Someone donated a box of like-new contemporary novels yesterday, which spurred me to spend all afternoon tidying the Fiction section--facing books out, alphabetizing, and reflowing books to loosen up the tight sections. Stock is a bit low though. More people buy the best books than donate them...
I've thought about putting up a sign requesting donations, and maybe I will, but that can go wrong. I've been surprised that when I've told good customers we need books, they've brought in boxes of mostly junk. They've obviously cleared their shelves of stuff they don't want--and neither does anyone else:
standard reference books (people use the Internet now); Dan Brown mysteries; South Beach Diet books (& workbooks & supplementary volumes); bios of George W. Bush; outdated travel guides (honest to god, Triple-A's Guide to North Carolina, 1998).
These go in recycling, which is a huge pain to deal with--big heavy boxes--the guys hate moving them...
Unmarked paperbacks cost a dollar, hardbacks, two dollars. (Though hardback fiction sells worse than paperback, so I usually mark it to one dollar.)
This is ridiculously cheap, but I don't want to raise it (and no one asks me to)--partly because I think the rock bottom prices keep people coming to the store even though there's an inferno across the street (the dealers continue to burn shit), and partly because it's a service to people who can't afford books otherwise. Some of our regulars are very old (Sergei, from Russia), very young (Amina, a Somali teenage girl), obviously fragile in mental or physical ways, as well as lots of college kids and novel-reading white women (my class--who may or may not have disposable income).
BELOW is the Fiction section (most of it; some books got cut off)––in alphabetical order by author.
Below sci-fi is an unlabeled shelf of Books About Words and Ideas--no label, you just get to figure it out for yourself... (just being scattered on my part--but books do sell off it, so I guess people do figure it out).
Funny, you'd think the Fiction section would look much the same, but I'd photographed the fiction section four months ago, in August, and with some holdovers (Cold Mountain!), it was full of different titles.
Nice!
So, the shelves look about as good as they ever do.
I will just note that the books don't necessarily come in looking good. I often dust off dirt and cobwebs, wipe sticky stuff off with Windex, or remove actual gunk with a butter knife; sometimes I tape a rip or a wobbly spine, as well as removing labels, if I can without ripping the covers (though sometimes I leave on stickers from other booksellers, like Half Price Books, so people can see what a good deal they're getting).
It's not unusual for a book to be so water damaged I have to throw it out (don't recycle mold), but if there's just a little coffee stain, I put the book out for sale--if it's desirable. It's a judgment call.
Battered old copies of Carlos Castenada's Teachings of Don Juan sell. A clean, unread copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul does not.
