Plain Brown Wrapper Book Club

I love to find advertising material and ephemera that reveals some of the underground marketing of the sleaze paperback era.

These ink store stamps from “Rudy’s Adult Books, Redondo Beach, CA” advertised an adult book exchange service in which $1 would get a “book just like the one you have just finished” sent to you “in a plain wrapper.”

These stamps were inside a circulating copy of Sex in Prison (which I have to imagine was a disappointing title, most of the recipients being already over familiar with the practice).

The given address: 1505-1511 1/2 Aviation Blvd, Redondo Beach, CA 90278 shows a block of plain wrapper store fronts out of which Rudy might still be operating.

Find this book and more in my Vintage Paperbacks: Lesbian / Lesbiana catalog which has received a lot of recent additions (with more to come).

Bookselling Tools: Google Voice as Business Line

I don’t have an open shop and I conduct 99% of my business through email, so it doesn’t make sense for me to pay for a dedicated business line.

Unfortunately this means that for the few customers who NEED to call–and for a pricey book or ambiguous description, I can’t blame them–I either screen the unknown number and forget to play the message for days or I answer with my fuck-you-telemarketer voice, neither of which puts me on the best footing for a potential sale.

So when I heard about Google Voice I thought this could be a solution to my problem.

GVoice gives you a new Google-generated number (potentially matching your area code) which will forward calls to as many telephones as you choose to associate with it. It will also record voicemail as mp3, transcribe it to text (with hilarious results), and forward the message to your email.

In the settings you can tell GVoice to either display the number calling you (or the caller’s name if they’re in your phonebook) or your Google # for all incoming GVoice calls. I chose this second option and I added the number to my cell ID as “Hang Fire Books.”

Now I know when a call is business and I can use my confidence inspiring, tweed-jacket, aged-whiskey voice rather than my paranoid shut-in voice.

There are many interesting setting and customizations–including the ability to filter phone calls like spam!–and I’m just beginning to experiment with it but I’ve gone ahead and added/made visible the number on all the bookselling platforms I use.

GVoice is still in the limited, invite only stage (Thanks Shawn!) but I’m sure it will soon spread like kudzu. If you try using it as a biz line, let me know of any tricks or kinks you find.

What’ll You Have, Mac?

This great Times Square period piece–and tour of the Village Bookstore on Christopher Street–is part of a 1972 “documentary” entitled Pornography in New York that I turned up on a torrent site.

[Clip not work safe] [or Youtube safe apparently. Crap and I didn’t keep my edit…]

Back in the day you needed to frame your smut with cautionary or educational warning to get past the obscenity laws…which I guess is what I’m doing here.

Anyway it’s worth tracking down the full 65 minute doc, which features early footage of Cynthia Plaster Caster (I think, or at least someone following in her–ahem–footprints), a tour of the original Pleasure Chest (when it just had bondage gear tacked to wooden shingles), a body-painting studio, and some innocent interviews with Times Square denizens about their sex-lives and attitudes towards pornography.

Housing Works Geektacular Sale

So I paid the $50 preview fee and there’s no way I was publicizing this before I had my fill–but this weekend (today, NOW) Housing Works bookstore (Crosby Street, Below Houston, NYC) is having a massive Geektacular sale on Comics, Records and Vintage PBs.

5 for a dollar all you can carry away. I was very happy with the PB section, so much that I never made it to the comics or records.

Definitely worth checking out.

End-of-year Book Post-Mortems

The end-of-year recession round-ups brought a flurry of articles on the current state of bookselling. This one from the NYT was the most grating:

Bargain Hunting For Books and Feeling Sheepish About It

The author laments the Houghton Mifflin buying freeze, folding indies, and faltering chains, but states that we shouldn’t “blame this carnage on the recession or any of the usual suspects” (you know; the real estate bubble, bestseller driven publishing, superstore culture, mushrooming media distractions) but rather on the “networks of amateurs who sell books from their homes” and the people who buy from them.

