Used Book Store Comments

Temporarily confusing the heck out of me, the estimable Nate Hoffelder included this article in his Morning Coffee post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/in-the-age-of-amazon-used-bookstores-are-making-an-unlikely-comeback/2015/12/26/06b20e48-abea-11e5-bff5-905b92f5f94b_story.html?utm_term=.4c33c899d32d

First, note the date. It is from Boxing Day 2015. There are some used book stores mentioned in it. Let's see how they are doing since then!

Reston's Used Book Shop still seems to be in business and doing well, beloved by many.

Riverby books -- closed upon the death of its owner, reopened by his son -- is open still, with another store, ongoing coverage by WaPo here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-little-neighborhood-bookstore-that-a-venture-capitalist-would-love/2017/06/23/e6ad1e5e-569b-11e7-b38e-35fd8e0c288f_story.html?utm_term=.57939e3d49e3

Walls of Books on Georgia Ave -- recently opened in the article form 2015 -- seems to be doing okay.

Wonder Book and Video seems to be de-emphasizing the video, and is now emphasizing its recycling book initiative, but is generally a going concern.

Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill is also quoted; they are also still around.

In the spirit of Burying the Lede, here is what caught my eye:

"Paperbacks, for instance, are bought at 10 percent of their original price, then sold for half the cover price."

This business gem is unattributed.

Half Price Books has always been somewhat cagey about what they pay, and how they decide what to buy and what they refuse or will take to pulp. And used book stores in the past (dunno about now) often would offer more in store credit than in cash. But "buy for a quarter; sell for half" was the normal operating procedure for paperbacks (which is what this is about) from when I first started paying attention in the late 1970s / early 1980s to when I really quit having to worry about how much I spent on books in the late 1990s.

Buy for _10%_. Wow. Honestly, I'm surprised it is as high as that. But still.

Shredding Financial Paperwork: A Few Observations

Some years ago, I decided I didn't want the ugly metal filing cabinets around any more. I failed. I failed because they didn't belong to me, and most of what was in them didn't belong to me. I did succeed in banishing them to the unfinished space, but I regard the whole fiasco as ... well, a fiasco.

In the course of getting my stuff out of the ugly metal filing cabinets and/or out of deteriorating bankers boxes from the 1980s or thereabouts, I wound up creating some caskets of paperwork. Some of the contents of the caskets was financial paperwork. I knew when I created these caskets that they were that: containers for the dead. And recently, one of these containers over flowed and I decided that as long as I was decluttering, I might as well take a poke at that.

One of the first steps I took was to go through a bunch of particularly bulky financial paperwork which is especially useless and just pre-emptively put it, unexamined, into the recycling bin. I sort of filled the recycling bin with this sort of thing. And that cleared up enough space I could have just ignored the rest. But I thought, what the heck. I'm here anyway. So I started reading some of the less bulky items to see what they were like. After I read some of them, I had a _very_ clear idea of whether any of it was worth saving (answer: absolutely not). So a few more cubic inches went into the recycling. The bulky and the not so bulky both had the virtue of No Account Numbers Or Addresses on them. Yay! No shredding required. The rest of the casket, not so much.

I starting to really get a handle on how much it takes to get the Staples brand shredder to overheat. And this -- in conjunction with the massive volume of paperwork cranked out by brokerage houses in the pre-bust 2000s -- is why the paperwork is in a casket instead of cross-cut and bagged and in a landfill somewhere.

But you know, I have things I can do in between shredding bouts while waiting for this thing to cool off again. I may actually get through the backlog.