Second-hand book dealing: how not to make money

“What did your parents do?”

I say, “My mother was a second-hand book dealer.”

“Did she have a little shop?”

No, she sold books by post in brown paper parcels tied up with string from various rented flats in Brighton. Books are heavy, so moving was always a bit of a struggle.

Her entry in the trade directory read “Established 1968. Private premises; postal business only. Very small stock second-hand and antiquarian books. Speciality: gardening. Catalogues on gardening: 4 a year.”

The Clique or Bookdealer?

Mum specialised in gardening books because there was a ‘gap in the market’ and because she could bear to part with them, unlike the theatre, fashion and ballet books she had tried first in 1966. Being reluctant to sell your stock is never a good business plan.

She was more at the “second-hand” end of the market than “antiquarian”. She subscribed to 2 trade papers, The Clique (which was as snooty as it sounds) and the young upstart, Bookdealer. She would read the ‘Books Wanted’ lists to make offers to prospective purchasers.

You can read more about this world at How we once searched for books.

Typing catalogues

Mum typed her own catalogues on stencils, then hand-turned the Getstener duplicator to create her catalogues. In 1969, she earned £19, 16 shillings and 7 pence (£291 now) from books.

She earned £482 (£7,018 now) from secretarial work, mostly typing catalogues for other bookdealers, including Fisher Nautical whose famously catty listings said things like “rare unsigned copy”.

Authors also asked her to type up manuscripts, where she sneakily corrected their spelling and grammar.

But her bread and butter was typing labels. She could do about 300 a day.

Jumble sales

As well as regular book-buying trips to Worthing, Hastings and Lewes, where she would ask for ‘bookseller’s discount’, Mum used to trawl the Brighton jumble sales on Saturdays for stock.

My first ‘Saturday job’ in 1979 was covering 74 jumble sales that Mum could not do. She would cover my admission fee and any purchase costs. If she sold a book I found, I would get a third of the profit. My best buy among the 40 or so Rose Annuals and Garden Book Club books I found was a Victorian tome on ‘Arboriculture’.

Mum would ask, “Was Fatty there?” He was a rival bookdealer who was usually at the front of queues. He would use his large frame to block off the book stall and scoop up all the good stuff in seconds.

People would complain about ‘dealers’ but I doubt anyone thought a teenage boy was a threat.

I made a ‘profit’ of £10.80p. I blew the proceeds on 122, mostly science fiction, books for myself, typically at 5p per paperback and 10p hardback, plus 3 collarless grandad shirts for 30p and 4 T-Rex albums for 40p!

Bookrunner

I bought my student reading lists from jumble sales and sold as a bookrunner to make extra money.

I got a first edition Diary of a Nobody for 10p. Years later, this caused a flurry in an antiquarian bookshop near Piccadilly until they discovered it was missing a single blank page! This made it unsaleable in their eyes, so I sold it in Cecil Court later. (The antiquarian book trade remains a mystery to me. Why is a book you can’t read with ‘uncut’ pages worth more than one you can?)

My best sale was an early Louis de Bernieres novel, which I bought in a reminder shop and sold to a Charing Cross Road shop for £350. When the buyer said “350”, I thought he was insulting me with “£3.50”. When I realised he meant £350, I was too stunned to say my usual, “I was hoping for a little more…”

Read Drif’s Guide and John Baxter’s A Pound of Paper for more about the world of bookrunners.

Bookfinder

Selling second-hand books was never a route to riches. Later Mum took a full-time secretarial job at The Church of England Children’s Society until they switched to computers. Mum decided to retire in 1990.

Another bookdealer offered to buy her customer list, built up over years of advertising in Garden News, but, resolutely unlucrative to the last, Mum refused to sell.

The Internet killed the business for Mum. Years later, she was bemoaning the fact that she had not been able to find a copy of Perch Hill by Adam Nicholson. While still on the phone, I typed this into Bookfinder.com and asked how many of the 28 copies available she would like?