Books: A Memoir by McMurtry Larry

Author:McMurtry, Larry [McMurtry, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

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BUYING BOOKS IN bulk—that is, buying real libraries containing, sometimes, thousands of books—is a special skill, near to alchemy. One looks, one guesses, the point being to make a bid you can live with and that the owner of the books will accept.

Some dealers simply don’t like to buy in bulk; some even prefer buying mostly or entirely from the trade. We like buying lots of books, all at once. Just today we bought a thousand, sight unseen, from a dealer we trust.

Not since buying the general stock of the Larry Edmunds bookshop in the sixties had I had to estimate what to pay for a mixed lot of books. (Indeed, I didn’t even have to do this with Larry Edmunds because Milt Luboviski told me what he’d take and I accepted his figure immediately.)

Hartley Sanders’s books, in College Park, was the first time I had been faced with an enticing jumble for which I needed to come up with an offer. That was not especially hard: we had $1,500 in the bank, and $1,500 was my bid.

To my great relief the offer was immediately accepted. After all, I had shown up. But for luck, Capitol Hill Books would have shown up and probably bid higher, though maybe not.

In fact Hartley Sanders’s descendants were tired of having the books on the floor, and probably would have taken less had less been offered.

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