There’s barely a fact in the article…and sadly I can’t rally the ones I want to counter him. Anybody know the percentage of book buyers who’ve bought a used title online? or the ratio of Amazon’s used versus new sales? Unless some of the other “amateurs” out there had a much better ’08 than me, I can’t imagine the numbers are all that formidable.

The author pays lip service to the fact that “resellers…offer a great service [and] this is a golden age for those in love with old-fashioned printed volumes” but he mostly treats this as fiddling on the deck of the Titanic and doesn’t explore the real game-changing possibilities of an easily accessible second hand market.

For example:

Of the last 10 sales I’ve made, you’d be lucky to find 2 of the titles at even the most well-stocked indy. The rest would have taken weeks/months of searching or (pre-internet) the acquisition of specialized mail order catalogs. In that time there’s a good chance that the buyer would have a) moved on or b) spent the extra cash on something else.

At least 2-3 of those books went to small towns that have probably NEVER had a bookstore, or at least nothing better than a Waldenbooks in the mall (I know these towns exist, I grew up in one).

Another couple went to distant lands (Sweden, Germany), markets that I would have had no access to previously (and believe me, I’ll be spending those Marks and Kroners locally).

Finally the used bookstore where I used to work depended on supplementary internet sales to keep it going (and I’ve heard this from many a brick-and-mortar dealer). Yes it was still staggering and has since died, but it was the doubled rent that killed it. The internet sales were the only things holding back the Verizon stores and the Duane Reades.

The most aggravating thing about the article is the author doesn’t differentiate between the penny/bulk dealers and those who provide a professional service and a satisfying and unique shopping experience. Just because he bought a book for a quarter and it showed up in a floppy bubble envelope doesn’t mean that you can’t do better.

Also the book he describes purchasing for $.25 was in fact between $4-5 bucks with shipping and was bought blind without a real idea of the condition or transit time. A used store could match this price–if the store’s used book buyer is aware of the price point they’re competing with and pays out accordingly–and maybe even mark it up a few bucks for the store ambiance and the chance to pre-inspect your purchase. If the title is too obscure for a brick-and-mortar store to keep in stock then it’s not a sale they would have had anyway and whining about online amateurs is just sour grapes….okay now Im officially rambling.

More links:
The Leonard Lopate Show commenting on the above Times article and the state of bookselling (mostly a love-letter to the Kindle).

A more thought-provoking–and insider–overview of bookselling in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, by John Schulman of the Caliban Book Shop (link via The Bibliophile Bullpen)

And lastly a peak inside the 54,000 foot warehouse of online dealer Wonder Books from the Washington Post (link via BookThink News)

Douglas & Foulis: Edinburgh Booksellers

I found three layers of booktickets from “Douglas & Foulis, Booksellers & Librarians, 9 Castle Street, Edinburgh” pasted to the cover of My Lady Castlemaine: A Life of Barbara Villiers (Hutchinson, 1912).

(top to bottom = newest to oldest)

I found this info on the establishment at the National Library of Scotland website:

This catalogue of Douglas & Foulis‘ circulating library gives a fascinating glimpse of the rules of the library, its charges (for one guinea a year, a person could borrow one book a month; for ten guineas, 30 books a month), and what books it contained. Through the supplementary ‘List of Books Added during 1913-1917’, it also gives a rare insight into reading tastes and the circulation of books during the First World War. It is easy to find out what books were published during this period: here we can see that books such as ‘Trench Pictures from France’ and ‘Russian Court Memoirs 1914-16’ were easily accessible to Edinburgh readers with five shillings (the lowest subscription) to spare.

Not sure how long the library lasted but I believe this is the address today.

Strange Adventures in Bookselling

Bookride is running a series of posts on bizarre bookbuying housecalls. The latest installment includes an account of browsing a collection during an orgy, and the purchase of Clockwork Orange firsts splashed with blood from the murdered previous owner.

Fascinating stuff. Though not quite of this caliber, I’ve had a few lulus but I usually have to bite my tongue (or sit on my hands) because telling all would sour a commercial relationship.

Maybe booksellers should trade and blog each others stories.

