Sunday, July 29, 2018

"Worth Reading Again"

New in the Books Room:
a 12-volume set of travel writing by John L. Stoddard.
I'd rearranged shelves so there was room to put up a little info about the guy too--he was a world traveler who gave lectures, illustrated with slides, around the United States:
"
His intellect, wit, and charisma transformed Stoddard into an extremely popular speaker on the American lecture circuit."

These are the the 1898 print copies of those lectures. I only glanced at them––they look pretty readable.
My pricing is kinda idiosyncratic... I'm still feeling my way with that. What do people want, and what will they pay?
The "Cool Old Books" I set up do sell (old books with neat covers or illustrations but often in rather poor shape, for .99–$1.99), so people do like that sort of thing. (I should take more pictures for the record.)

I priced these volumes at $4.99 each (about as high as our book prices go) because I like them and the set is a neat donation. You can find them for around that price online, so that's fair, but not a steal.
If they don't sell I'll reduce the price.

On the other end--pulp fiction! Love it, but the mid-century acidy paperbacks won't last another century, like these lovely volumes will. Some are barely holding together now.

I love that this donor had put notes on the books:
I saved the best covers of these and the rest went on the 33 cents shelf.

2 comments:

ArtSparker said...

Yikes! Saw this collection used for purely interior decoration at the house of people I was babysitting for. Yeah, pretty sure they weren't reading them. Anyway, another potential market if you were to sell them as a set.

Frex said...

Hi, SPARKER: That's wild! Yeah, somebody told me real-estate people buy sets like these at thrift stores for staging house sales.
I guess they get appreciated as beautiful objects, which they are (the marble paper covers!!!).

In my heart of hearts, I do hope someone somewhere down the line will read them...