John Dunning's Cliff Janeway novels introduced many people to the world of the professional bookscout, a real calling minimally explored by the author, one that is nonetheless frequently peopled by true characters who would be right at home in a variety of midnight fiction.

What Is A Bookscout?

Anyone can be a bookscout, which in turn, despite the occasional glaring front page story, is a mostly honorable profession. There have been bookscouts every minute as long as there have been bookstores. For many people the attractions of bookscouting include setting their own hours, working as much or as little as suits them, and enjoying many more rewards than risks because their operational costs can be minimal. Whether its practitioners pursue it as a pastime or an occupation, the thrill for most bookscouts is the chase, the find, the hope that the next book they suspect may be worth something may in fact really be worth something.

One question we've been asked for decades is what it takes to be a bookscout, or, what level of book knowledge is required to be a successful bookscout.

Naturally, the more a person knows and the harder that person works, the greater the odds are for success; but, we've known bookscouts who were walking bibliographies, encyclopedic in their knowledge of publishing arcana, who were no more successful than those to whom the difference between a hardcover and a mass market paperback will simply never quite register. What they share in common is that when they bring us desirable books, we give them money. Those who are most successful have mastered the art of finding books that are profitably desirable.

Assessing Desirability

Overall, a book's desirability is what drives value. Only a couple criteria must be met for a book to be considered desirable: it must be wanted in the condition it's in.

What makes a book wanted? There are several components of what we'll call wantedness, including such details beyond author and title as the quality and composition of a book's binding, its edition and printing, its scarcity, the specificity of its subject matter, its uniqueness in its field, and even the cache of the publisher. When all of these factors align, a book may be highly desirable. When a book has very few wantedness attributes, it will have correspondingly little desirability.

Let us now speak of "old." While age may play a part in the Gestalt of desirability, it also may not. What we've come to find so often since the mid-1990s is that many older books published before 1900, even pre-Victorian era books, aren't as scarce as many booksellers once presumed. In fact, so many older books are now, thanks to the internet, so unexpectedly common as to have little or even no value; there are just too many of them out there. Further, no matter how old a book may be, if no one wants to read or own it, it's publishing date alone is not enough to create desirability.

Condition is another often-critical component of desirability. Often, the better condition a book is in, the better its odds of being desirable. Yet, there is a kind of reverse saleability ratio of condition-to-scarcity. The scarcer a book is, the less of a detriment its condition is; while the more plentiful a book is, the more important its condition is. In other words, even if a book is disbound, if it's a one-of-a-kind on a subject of high interest, it will most likely be found desirable. Conversely, no one's going to buy a POOR copy of a book that's suddenly available in VERY FINE for pennies because the title is over-represented on the market.

A book for which we can offer decent money is going to have a high desirability factor, meaning (again) it's a book that someone might want in the condition it's in.

Bookscouts We Have Known

When I clerked in a bookstore in the early 1960s, a tweedy gent with a walking stick, a suitcase and a baffling accent came into the store about every three months. He'd announce himself as "Reggie the Bookscout," hand over his business card which said exactly that, open his plushly-lined case and display two rows of silk-wrapped books, all of which he seemed to know by heart. It was a ritual, as if each were the first time he'd ever walked into the store.

Although I can't remember the bookstore owner ever buying anything from Reggie, they were always glad to see one another. As a treat for my birthday, I went to lunch with them once and Reggie told me the story of how he'd become a bookscout.

Born in England, he'd been wounded in the Great War; he met his future wife, Beth, an American nurse, while he was convalescing; they moved to New Orleans where he studied law, working part-time in a library; and he and Beth accidentally, almost magically, discovered great joy in sharing book finds with one another. Together they began attending sales, auctions and fairs all over the country, truly delighting one another. When his Beth passed away, he retired from the law, hit the road, traveled the US and Canada buying and selling books along the way. He finished his story, nodding at my employer, and saying something like, "Except to him, whom I've never been able to tempt with me humble wares."

My boss rolled his eyes and went into a whole drama about Reggie confusing him with a rich man, the only sort of person who could afford marbled calf this and Kempis that, and how Reggie must have had books of more value in his suitcase than he did in his whole store.

My first experience with someone in that line, I remember thinking that being a bookscout must be about the most glamorous calling a person could pursue, like being a jewel thief without the dishonesty. Of course, I'd meet many more bookscouts in the years that followed, and I learned it wasn't so much the calling that was so captivating. It was how Reggie the Bookscout practiced it that held such poetry.

* * * * *

One of our most enduring bookscouts is homeless by choice and on his first trip into the store he was tagged Shifty McBookthief by one of our staff. I found it hard to disagree as Shifty seemed always to be trying to look over his shoulder only without moving his head, the kind of furtive little man who doesn't look at home out in the daylight. The first few times he came in I'd look at him and just have to ask if the books he brought in were hot. He resented this so angrily I could tell that he'd give anything to take a swing at me. I could see it in his eyes that if there had been any way for him to launch himself at me over the counter and still sell his books to us, he'd have done so, maybe even if it meant having to take a punching-the-owner discount.

But then he learned that another bookscout who comes in almost daily is a police officer and he became a little more open about how and where he found the at times amazing number of books he'd bring to us. Iowa has a bottle deposit law, meaning cans and bottles are redeemable for five or ten cents apiece. Shifty is a dumpster diver, a can man, smart enough to branch out when he'd find other things he might be able to sell. Dumpsters in Iowa City are astonishingly lucrative for can men and recyclers of almost every variety, especially at the end or Spring semester, and at lease-change, for most usually the last week of July/first week of August.

After his first ten years of selling us books, we did a little math. Not wanting to violate any confidences, let's just say that we have never paid him less than $1,500 a year for his finds. He's done better lately. Further to his credit, books are only in fourth place in his recycling income.

