Desperately Seeking Salem

When we moved to Salem, our stuff was parceled out into about 40 cardboard boxes. Twenty of these contained my book collection.

My poor husband. When we married, he never vowed to schlepp around a constantly expanding intellectual burden made physical in the form of a couple hundred hardbacks. And yet there he is, every two years ago, building his delicious biceps doing just that.

Yes, many are hardbacks. I often throw down for the real deal — because if you’re a writer, and you don’t buy an occasional hardback when you are really excited about a book, then you’re pretty much the biggest hypocrite around. Also, I’ve been known to forgo food so I can afford hardbacks in a former life. Buying hardbacks is one of my most well-established values.

Parting with books is difficult for me. The pain is born half of genetically inherited pack-rattedness, half of my belief in  stewardship over these very important things in my life.

But I have no problem getting rid of Malcom Gladwell’s Blink. It’s his worst book, and if you’re lucky, my friend Roric will tell you the story of Blink in the comments section here.

Yet in a world filled with Gladwell books, will Blink sell at the Book Bin, one of two Salem downtown bookstores?

I arrived at the Book Bin earlier this week with a paper bag filled with mostly paperbacks that I had either received through reveiwing assignments or picked up in my travels. Some I had read cover-to-cover, others… well, I don’t even know how they ended up in my house. (Chloe Does Yale? Seriously?).

But will the Book Bin book buyer, Craig,  take my discarded darlings?

Yes.

And no.

I sold about half of the books for a whopping $14 store credit. The other option would be $9 in cash. Since I’m a book junkie, I’m placing my bets on the future fix.

Here’s what sold:

Tom Perotta’s Joe College – worst book of his, loved Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher, hated this book.

Honor Moore’s The Bishop’s Daughter — slightly whiny memoir, in hardback, and very new. An easy sell.

Sandra Dallas’s Tallgrass — picked this up at the Cannon Beach bookstore because the publisher never responded to my request for a review copy. Didn’t really care for it.

What didn’t sell:

Gary Schteyngart’s Absurdistan– am guessing its obvious relevancy for our culture won’t fly in these tough times.

Jaspar Fforde’s The Eyre Affair — Craig said he already had this on the shelf.

Tara French’s In the Woods – Kind of surprised by this one, since it’s a bestseller and is frequently on the front tables at Powell’s, but my guess is that Craig thought he already had too many copies on the shelf. Good for him, it’s way overrated.

Sara Paretsky’s Fire Sale - Also already on the shelf.

Chloe Does Yale — Duh.

As for Malcolm Gladwell, well, do you really think that any bookseller is going to deny the chance to resell a book that has sold millions and gazillions and wazillions of copies? The world doesn’t care that I hated Blink. The world loves puffy-mopped New Yorker writers who can articulate our bizarre behaviors in well-documented prose.

You can pick your copy up at the Book Bin.

Tell them I sent you.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.