price
The Olympia Book Fair has left us basically 'home alone' in the shop. Usually when some grubby gentleman comes in with a big bag full of second-hand books like Father Christmas and his sack, the boss will come upstairs to price them. I like to observe this short moment of bargain dealing, when trade is stripped away to its basics: goods, coins and face-to-face contact. Also, these people sometimes do bring in stuff that I want to keep for myself. Now that the bosses are away it gives us the chance to do the estimation. One boss returned and asked me to show him how I labeled the stock. Though I didn't remember how J separated them, I divided them into piles of four, two and one pounders. I generally give fiction higher points, book on sex gets one point and so do books with a lot of wear and tear. There was one hardback with an ugly, old American singer on the cover which I didn't have any high regard, but apparently it was the first one that got sold. Words of advice: coffee table books aren't worth as much as you think. In the case of literary criticism books, the low value ones are either written by Americans, or that the content is about the comparison between two writers. Not wanting to be an Anglophile, but that's rather funny and true?