(Footnote: following weeks of ‘payment is imminent’ promises on the telephone, Mrs Booth phoned me to apologise for the ‘mess’ she and Richard had just returned to find. A cheque was then promptly sent.)
Emmaüs Near Calais, Late August 2007
Calais, overlooking the Strait of Dover, is the closest French town to England, just 21 miles away. For several centuries Calais was a British territorial possession. Nearby is an outpost of Emmaüs, the French equivalent to the UK charity shop. For many years they have been collecting and sorting all kinds of second-hand goods: clothes, electrical appliances, furniture, and of course books. Abbé Pierre founded the first Emmaüs community in the 1950s with a view to reducing social exclusion in society. Admirable sentiments, which do not, I’m afraid, account for my interest.
I intend to visit an Emmaüs warehouse near Calais and so investigate a developing theory, that over the years English books might have ‘washed up’ like driftwood in Calais, those left behind in hotels and on the ferries. Surely they would have a good chance of finishing up with Emmaüs.
Having kipped in the car, parked in a service station near Lille, I am feeling as dishevelled as I look. The previous day’s 600-mile drive up through France has taken it out of me. I arrive early and wait for a café to open. There are groups of young men skulking down side streets. Such is my appearance, I could almost be mistaken for one of them. But these people are truly desperate; young men seeking food and dignity and attempting to complete the final leg of their journey to Britain. They are probably inhabitants of ‘The Jungle’, a collection of makeshift tents and cardboard structures which are home to hundreds of migrants, predominantly from the Middle East and Northern Africa. Even Emmaüs can’t help these men, ‘les sans papiers’.
A local reveals that the Calais branch of Emmaüs is not actually in Calais. It is in a village some seven miles south of the port called Attaques — a name to embolden the hunter-gatherer. At the appointed hour, 10.00 a.m., the shutters open and in we go. The usual suspects accompany me; people on the look out for antiques and resellable bric-a-brac. Inside the building there is plenty of the bric and the brac and, to be frank, the all round tat. A receptionist, bemused by my accent, directs me to the ‘livres etrangers’ shelf. Musty smelling Penguins, unopened Orwells, a couple of Dicks (by which I mean Philip K.) and the ubiquitous The Moon’s a Balloon by David Niven. It isn’t the haul I’d been hoping for. But there is one hardback, sandwiched between two Bibles, that is a gem, though not in any financial sense. It is Holbrook Jackson’s The Anatomy of Bibliomania. The first sentence reads:
‘Books, the most excellent and noble creations of Man, are, saith one, for company, the best Friends; in doubts Counsellours; in Damps Comforters; Time’s Prospective, the home Traveller’s Ship, or Horse, the busie man’s best Recreation, the Opiate of Idle Weariness, the Mindes best Ordinary, Nature’s Garden and Seed-plot of Immortality.’
En Route to Llangollen, Wales, July 2009
Driving along the A5, the brooding, awful mountains are a fitting landscape for dark musings on the book business. I’ve recently closed down a shop; the venture culminated in a mega ‘all books must go’ sale. Books were given away, first figuratively such was their cheapness, and then literally, to passers-by and charity shops. During the cull, I pictured myself as a biblio-chemist, involved in some esoteric process of distillation. Book club editions and beach reads were jettisoned. I find that I’m left with an increased proportion of non-fiction titles that command a higher monetary value than most prose. I keep only the books that I perceive as food for the net. Aside from the occasional car boot sale, I’m now primarily a seller on the internet, of which I was an early enthusiast. But my view of it these days is more ambivalent. I can now sell a book to a customer hundreds of miles away. But the technology enabling me to do this is, of course, available to the customer, the middleman cut out.
The bookshop that I’m heading to in Llangollen, a town associated with the Eisteddfod and the River Dee, is a bit of an enigma. Above a greasy spoon café, a former chapel-like building now accommodates a large and incongruous stock. ‘One hundred thousand books’, proudly declared at the entrance to cafe. I spend hours traipsing the aisles, familiarising myself with the layout. There is a great deal of perusing done while a desultory trail of customers come and go. Most are looking for specific books. I, on the other hand, am taking in all the categories, trying to decide on what books are, from my perspective, underpriced.
It’s soon clear that thousands of books here have no potential buyers. Dead authors and illustrators that have long since lost their allure. The observation is a salient reminder of a bookseller’s ongoing fight against obscurity and, ultimately, extinction. There are exceptions of course. The shop’s impressive collection of Penguin Classics is tangible testament that certain stories, ideas and philosophies live on. It’s a struggle to guess which ones from the twenty-first century will survive. I reprimand myself and focus instead on money and how it is to be made.
The shop’s seemingly permanent half price sale makes this possible. The large numbers of multiple copies reveal the previous owners’ penchant for ‘remainders’. Going on hunch and memory, I attempt to locate titles that are both out of print and desirable, the former not necessarily leading to the latter. Finally I spot several candidates. Occasional Prose by Flannery O’Connor and Six Plays by Soyinka at £1.50 a book. These can be resold near to the £10 mark on Amazon. I snap them all up. In the children’s section I leave with a £3 copy of Masquerade by Kit Williams — worth five times that on abebooks. I might be tempted to read the O’Connor book, being a fan of her short stories. But I have to be aware of when my personal tastes influence ‘business’ decisions.
I spend £65 in total and return to Bangor to price and list the books on the net.
I should be able to triple the outlay in time. How much time exactly is anyone’s guess, which is why the margins have to be so high.
I’ve made one mistake, seduced by the bulky seriousness of John Lloyd’s History of the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union, which seemed good value at £6. It turns out that were plenty of copies going for less money on Amazon, some priced as low as you can get. One penny. It’s become a significant trend, especially with paperbacks, to set them for sale at a single penny. In listing a book, software programs can automatically undercut all other copies of the same title. The result is an ineluctable slide in price, but some dealers are still able to turn a profit on the postage.
(Distance travelled: 100-mile return trip. Profit (projected): £295. Fact learned: Thomas the Tank Engine is alive and well and tooting in mid Wales.)
Barnardo’s Charity Shop, Caernarfon, 2002
Falling into conversation with a volunteer on the till, I learn that he, a well-dressed pensioner, is an old camera enthusiast before he realises what brings me into the shop. He wastes little time in requesting an atlas that designates countries of the British Empire in pink. For some time, rifling through the bags of shop donations, he’s been on the look out for one to give to a friend.
I dig out a nineteenth-century Bartholomew that fits the bill. A little research reveals that the pink colour is probably derived from the eighteenth-century atlases that used red after William of Orange ascended to the English throne. Incidentally, the French had atlases depicting British Empire countries in grey.