Pictures From The Book Business

~ Laura

It’s estate sale season around here. People are preparing their homes for sale, so they hire people to sell all their crap. Crap for sale? Count me in!

I bought dozens of gold leaf books at two 9,000 square feet mansions and 400 dusty tomes from a dusty garage this weekend. I’m sorting out all these books today. Some will be sold individually for hundreds. Others will be sold by the dozen to home decorators. I paid Jonah to come back from college and help me with the garage books. We did triage in the driveway sorting books into keep, donation, and recycle piles.

It’s all actually pretty fun. Here are some pictures of things that are going on around here:

  • Visited this 9,000 square foot house for an estate sale.
  • This was their breakfast nook.
  • Outdoor tv, fireplace, full kitchen, pool, and pool house.
  • And lots of leather books by Easton Press and Franklin Library. I bought them for $10 a piece. Will sell between $70-$400.
  • They’re stacked up in the dining room to get ready for pictures.
  • I turned an unused wine cellar into the books zone.
  • I have a lot of sorting to do next week. I’ll probably sell most of these for $20 per dozen.
  • This is our basement. If I expand my business, I’ll use the profits to refinish it.
  • Taking pictures of my own books for Instagram.

Published by Laura

19 thoughts on “Pictures From The Book Business”

  2. Well, I love that Laura has a great side job rescuing unwanted books, and re-selling them.
    Win that books are rescued.
    Win that Laura makes some money off it.

    But, as a book and literature lover, I am sadly horrified that books are sold by the yard to interior decorators.
    When the binding is worth more than what’s inside….

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    1. Ann said, “But, as a book and literature lover, I am sadly horrified that books are sold by the yard to interior decorators. When the binding is worth more than what’s inside….”

      That’s the least bad thing that designers do with books. Some stuff I’ve seen in shelter magazines:

      –a how-to for gutting a book with a pretty binding and turning it into a purse.
      –a how-to for gutting books and turning them into a headboard
      –hanging large pictures over bookcases
      –organizing books by color of binding
      –recovering books with white dust jackets (whyyyyy?)
      –turning books so that the bindings facing the wall (whyyyyyy?).

      Basically, decorators are monsters who hate books.

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      1. I forgot to add–unlabeled white dust jackets.

        My working assumption: these are not people who don’t read at all.

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      1. Amusing that some colors are more expensive by foot. I guess it makes sense, since books are more likely to be some colors than others.

        There’s a coffee shop near me that I think probably got its books by the foot. But, there are some interesting reads there. I sheltered there once on a cold day (before the pandemic) and read a book about a frontiersman and the orphan he adopted randomly chosen from the shelves.

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  3. As a teenager, I once covered all my books in yellow wall paper. It was partly motivated by the cultural practice in some countries of covering books to protect them — I think this was done in the US in the earlier parts of this century, too. But, also ’cause the paper was a pretty yellow and matched my decor. I did read my books, so I have very personal knowledge of how very terrible it is to cover your books in matching paper.

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    1. bj said, “I did read my books, so I have very personal knowledge of how very terrible it is to cover your books in matching paper.”

      Hee!

      When I was a teen, I scrupulously covered my paperbacks with clear contact paper. So much work! I still have some of those books, though.

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      1. Coming from the library supply business, I have a very clear idea of the ROI required in order for covering to be economic. Consequently, I have always refused to cover my son’s school exercise books. If the cover is any stronger, the inside just rips away from the cover at the staples. Something which is used for 9 months (at best), and costs less than a dollar, is simply not worth covering.

        And, re matching paper – I always laugh at the up-market Mummies who cover all their daughter’s books in matching contact (doubly bad if they have 2 girls and use the same design for both). Little Mary will never be able to find her maths book in a hurry when she needs it.

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      2. Ann said, “And, re matching paper – I always laugh at the up-market Mummies who cover all their daughter’s books in matching contact (doubly bad if they have 2 girls and use the same design for both). Little Mary will never be able to find her maths book in a hurry when she needs it.”

        NOOOOO!

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  4. BJ said: “There’s a coffee shop near me that I think probably got its books by the foot. ”

    The worst one I was ever in, had the books *glued together* – presumably so that no one could upset their ‘delightful’ arrangement (or possibly nick one).

    I left….

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  5. Since I’m not a twitterer, I will follow up on your CC tweet by saying, yes, email them to find out who to call. If they are like the typical underfunded public university or CC, their disability support has been cut back or restructured multiple times. For a while at my university, the most experienced person at the disability resource center was an undergraduate. (They had two wonderful people resign for more stable jobs in rapid succession when layoffs were going on. And the student, who was one of our minors, was awesome. But…. ) I hope the situation there is better.

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  7. Thanks. The local community college is just one of the paperwork hassles on my plate today. Ian will be in an 18-21 program next year and take classes at the community college in the evening. All that is requiring lots of coordination and paperwork. I really need to talk with someone in the disability office about how to even just register a kid, who won’t officially have a high school diploma. And then we’re starting the whole process for SSI and Medicaid. Whew. Tons of paperwork. I took off a month from work to deal with all this. I hope I can start up again soon.

    Honestly, I’m having a major panic attack, because I think things are actually going to get worse for me.

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    1. If you can find a real disability resource person at a college, they are awesome and know a ton of stuff. (This is a sample of two, of course, but wow, they were just great people and really spent a lot of time considering how to make things accessible to everyone.) So I hope that CC is in that position. If not, and I hate to add to your plate, might be worth checking with a few other CCs, or even a 4-year public, in the area to see which one has the best DRC. Very large schools with big bureaucracies might be better at that than smaller schools. If they have a good DRC you should be able to find it on the website easily, possibly with directors’ names attached.

      The paperwork sounds awful. Sorry.

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  8. I can’t offer anything but words and sympathy, but I hope (and think maybe you do) have some real support?

    “lots of coordination and paperwork” is one of my ideas of hell (even while acknowledging that there are many other hells).

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