Sargasso Saturday

Saturdays are weirdly enough, fairly quiet at the moment. Two or three browsers will make an appearance. (they wander in, we smile brightly through our yellow teeth, they tell us what a marvellous collection we have, because we're clearly a museum and not a shop, and then they ask about Harry Potter. Not that we mind; bookdealers need human contact on a regular basis to remind them how to imitate humans in their daily lives, otherwise we forget and stumble around looking unsvoury and smelling of rubbing alchohol).

Passing trade is a big issue in London at the moment. You're okay if you happen to be on Charing Cross Road (Visit Any Amount of Books Now...subliminal advertising break over...) or Museum Street (Ulysses Bookshop must be regarded not as a shop but as a house of worship), but if you happen to be anywhere else the likelihood is that you are suffering from severe congestion charge issues which can lead to drowsiness, a sore throat from praying for a customer and ultimately...bankruptcy, divorce, alchoholism, alienation and generally being forced to get a proper grown up job where people bicker about each other from their cubicles and the high point of the year is someone getting drunk and photocopying their backside.

It isn't just the congestion charge obviously. There are other considerations; fewer people leave school knowing how to read, and if somehow they have learned, then they have had all the inclination ground out of them in order to turn them into better candidates for reality TV shows. The internet has had a massive effect on rare bookdealing; for centuries your skill and success depended in no small measure upon knowing what was rare and valuable and scouring the known world for it.

The internet has reduced the necessary level of scouring but it has put us in the weird position of having to redefine rare. There are titles which we would search for, obtain and then price routinely at a certain level tailored to our customers, the rarity of the book and how piratical we were feeling that day (or at least that's what people think). The internet not only makes it clear that this particular title isn't rare (if there are ten on abebooks then it isn't rare), but also that our 'traditional' price for the book is either a) looking remarkably high or b) the same as everyone else's because they're using us as a price guide. Everything becomes comparison shopping; seeing as no two books are ever the same this introduces a problem.

For example; I have a copy of The Hound of The Baskervilles in First Edition, it is gorgeous, all deep red and shiny black and it looks like it was printed yesterday...it's £6,500. Now, there's a nice man who bought a copy in a charity shop for £3, it's frayed, faded, foxed and generally looks like the Hound it question has been using it as a chew toy...now this nice man isn't a bookdealer and through no fault of his own he decides that his copy is about half as good as mine (because all the available copies are there on the net) and prices it at £3000 when it's worth about a tenner. Thus the answer to the question "Why is your copy so expensive?" is likely to be "Because it's fabulous, and we're professionals." rather than "Because we're really, really greedy and we think you're an idiot."