Is Book Collecting detrimental to being a good Bookseller?
My family recently moved into our permanent home, which has given me the opportunity to reevaluate and reflect on both my book collection and my philosophy of collecting. Books are, we all know, one of the bigger pains to move. In our previous move, I had relocated all of my personal books to the back of the bookstore (leading those who wandered through the employee only door to ask--”Hey what are all these?” and “Why are all the good books back here, man?”), but now that we have found our home, it has given me the chance to bring my book collection home and to determine exactly how much space of one’s home should be devoted to Thomas Pynchon (a lot, I would argue!).
These aren’t mine, but if anyone wants to put together an Ocean’s 11 crew of booksellers, they could be!
There is a belief I’ve heard repeated many times amongst booksellers that you can either be a book collector or a bookseller, but you can’t be both. Being a collector holds you back as a bookseller. If I want to personally snatch up every fascinating book or oddity I come across, my store will be much less interesting, and my home will start to resemble a home from a TLC hoarders episode. Because I still want to hoard a little bit, I reject the idea that booksellers cannot also collect but accept that we can’t collect everything.
When I was younger, I was seemingly intent on holding onto every book I read. Who knows when I would need that copy of George Bush, Dark Prince of Love but I had read it, and therefore, it went on my shelf. For an avid reader, keeping every book isn’t a practical option. I read somewhere in the range of 125 or so books a year. Let’s assume that with Peter Thiel technology I live to 204. Where would I put all those?
Aside: Anytime I start to run the calculations on how many total books I can conceivably read in my lifetime, it makes me question why I spent those hours reading George Bush, Dark Prince of Love or Chris Rock’s Rock This in high school. The sand is continuing to fill the bottom on the hourglass and my TBR pile just keeps towering higher and higher. I suppose facing the reality of my mortality could lead to despair, but instead it just makes me want to find a way to spend every second as wisely as possible. And instead of spending those moments scrolling social media content that is ensured to anger me, I will spend it reading the next book on the pile (oh no I just glanced over my shoulder and the next book is volume four of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle) or the next volume in Junie b. Jones because we have just graduated up to chapter books at bedtime (the best use of my limited time).
People collect for all different kinds of reasons, and I hope I have not discouraged anyone from stockpiling stack after stack of books by invoking memento mori back there, because I do believe that if we are stockpiling any object, it should be ones that hold deep meaning to us. I have a relatively small book collection now (I mean for a person who owns a bookstore it’s small, for an average person, I have an excessive amount of books and a very light addiction). I primarily collect first editions (ideally signed) from my favorite authors as well as writers whose work I believe will appreciate over time (That signed DFW is going up, up, whereas I imagine I could part with a signed Updike or Bellow as their value drops as their influence wanes). Collecting as investment is one form of collecting, and one that I engage in that splits the difference between seller and collector. I have been a bookseller long enough to see trends in collecting and value come and go, and I can use this knowledge to try to predict what is coming, and which authors collectability will increase is part of the profession (this is why when our five year old shakes her head and asks why I need to have three copies of the exact same books I feel flustered like a Tim Robinson character and bellow DONT WORRY ABOUT IT IM DOING SOMETHING! IM BETTING BIG ON OTTESSA MOSHFEGH!!!). (I was speaking with a bookseller yesterday who told me he was buying up signed first editions of an author he suspects is in poor health! Death always leads to a nice bump in value. Yes, I know how morbid this is!)
For a while I was keeping pulpy covers for works of serious literature that were marked as pulp (which I think is a great concept for a book collection, but not really what I want to focus on). Beyond collecting my favorite writers, I also hold onto books in my areas of interests, so I have a theatre collection, as well as a growing collection of memoirs by booksellers and books about the bookselling trade. I also have quite a few cat books as people love to give me cat books as gifts and I have the hardest time parting with gifts.
Sometimes, but rarely, I regret selling a book. When I was trying to get money to initially open Bookmarx, I sold my signed first edition of Christopher Hitchens memoir “Hitch-22”, which I got signed at the Printers Row Book Fair about a week before Hitchens learned of his cancer. I also regret selling my signed first of David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”, but that was sold when I was in a precarious personal financial situation and needed cash fast. These are both examples of books I am confident will appreciate with time, and by selling them I was a Bad Bookseller.
Harvey recently asked me to build her a library of feminist literature, which kind of confirms some viral Tiktok I saw a few months ago about how men like to be given little tasks to do because I was instantly excited by this and couldn’t wait to start looking on my next book buying trip for because I’m excited to begin my quest to add The SCUM Manifesto to our family’s home library!
Need an idea for something to collect? Ask me. I’ve got all kinds of great suggestions—you could start buying every copy of Mike Lindell’s memoir you find at a Goodwill, you could collect the entire Penguin library with the teal green spines, first printings of Wishbone, anything that you find appealing is worth collecting.
