Identifying Collectible Books, the Wonder of Secondhand Bookstores, and the Time I Accidentally Scammed an Old Man
I WAS GOING to make a post about book collecting, in particular the difference between “book club editions” and “regular books.” To do that, I was going to use a couple of Jack Kerouac hardcovers I’ve had for a while. However, I soon realized that to talk about those books is to talk about where I got them, the old secondhand bookstore in my small hometown that I browsed for over twenty years, because the story of my book collecting is the story of that bookstore. Many of us have watched the withering of bookstores over the past couple of decades, and I suspect this is a story that many people can relate to.
And maybe learn a couple tidbits about book collecting along the way.
Also, I accidentally scammed an old man.
How to Spot Book Club Editions
As a bad amateur book collector, there are four broad, beginner’s hints I look for to determine if a book is, say, a first edition, maybe collectible, maybe even valuable. Most of the time you’re looking to distinguish between an original printing and a book club edition—which is a print run usually done by an outside publisher for mail order subscriptions, often in larger numbers than the original book, often in slightly poorer quality. Sometimes, the inside matter will be the same, which makes it tricky, but there’s a few key things to look for:
Does it have the dust jacket, and if so, does it have a price?
Look inside at the publishing information, usually for the line of 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7… The numbers indicate what edition it is. If it’s a 0 or 1, it’s a “first edition.”
Does the book have a headband? If it doesn’t, it’s more likely a book club edition, as it’s glued rather than stitched.
Is there a number on the bottom of the back dust jacket? If so, it’s usually a book club edition.
If there’s no number on the back dust jacket, check the last leaf inside and see if there’s a number written inside the fold. If it does, it’s likely a book club edition.
Account for infinite variation, and if possible, compare it carefully to a known book.
Sometimes, book club editions can be collectible by themselves, such as The Planet of the Apes, whose first edition was the book club edition, and not all books got published in hardcovers—the first edition of Neuromancer is a paperback. But most of the time book club editions are not sought after except maybe as “reader copies”—a book that you don’t mind unperfecting by actually reading it.
The Book Hollow
MY SMALL TOWN on the far east coast of Canada got its secondhand bookstore, the Book Hollow, when I was around fifteen in the early ‘90s. If I were anywhere downtown, I would always divert that way and browse through the racks. It was small, no more than fifteen by thirty feet, but as I was fifteen and hadn’t read anything, everything I found was new and amazing.
Thirty years later, I realize I had been buying at a great time for some really interesting books, like old sci-fi paperbacks from the 1950s and 1960s, and quirky covers from the 1970s. My bookshelves now, unlike a lot of photos of uniform bookshelves I see shared on reddit, is a motley arrangement of diverse sizes and colors from all eras.
You know the story of bookstores in the interim: people don’t read as much these days, and e-readers have yoinked most of the market for the mass market paperbacks that used to be bookstores’ bread and butter romance and mystery sales. Around the same time, Walmart heaved into town—on the outskirts to intentionally kill the downtown (No, really, that was an intentional strategy). The mall the Book Hollow was in slowly turned into a cafeteria, a law office, a call center, and a dollar store. Like the pith of an old tree, in the middle of it the Book Hollow remained.
In my twenties, I went roaming around western Canada, tree planting in B.C. and Alberta, and whenever I wandered home I would take a walk downtown to the Book Hollow to see what I could find. This went on until 2012, when I washed up back in town after a breakup—even when you’re in your early thirties, you can make dumb mistakes like moving to a new town with a partner way too early in a relationship. I ended up loitering for a couple years and met my now-wife. Meanwhile, I had started working from home as a freelance editor, and my trips to the Book Hollow became a welcome walkabout to clear my head and forget Microsoft Word existed.
This post about books will eventually get to the actual books, I swear. It’s not like one of those online recipes that ramble on forever without any point because Google ranks them by how long people stay on the page.
It wasn’t like the old days. There’d rarely be customers in the Book Hollow. I’d browse the SFF rack, which still had some good finds. The proprietor, Cal, would read magazines behind the glass counter, which now sold hockey cards and small knickknacks too. Every once in a while, someone would come by and have a chat. He didn’t purchase books from customers anymore, but boxes full of books sometimes sat by the counter where people had brought in donations.
