Listen to Jim’s podcast: http://redclaydiary.com/
or read his story below:
Stragglers of the Orphanage Open House Day
The library basement room is filled to overflowing with wandering patrons searching for books that librarians want ousted from their shelving.
Every kind of person you can imagine is here tonight, roaming the aisles, searching for just the right volumes to take home or to auction on Ebay or to re-gift or just to collect but never read, or simply to place on the coffee table to look pretty…or perhaps even to read and cherish.
Here at the book sale, I am wending my way through the throngs, looking for a niche that everybody ignores, a corner bereft of shovers, space hoarders and aggressive acquirers. Ah! The Humor Section. Nobody looks there, so it’s the perfect spot to seek treasure. I am alone in a sea of grabbers.
Wham! Plop! Wham! Plop!
What th- Where is that noise emanating from?
Wham! Plop! Wham! Plop!
I peek around the corner of the next aisle to spy an intense woman who is stooping down to knee level, ignoring titles and subjects and authors and simply methodically grabbing one book at a time, scanning the back cover with a hand-held device, then slamming each book aside loudly and messily to make room for the next scan. Oblivious to others attempting to examine and open each book, she is working hurriedly, unsmiling and avid.
Wham! Plop! Wham! Plop!
I get it. She’s working from a Want-List of books that are sought by the hundreds on the Internet. She’ll use ISBN numbers to fill some boxes, then ship them out of state to humongous used book entities that will sell them at the rate of thousands per day.
Wham! Plop! Wham! Plop!
Most people here are having a grand time. Kids sit on the floor and read, anxious moms grab titles they hope to read in their spare time and other titles they hope their kids will read, cookbook collectors search for their favorite recipes, history buffs search for Churchill and Durant and Ambrose and Herodotus, donors look for beach reads, teens seek vampires and zombies, nerds all have their specialties…
Then there are these two guys who have cordoned off a corner of the room, where they accumulate stack after stack of books and guard them from examination by others. These are out-of-town dealers who are not purchasing these stacks of books. They are simply roping them off so that they can leisurely pick out the few they want to take with them, leaving a jumble of volumes behind. First come, first served.
Now things are thinning out a bit and I can pick up a few more books to read.
Now, as the books disappear, I look at what is left.
I am the only one who spends time in the philosophy section, so I silently converse with the oldies and make my selections.
Then, when most of the assertive customers have left the building, I carefully look for the wonders they missed, the special books with intrinsic value that cannot be detected by tattooed numbers or overly zealous grabbers.
I find them and am pleased.
I eventually leave with my trove, bidding farewell to those straggling books that will never, ever sell, those orphans who are passed over again and again…books that once meant much to someone but now are passe or outmoded or untrendy or battered.
Where will these orphans go now? What will be the final book that no-one will purchase?
When I return at the end of the sale, I will spend some time with these volumes, searching for special traits hidden to the untrained eye. I’ll find something worthwhile about them, mostly because nobody else took the time.
It’s one of my guiltless pleasures, a game I play all by myself, taking a second and third look at these foundlings to see what they have to offer an uncaring world
http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast