didn’t fit into their centralized curriculum. I was charged with getting rid of them, to anywhere; the lucky winner needed only a truck. We cajoled a nearby school to take the whole mess from us as a personal favor. Their only condition was that they would not have to do the loading themselves, so that is how a couple of us ended up humping books into a flatbed truck while a high school principal and a local truck driver sat in the shade smoking, watching us. We heard later from a third party that, failing to sell the books on the black market, the principal just dumped them behind the school.
Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People
This was very strange to me cause I used to think of American government as very efficient, and with experience of solving exactly the same problem many times already - Germany, Japan, Korea. And the thought that somebody could just waste my yearly taxes on nothing - was very strange and disturbing.
> “It is so important that the children of Baghdad, the next generation of leaders of Iraq, obtain basic literacy skills. A love of learning and literacy will mean better job opportunities for them when they grow up. They will be able to better support their families and help build a more prosperous Iraq.”
Baghdad, before the invasion, was known for the high percentage of readers compared to other cities in the Middle East. We -Arabs- had a saying: "Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads." I doubt the above quote being the true goal of "My Arabic Library" project. I guess it was an attempt to change the culture of people by exposing them to American literature, which would help eventually the political cause of US government in Iraq.
I can’t speak for the mind of the State Department, obviously - but I guess the main purpose of the project was to advance its author’s career. Van Buren’s book is full of such projects, whose main goals were to look good on American television - just once is good. Total lack of a strategic vision.
But if there was a strategic vision in some unseen echelons of American decision making - its goal does not look like to make Iraq successful.
The idea of sending books that are deeply close to American history seems like an obviously terrible idea. Yeah no shit that wasn't going to resonate with an Iraqi child. A lot of these books are culturally foreign to American kids.
Great books are often cross-cultural. We Russian kids enjoyed Tom Sawyer very much. “It”s not every day that a boy gets a chance to paint a fence”… There was (and is) a lot of buzz in Russian culture about Moby Dick though I personally failed to enjoy it. Never heard of Of Mice and Men though - probably because our communists were rather puritanic.
I think problem was that planting a book-reading habits require a lot more work than providing books.
I'm not sure I agree with this. The prices that things sold at might have been cheaper 20 years ago, but the advent of the web with used-goods marketplaces has allowed people to access things that were previously not available or hard to find.
I can go onto ebay and order things from the US that were never available locally in my home country. The same with Yahoo! Auctions for items sold only to the Japanese market. And not only can I access things that I couldn't before, but I can easily search for things. Want a copy of an obscure record? No need to search dozens of local stores - Discogs will probably have a few copies for sale. Need a book to complete a collection? Try a quick search on Amazon or Abebooks.
While the prices that things sell for may be higher, I find that it is considerably easier to collect things now than it would have been before the web.
I mostly agree, but there are exceptions. For my birthday a couple years ago my son showed up with a couple cardboard boxes full of books. Turned out to be a complete set of "Great Books of the Western World," worth well over $1,000. He had picked it up for about $30 at an estate sale a couple days before.
I bought a bunch of architecture books a few years ago at an estate sale for $5. Flipped through them and my son looked them up on eBay - we sold the collection for several thousand dollars.
I quite recently bought a used book for something like $100. Certain books can be expensive, it was not a popular or particularly good book, but the writer was a character and I guess therefore his written books are valuable niche items... Also no more will be printed, so there is limited supply. Similar for some old music sheets or records.
However these are definitely not liquid, if you are going to sell them you maybe have to store them for a long time.
Idk with the amount of books referenced and the definitive fact the some of them were resold at least indicates a good chance of making thousands of dollars, otherwise It’s logical to assume if the effort has not been worth it the author would have commented as such.
A lot of older books that are now out of print often run many hundreds of dollars, if not more. For example, I've been trying to find a complete unabridged edition of Fraser's Golden Bough, which isn't that niche - you'll find it cited somewhere in any work on mythology- and it seems to run in the high-hundreds to low thousands. A quick look shows a first edition selling for 12k all by itself.
Similarly, I'm looking for the complete Collected Works of Carl Jung, and that's got a hefty price too. Maybe one day. :)
I'm sure both of these examples are sitting in some old man's study and are getting sold for nothing at estate sales, if they aren't just thrown in a dumpster or pulped after being donated to a library that can't get rid of them either. But nobody is indexing estate sales.
But a pallet of old academic books is unlikely to be composed of such books. It is probable that most of the books are worth less than the cost of shipping, and some of the books will have some value but not tremendous value. It is astonishing the number of wonderful, high quality books that can be bought on Abebooks for $1.
Did you look at the picture? https://i.imgur.com/0qiTKSQ.jpg Books I commonly buy secondhand that look roughly like those pictured are anywhere from $10–$200 each (depending on how common the particular book/edition is); we’re talking about pretty ordinary old academic books, nothing fancy or extremely rare. A pallet of books is ~500–1000 books (there are maybe 400 in the picture, but the blog author claims that is a "sampling").
That's selection bias because you are only looking at books that you actually wanted. An average book is worth much less than a book that someone actually wants.
An average (~worthless) book is something like a pulp romance novel, political book by a sitting politician, self-help guide, .... These are printed in the millions and used copies can typically be found for $1–$5 + shipping costs. That’s not the same kind of books primarily shown/described here.
Any scholarly person who loves old hardback books and spends a few decades collecting ones they personally want or need is going to end up with some worthless books, a large number that sell for $10–50 each, and a few that are worth hundreds each. It’s just inevitable, unless they go out of their way to only collect junk.
If I had to guess I’d put the price of the old man’s collection in the $10k–$30k range. But it’s plausible it could be more, if he collected anything rare.
I have a book printed less than 5 years ago that routinely sells for $800 online now. The niche religious press that published it simply cannot keep all of the authors work in print and his more academic work gets printed maybe once a decade in a run of 1000.
The article said, "there were some very old, and often valuable, books in this boxes," which is somewhat difficult to interpret but seems to be saying that many of the books were valuable in the sense of fetching a high price, unlike those sold on the rather offensive page you link.
Good auctioneers make sure that there is a buyer for specific things like that. I'm surprised that there wasn't a used book buyer in the crowd. Though maybe his guy didn't show up.
It's a Salvation Army auction. I imagine the main purpose is to dump stuff that they haven't found any other use for. They get all this stuff for free, any money they happen to make from an auction is just a nice bonus.
Exactly this - and 99% of the time a “pallet of books from Salvation Army/Goodwill” will be entirely romance novels and cookbooks and not worth the pulp.
That depends. For things they expect to go be worth a lot they want two buyers. However for things like scrap metal they just want one buyer - they know that buyer will get a great deal, but the value in scrap isn't high enough to support two and so getting a second buyer means both will disappear soon.
> When I asked the auctioneer afterwards why he’d let it go so cheaply, he said, “Did you see anyone trampling you to get in a bid?” I said no, I didn’t. His reply, with a smirk on his face, was, “Gotta’ know your audience in this job.”
> Well, needless to say, I got the books home and spent a few years going through them and selling some, giving some away, etc. However, that’s not the point of this story. The point was finding things in books. So, with that in mind…
Dude goes to an auction and finds books. Nobody bids on the books. Dude is amazed that the auctioneer is willing to sell him something nobody wants for a low price. Dude spends years going through those books.
I'm happy for this guy.