Result!
I took a wrong turning in Manhattan this morning and stumbled across a book stall selling a copy of Zamyatin's The Islanders for four dollars. When I looked online for a copy of the same edition a few months back the cheapest copy available was $52!
Being a 'the-glass-is-half-empty' kind of guy, I know I'll never find that book stall again.
2 comments:
I've noticed the same kind of thing. My local second hand bookshop often has the stuff I search for online, but then don't buy (online) as the prices are far too high and the state of the books is just too bad.
And every now and again I go in and look, remember only the hind of half-arsed information about the title or publisher than drives all booksellers (including myself) mad, and manage to find it/have it found for me.
You should go more to those tiny bookstalls though - I have a friend in NY who every now and again finds first editions of Bukowski, Ginsberg and so on, for a dollar or two, and then sells them on to other places for up to $ 1000. It doesn't happen often enough though for him to be able to live from the proceeds...
Online book prices often seem to be set according to some strange automatic algorithm rather than any actual human judgement of the market.
For instance the obscure 1984 SF paperback Man of Gold by MAR Barker has secondhand copies listed on amazon ranging from $3.00 (which is roughly what I paid for mine) to $321.80.
While Barker does have some devoted fans clearly nobody will pay hundreds of dollars for a battered little 1980s paperback when copies do still turn up for a couple of dollars - but because it is relatively rare and a first edition (only because sales weren't sufficient to justify a second) some automatic pricing system (or just absurdly overoptimistic owner) assumed it must be valuable and others must have followed suit.
And eventually the $3 copies will disappear and the only ones available will languish for decades unsold at insanely high price tags until the paper and glue quality of such paperbacks not being good they literally fall apart on the shelves and are binned.
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