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Another great place for lowcost, excellent new books
I'm a book collector, and so is my wife. She collected books before she met me, and I before I met her. My father and mother were both book collectors, too. The number of books they had got seriously out of hand because they divorced when I was very young and both continued collecting books at a rapid rate. When my father died, I sorted through his books in Massachusetts and sent boxes and boxes of what I regarded to be the choice ones to my home in California. When I added up the parcel post weight, it proved to be slightly over one ton. Yup, more than 2000 pounds ! I still collect books. My house is like a combination of the New York Public Library and a mansion filled with tunnels through stacks of books. Perhaps it isn't quite that bad, but I feel sorry for my wife or the executor of my estate after I drop dead. Since I am now almost seventy, I am hoping for another 15 good years of book collecting before I become confined to a wheelchair and spend my time drooling at the world. So where am I getting my books these days ? One of my greatest sources is an outfit called Daedalus Books. Although they do sell new, recently published books (at a discount), Daedalus is what's called a "remainder book company." And just what is this ? Suppose as a publisher you have published a book you think will be a hot seller, and you've printed 50,000 copies of it. As a year or so pass, you realize that you're selling fewer and fewer copies of this title every week. You have 4,273 copies all stored and stacked in a warehouse, but no huge purchase arrives to take the remaining volumes off your hands. The warehouse space costs money. Why should you be spending money to keep something that isn't selling enough to pull its own financial weight ? Why take the loss ? You have several choices. You could always sell the remaining 4,273 copies of this book for scrap paper. In this case, these books will just be chopped up and used to make more paper. Or, you can sell them to a remainder book company. A number of these exist in the United States. They sometimes bid on remainder stock, and whoever bids the highest for a title gets what's left of it. Whether Daedalus goes through a bidding process or whether they just have arrangements with publishers to keep a supply of certain overstocks automatically coming to them, I don't know. What I do know is that book lovers can find extraordinary bargains through Daedalus. Brand new books in excellent condition that originally would sell in a bookstore for $29.95 often sell at Daedalus for $5.98 or less. Their print catalog, which is sent out about six to eight times a year, always lists several hundred titles. Incidentally, Daedalus is a great place to buy children's books. The company always offers a lot of interesting titles. In the catalog, there are usually sections for novels, non-fiction, children's books, the arts, and other types of books. My prize purchase from Daedalus came one year when I was feeling VERY flush. I bought a complete set of the novels of Joseph Conrad in an edition with special watermarked paper, pages uncut, bound in Nigerian goatskin, with gold print for the outside titles. Originally the complete set sold for $5,000. Daedalus offered it for $1,000. I was REALLY flush that year ! Every so often I take a volume out from its bookcase and simply open it and look at it. To read it, I would have to cut the pages, which I will not do. Maybe some day I'll be able to sell the set for its original value and make a handsome profit. But it is really too handsome a set to sell. I do love the works of Joseph Conrad. I do read his novels, some of them over and over again. But I read a cheap edition put out in the 1940's, of which I also own a complete set. I guess that's what a crazy collector does. Daedalus has a web site: DaedalusBooks.com They're honest and reliable. I've bought books from themk for many years. |
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