My dad once said that if our family had a motto, it would be “Good food, good books, good conversation.” Those do seem to be our three favorite things.
I grew up in a house full of books, because we all like to read and we all have wide-ranging interests. After I left home, my mother began collecting books as a hobby. Actually, it was more like a scavenger hunt: She would buy books for a quarter and sell them for ten bucks. You won’t make a living that way, but Mom just loved the idea of finding overlooked treasures and turning them into cash.
In order to do this, she learned a lot about offbeat authors and illustrators. You’re not going to find a Dickens first edition at a garage sale or Goodwill, but you might find a 1928 edition of Dana Malone of Greenfield, by Rev. Howard Chandler Robbin, that retails for about $10. If you can buy it for a dollar, that’s a 900% profit.
Mom liked finding the books—she always had a great eye for the good stuff—and she liked doing the research. What she didn’t spend as much time on was the selling part. Every now and then she would pack up a box of books and bring them to a dealer, but while she was there she would spot some more books that had potential, and my Dad would find two or three books he couldn’t live without, and the upshot was that they would usually walk out with more books than they came in with.
So when the time came to clear out their house, we were faced with stacks of books that were too valuable to just give away but not valuable enough to interest dealers. We set aside a few to sell on E-bay, and we had several dealers come in and go over the rest. When they were done, we still had a lot of books left. Many bore little Post-It notes with Mom’s handwriting: “$15 on Amazon” or “hold on to this.” Going through the books was like having one last conversation with her. But I couldn’t ship all of them across the country, and we were starting to run out of time.
We ended up giving a lot of the books to Goodwill after all, reasoning that we would give someone else the thrill of finding a semi-valuable book in a pile of Readers Digest Condensed Editions. But there were quite a few that I just couldn’t part with. I shipped seven or eight boxes to my home outside Boston, where today they nestle on my overcrowded shelves with all the other books that I found somewhere for a quarter and just couldn’t leave behind.
These are the books—Mom’s and mine—that will be featured under the “books” tag. Don’t bother breaking into my house to steal them—none are in good enough condition to be worth much. They’re just sort of interesting, at least to me.