It's not like that now. I didn't count the tables, but there couldn't have been more than five or six dealers represented. I saw no older books, not that I looked very hard. Everything looked shiny and new, and all the books appeared to be by writers attending the convention.
There was one exception. Mystery Mike had three or four small boxes of older paperbacks, the remnants of an estate he'd bought. There had been a thousand or so books originally, I was told, but the rest had already been sold. I looked through the boxes several times in the hope of coming up with a great find, but I was disappointed. Either I had the books already or they were things I wasn't interested in having. There was an okay copy of the Dell 10 Cent Marijuana, and the price wasn't bad, but I already own a much nicer copy. I was tempted to buy it, anyway, but I resisted.
After looking things over a couple of times I bought two books, more out of a sense of obligation than anything. One was Dark Destiny, by Edward Ronns (Edward S. Aarons). I have a copy, but someone wrote on the cover. The one I bought wasn't in great condition, but the cover was unmarred. The other one was The Young Hoods, which appears to be unread. I couldn't resist a book about "the bitter poison of delinquency," even if I never planned to read it.
The Internet is to blame for the condition of the dealers' room, I'm sure. Why pack hundreds of books, haul or ship them to a distant city, unload and unpack them, sell what you can, then pack them, load them, and haul them home to unload and unpack, when instead you can just sell them out of your house via a website? I can understand why things are as they are, but I miss the old days.
25 comments:
You said it! We took a few days after Bouchercon and traveled south down the coast for stops in Charlston and Savannah. Didn't find any great used bookstores in those places (at least in the downtowns). It's getting harder to find good used bookstores too.
I fondly remember the book room at one of the Seattle Bouchercons, one dealer had what seemed like a hundred or more just in Gold Medal paperbacks. The internet give the, and the internet take the away.
DAMN autocorrect. It was intended to say "giveth" and "taketh".
By the time I quit selling at Malice Domestic it was like that too. I was selling mostly to my regular customers and other dealers because most of the people only wanted new books by attending authors whose books they could get signed.
Bah, humbug.
And keep off my lawn!
Jeff
Yeah the few cons I attended were highlighted by the dealer rooms. The fronts of my shirts--I was always debonair--were soaked with drool.
I've said before that the internet is great if you have a specific item in mind, but gone are the days of browsing, of serendipity, of looking for one thing and finding another. We can find what we know we want, but how do we ever find the things we don't even know about?
Browsing is such a lost art, I miss it terribly. And don't try browsing on Amazon. There's so much crappy self published blubber you have to go through! Ebook and self-publishing have destroyed book buying and publishing.
RJR
What Deb said !
Lighten up guys. I'm sure each person in this thread, at one time or another, bought a few books online he thought he'd never own or even see. Anyone? No one? Oh well.
Sure. I found one I'd been looking for for 30 years. Cheap. But it just wasn't the same as stumbling across it on a dealer's table.
Me, too. Even compared to ten years ago it was woeful. Serendipity is a wonderful things.
I will be discussing this on the SleuthSayers blog a week from Wednesday, or at least a related topic. The bee in my bonnet is this: why do they invite dealers to come try to sell books and then give so many free ones away?
I'm looking forward to your post. I hadn't thought about the free books angle.
So, Bill, how much did he want for that copy of Marihuana?
$25, and it was in pretty good shape.
Also, a lot of the booksellers that you all remember fondly, got old and retired with their riches (Taylor, Stilwell, Meyerson, for instance), though I heartily agree that the internet played a huge role in destroying things as we knew them. And not just the book business.
Stilwell
I heard from one of the con organizers for next year that having a bigger dealer's room is a major goal for them. The Raleigh book room was by far the smallest ever. I only bought one book, by a beginning writer named Crider (I got it signed!). Not bad. Some promise.
He's one to watch. That signature is golden.
Either that Marihuana was a steal or the pb prices have plummeted.
I tried to get a table at LCC in Portland and couldn't. That was a blessing in disguise. The people in there looked like a meeting of Maytag repairmen. But when you have every dealer stocking the same wares, sales won't be brisk.
Yes, the Dealers' Room in Raleigh was a disappointment. But Raleigh also had a couple nice used bookstores. One even had a BOMBA book...
Only you could find a Bomba book in Raleigh. Well, maybe Scott Cupp could.
I wouldn't mind having a table in New Orleans. If the price is right, and they make it easy to ship a box or two of books directly to the hotel. Any clue as to who is in charge of the dealers room there?
Stilwell
Not a clue. I'm way out of the loop.
I know I'm late on this (and it might be behind a paywall), but check out this article on penny booksellers from the New York Times:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/a-penny-for-your-books.html?referer=http://digg.com/
Thanks, Deb. Very interesting. This link works better.
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