I visited once a week. My book browsing to get out of the house turned into book rescuing. There were lots of old, neat books buried in that store, some unlike any I’ve ever seen. The little store smelled like a library. Books from every era cozied up next to one another. Stacks, three feet high on the floor, would shuffle around at night after closing. I’d free-climb to the tops of high shelves and find things I’d never seen before, and spelunk through the dark corners. I’d talk to Cal about my work, and about the hockey cards he had in his display—he was a Leafs’ fan, but nobody’s perfect. If I didn’t visit for a couple of weeks, Cal would say, “Hello, haven’t seen you in a while,” when I walked in, and sometimes he’d have a book he’d set aside that he thought I might like.
One time I took a walk down to the Book Hollow and there was a display in the window for an old book club edition of East of Eden, and I bought it for around thirty dollars.
Some dummy spilled tea on the bottom edge of this book a couple months ago. Also, that’s clearly James Dean on the cover from the 1955 movie.
Right away, Cal picked up the phone and called the store’s owner to tell her about it. It turns out the store was owned by his ex-wife and he still ran it, mostly for something to do. I did the calculation on how much rent the store was paying, and what it cost just to break even every day, and after that I made sure I never left the store without buying … some book … even if it was only a couple bucks, maybe a neat copy of an Asimov that I already owned, or an old racist colonial adventure like Prester John that used to be taught in schools. I started getting down on my hands and knees and moving aside piles that hadn’t been touched in twenty years.
Cal used to lament that he couldn’t get enough old cowboy books to sell to the guys working on the oil rigs a couple hours’ drive away, and how the Westerns those guys did buy never came back for him to sell them again. Meanwhile, when Cal wasn’t looking, a couple times I plopped a book I knew was popular out on the shelf by the door so people walking by could see it—the new 2011 biography of Steve Jobs that I found in the bottom of a donated box comes to mind.
One day I walked into the Book Hollow, and in the rarely-used display case by the door were two Jack Kerouac hardcovers, Lonesome Traveler, and Desolation Angels.
I used to love Kerouac. I first read On the Road when I was fifteen, and went utterly teenage bonkers for his writing. It would be a cliché, but also an understatement to say that it had an effect on me and my life’s trajectory. I mean, I could perhaps draw a direct line from reading On the Road when I was fifteen to my then current predicament, seeing the woman I had broken off dating and moved home from I had first met in a tree planting camp in BC. In early high school, I used to carry my favorite quote from On the Road on a folded-up piece of paper in my back pocket, and I soon started hitchhiking to the hiking trails outside of town and hitchhiking back in the evenings, and would later hitchhike back and forth across the province to visit friends, or to my friend’s cabin.
I still love Kerouac’s writing, though now I sorta think it’s kinda like reading The Catcher in the Rye. It means one thing when you’re fifteen, another when you’re thirty, and I assume something else when you’re fifty. But this was the ‘90s, before people could find online communities to connect with. We had what we had. I had books—including lots of Beat literature I couldn’t buy anywhere near my small town, and I only knew about as they were the authors who the authors I enjoyed liked to read.
Of course I asked to see those Kerouac books in the Book Hollow window. Cal was waiting for me to ask. He handed them over, sorta eagerly, maybe kinda proud he had those in his shop. I think the sticker on each one was around seventy-five dollars.
They didn’t have a publisher’s price on the dust jacket because the dust jacket had been “price clipped.” Often, when people would, say, give books as presents, they would cut off the price as that’s what you do with presents—you don’t leave the price tag on a present, right? Sometimes, too, they would cut off the “book club edition” note so the person getting the book wouldn’t know they got it with their subscription.
To go along with that, both books had their front endpaper neatly removed. Like maybe someone had written a note or their name in the book, Happy Birthday, Billy, and later, when the book got donated to charity or someplace, they cut that off.
Lonesome Traveler had a number on the back, like this book club edition of Asimov’s The Robot Novels.
They had no headbands (comparison to a modern Kerouac book below), which I thought was the most conclusive, and both had a black residue stuck to the cover from an old style of protective book covering that had a black border to make the plastic more manageable (Click image to switch). After a while, it would break down, get gooey, and stain the book.