Mister Bookseller: Croatian Comic

Reader Mark Hurst (whose grand scheme I’m following by cleaning out my inbox right now) sent this link to an Eastern European comic strip about a magic bookseller (it must be the soul patch) who has every book in the world “except one”.

It’s well drawn and touching.

I’ve been responsible for a few of these magic book reunions in my time. It keeps the job interesting. Soul patch should have gouged him more on the price though

Art’s Magazines: Seattle Headshop

I found this label for Seattle’s “Art’s Magazines” pasted to the inside back cover of Lesbian Love by Marlene Longman (generally thought to be the work of Marion Zimmer Bradley) Nightstand, 1960.

Art claims that, “neither of the establishment newspapers would touch this ad with a ten foot pole” so he stuck these in the books. Art’s carried “Detectives, Westerns, Science Fiction… Girlie magazines, Danish Magazines from Copenhagen, Nudist Magazines, Bondage…and books on that ‘ole suppressed sex'”

Sound’s like a very well-stocked head shop. Anybody have pictures from insides Art’s or similar defunct 1960s smut shops?

How to Fit 6,000 books in a One-Bedroom; or, Apartment Therapy Can Suck It

For some twisted, masochistic reason–unknown to even ourselves–Alice and I decided to get our apartment in order and enter the Apartment Therapy “Small Cool 2008” contest.

Entry requires you push to all of your crap out of the way and prepare 5 photos (plus an essay) showing off how you’ve creatively utilized a limited space. Then you submit your home to the votes–and snarky comments–of a thousand Pottery Barn Fascists who want everything painted white and own NOTHING.

Before you get your chance to run this bourgeoisie gauntlet though, you have to make it past the regional editor…which we didn’t (though plenty of–and I’m being totally objective here–dull and ugly apartments did).

So for the edification of anyone whose last name happens to be Smith or Stevenson, here’s a quick tour of our apartment (aka: the Hang Fire Books Fortress of Solitude).

First the foyer where I store most of my inventory.

Regular readers of this blog will remember the exciting erection of the built-in bookcase saga from back in January. Skillfully cropped from those photos was the groaning and hideous aluminum shelving carried over from my old office. Thanks to some Ikea curtain sliders and sharp, Alice-selected fabric panels, those shelves are hidden now and my stock is protected from sunning and dust.

Here’s the living room.

The cool coffee table is one-of-a-kind from the estate of a cabinet maker whose house was filled with beautiful built-ins (that we should have taken if only to store them until they fit somewhere). The art is from a folio-sized catalog of antique textiles. The one on the right has all of these curious severed feet worked into the pattern. We busted that doorway through to the kitchen ourselves…very therapeutic.

Here’s the kitchen/dining room.

The hybrid aluminum + wooden table is from Craigslist, the china cabinet is from the street, Alice reupholstered the wooden school chairs, and the scrollwork thingy over the right-hand window is an architectural detail from another estate. My packing station is under the cutting board. When I ship books, I take off the board + skirt and get to work.

Here’s the living room from my office side.

I found this vintage wooden cubicle divider at the Housing Works thrift shop but it was over priced. It ended up on their auction page a few weeks later and I got it for the opening bid of $150. It took 1/2 a bottle of Murphy’s oil soap to clean the nicotine and depressing work lunches from it. The smoked glass window is nice and my monitor glows through it in a very soothing way. The creepy outsider art–visible over the top–was salvaged from this crazy crap shack. A recent addition is this red enamel clock from the 40s-50s.

Lastly the boo dwa.

The pirate trunk is a family heirloom, the dresser was a craigslist find (that I snatched up for $100 before like 1000 furniture dealers found it), the art is a vintage travel poster from Zermat Switzerland (that used to serve as my air conditioner before I could afford one), and a limited edition Eric Drooker poster from Blackout Books–an anarchist bookshop where Alice used to work.

That’s it for now. I just purchased a huge sign from an old tattoo parlor and some vintage Mexican wrestling movie posters. I’ll take a picture of that wall when I get everything framed and mounted.