Book Biz Finds

You all know about my book business side hustle, right? I buy books at estate sales and auctions for very little money, and then resell them on my Etsy shop. While I don’t have to spend a lot of money on the books, there’s a lot of labor involved.

My last major purchase, for example, brought in about 2,000 books from an estate in Westchester, NY. I paid $165 for all those books. But it took all four of us about about half a day to fill up two cars with the books and then unload them at home. I did a major sort that afternoon and got rid of about six garbage bags of books that were too old to use and junky magazines that were part of those sales.

But then the books have just sat in my basement for two months, because I’ve been busy with other work. Procrastinating on a first draft of an article, I went down there this morning to do another sort.

Here’s some of what I found: These look like books, right?

Nope! They are actually silver plates. They’re going for $200-$600 on eBay.

And then I found a first edition, “Out of Africa,” with a near perfect dust jacket. $1,500

This table is just filled with books from 1900 or earlier. Half are in rough condition. I’m not sure what I”ll do with them.

Fun way to get dirty this morning.