Satnrose:
Last Saturday a customer came in complaining about all the bookdealers and self-proclaimed eBayers at a local FOL sale who were sweeping away armloads of books that they loudly proclaimed they'd be selling for big bucks online.
I'd forgotten about the sale, don't get out of the store too much anymore, but thanks to our customer's reminder I arrived at the sale forty-five minutes before it closed. I asked the FOL staff how the sale had been and they said it had never been busier, that they'd run out of new books to put out two hours after they opened the first day. "Everybody wants to be a bookseller," said one FOL staffer who claimed that it seemed to her every other buyer was talking about selling on eBay.
So, I looked around, and bought a whopping eleven dollars worth of books, among them: a book on solar heating that last sold for $85, three on Software Quality Assurance which combined last sold for $280, an inscribed first edition of Killy by Donald Westlake, an inscribed Too Funny To Be President by Mo Udall, a Frank Capra autobiography first, some civil war biographies, and, among too many others to name, a stack of philosophy hardcovers by such minor figures as Spinoza, Skinner, Schopenhauer, Kant and Maritain.
It's too early to tell how any of these books will do once they're listed but I was more than surprised to find so many books of such potential value at the very end of a two-day sale ... especially after a throng of "booksellers" had marched through.