I was interested in Desolation Angels. I’d never seen a hard copy like it, and it was a book I used to really love. I told Cal these were probably book club editions, and pointed out how the front endpaper had been torn out. Right away he dropped the price in half, to around thirty dollars. Normally, getting an instant bargain like that would be great, but I wanted the Book Hollow to keep afloat, so I un-bargained myself. I believe I paid him forty or fifty dollars. The store didn’t take debit. That was what I had in my pocket.
I was happy with that. Cal was happy with that. He got on the phone to call his ex-wife.
I brought Desolation Angels home that night. I liked having it around. If only a BCE, it was still a nice old copy of a favorite book that meant something to me.
A few days later, I needed another break from work. I walked downtown, visited the ATM in the mall, and bought Lonesome Traveler, a lovely book, even if not one I had meshed with when I was younger.
Cal picked up the phone again. That sale made them break even on that day too.
I paid about a hundred bucks for both.
That was over ten years ago. I don’t really try to collect books anymore. For one, I’m a freelancer in a world where people think AI can write or edit books for them. For two, I live in a ding-dang apartment. I love books, but they are physical objects and I am too space-poor to take in so many strays. And for three, if there’s a bright center of the galaxy, I’m at the farthest point from it; old, cool books simply didn’t wash up on our shores—my province until recently had something like a functional literacy rate of around forty percent. I think it was number three that really convinced me those Kerouac books were book club editions. How else would they come to be in freakin’ Newfoundland?
The Book Hollow closed a few years ago. My wife and I moved away from our hometown in 2015. A couple years later, we went back for a visit. I walked down to the mall and found the store dark, closed, locked. Cal’s ex-wife, the owner, had died the previous spring, and thus the store was done.
Those two Kerouac books hold a prominent spot on our shelf above the couch. I shelve my books by what they mean to me, and they hold court alongside my Leguins, my Steinbecks, and the giant copy of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” I got when I was seventeen and still haven’t read.
As I noted above, I don’t read Kerouac religiously anymore—I started writing fantasy after going thirty-something bonkers for Leguin—but I have been re-reading through his catalogue. If you’re unfamiliar with Kerouac, all his books are based on his life, from boyhood to his time in the Merchant Marine in WWII, his road days, and on until his death in 1969. He didn’t believe in revising; what you read on the page is what came out when he sat down to write, which sometimes makes it super impressive. He wanted to make a big collection of all his books in chronological order, named The Duluoz Legend, as that was the name he used for himself in his books. Unfortunately, he died before he could make that happen. I’ve taken up that mantle anyway, reading them all in order, about one or two a year, starting with Visions of Gerard, and I guess eventually ending with Satori in Paris, or Big Sur, which was never a favorite of mine, as it was so cynical (unlike On the Road).
When I got to Desolation Angels in my reading, I took another look at the old “book club editions” I had on the shelf. I was actually going to use them in a very different newsletter post like this one, comparing book club editions to publisher editions, but no piece of writing survives the actual process of writing it. The books were suspiciously nice, too high of quality; on Lonesome Traveler there was the faint residue of an old price sticker, which struck me as odd for a book club edition. I decided I wanted more information, so I posted on the rare book subreddit on reddit. Normally, a question about editions will raise more uncertainty and opinions than a game of Clue. In this case, however, right away the first couple of responses were pretty definitive:
“Kerouac didn’t have any book club editions. Shame about the endpapers. Enjoy your nice books.”
Good news, yes?
I admit I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I can confirm I have two precious first editions that I cherish by an author I’ve enjoyed my entire life.
On the other hand, I feel like there’s partially an element of scamming an old man I was trying to help out.
In the end, I can only soften the blow by saying I had good intentions.
Mind you, I would trade them in today for another store in my town like the Book Hollow. Stores like that, they’re rare editions themselves now.
I’m going to continue my progress through Kerouac’s “Legend” by reading Desolation Angels next, and I’ll try not to imperfect it with my cherishing. Meanwhile, I suspect it’ll mean more as I’ll remember where it came from.
I hope you had a bookstore like the Book Hollow in your town too. Or if you’re really lucky, you still do.