By the way, we'd known him several months before Shifty admitted he'd broken his glasses; knowing he couldn't afford a new pair, he just went without. I'll never forget the look on his face when he tried on a spare pair of drugstore reading glasses here and could see again without having to squint and constantly shift focus. He was a new man. No one who's met him recently can figure out how he got his nickname.

* * * * *

Another bookscout from whom we'd like to buy more, but who kind of gets in her own way, is newly divorced and beautiful. She used to buy books from us to decorate the homes of her clients, friends and family. Due to the change in her marital status, she's now out almost every night, kept busy by well-meaning friends so she won't be lonely. No matter whose home she's in, she apparently tells her hosts that it's time they updated their book collections, or at least did some weeding. She has good instincts about the discardables, which she dutifully brings us as if we'd be thrilled to buy the discredited, de-jacketed and damaged drek that other people are happier without. Yet, this is a business relationship with potential. She's already bringing in lots of books. Now all we have to do is encourage her to bring in the occasional volume possessing resale potential.

* * * * *

Another is an estate attorney who knows what a book is but has never owned one since passing the bar. He has nearly a photographic memory and can describe to us a wall full of books in some dead person's house as clearly as if we were looking at photographs of them. He's a legacy, knows everyone who's anyone in town. We have agreed to make an offer on every lot he's told us about. He thinks our appetite for acquisition is mysterious and asks us without fail every time we see him, "What are you going to do with even more books?"

* * * * *

Another owns a tiny antique shop about an hour away. She has amazing energy, is constantly on the move, and hits every estate, garage and yard sale within reach of her remarkable antennae. She's what we call in the trade a cleaner, someone who offers due to the simple kindness of her nature to help the holders of estate sales get rid of things that aren't likely to sell, or are just cluttering up the place. To her, this often means books, which in fact makes us wonder what sort of tragic and/or comic episode in her life caused her to grow up considering books to be this kind of curse, or at least nuisance. It's hard to get her to hold still. We have to speak to her in very short sentences. We do a lot of "this, not this" and let her hold the sort of books we most want to buy. It doesn't work. I've tried to tell her what we can and can't sell, wasting every single moment of the effort, until I wised up. This is the way she sees us, as that place to put books, and I'm not ever going to change her mind. And so she brings us whole vans full of books, usually for about five bucks a box, and so far there's always been a nugget or two buried inside that make the digging, and mountainous recycling, worthwhile.

* * * * *

Because we are widely known to buy used books, we run into some of the same characters as does your average wrong-side-of-the-tracks pawnshop. Call them sketchy, suspicious or sociopathic, the dishonest variety of bookscouts, or thieves, no longer shock us. Parting the curtain on what is often presumed to be a quiet and contemplative business, let us mention some of the thieves we have known, those who have stolen from us, or tried to, and those who have brought us stolen goods, or tried to. These would be the bad examples of bookscouting.

The Grab-And-Scoot Number One - Built on sloping land our store has two floors, the street level, and a walk-out basement. We'd been juggling customers and yard work one day, and seeing that it was about to rain, I welcomed a young man to the store, said I'd be right back and hurried out the downstairs door to put some tools away. Taking a moment to survey my work, I climbed the little hill alongside the building and re-entered the store at street level, astonishing the young man who was just then sprinting out the front door. I'm no offensive lineman, but at six feet tall and safely over two hundred pounds, guys who are half a foot shorter and weigh a buck and a quarter tend to bounce off of me. Finding himself once again in the store, lying on his back, the wind mostly knocked out of him, me looming over him from which vantage I must have looked mostly nostrils, he had just enough breath to keep repeating, "Please don't hurt me," and "I'll never do it again!" He'd tried to swipe two inconsequential International Collectors Library Editions that he'd hoped to sell elsewhere. The conversation that followed included properly assessing value before committing to an acquisition.

The Grab-And-Scoot Number Two - A hoodie-wearing fellow in a shabby jacket stopped just inside the front door, dropped beneath my eyeline and made enough noise with his belongings to make me wonder. I walked around the counter and to the end of the aisle blocking my view, and caught him stuffing books into a backpack in the sort of frenzy that gives the drunk and drugged such a bad name. Right there by the front door we only keep mass market paperbacks that we can afford to lose but there has to be a limit, right? I punched 911 on my cell phone but spoke in simple declarative sentences only to the busy shoplifter. "Looks like you're stealing books from The Book Shopon South Dubuque Street." The police dispatcher put it together. "What are you going to do with all those books?" Perhaps because his bag was nearly full and he must have concluded the heist was proceeding wonderfully, he explained that a second-hand store bought every paperback he brought in for a dime apiece, no questions asked. The police arrived before the guy could figure out how to open the front door. The second-hand store with the now questionable reputation claims it has altered their buying policies.

The Happy-Girl-Team - Two darling young women came in all bubbly and seemingly thrilled to have found our little store. Chatting excitedly to me and one another in a non-stop flurry that just seemed odd, they began amassing a couple stacks of especially cheap books on the counter, about which one or the other wanted to cheerfully haggle, as if our standard discounts were cute but flexible. I'd managed to fill four bags with about twelve dollars' worth of undistinguished books amid all their happy gabble when they suddenly noticed the time, exclaimed how late they were, and began to dash. Their scheme broke down when I came from behind the counter to help them carry their purchases, one bag of which I hadn't let go. There by the front door were four other bags, all of them filled with higher-end volumes, not one of which I'd rung up for them. Their act hadn't been bad. While one of them kept me busy with compliments and finger-in-cheek talk of discounts, the other had been bagging fairly valuable titles that they intended to sell on eBay. It's an old swindle, this diversionary tactic, and it's almost painful to watch when you know what's happening.

What's In A Name - Picture a middle-aged pug, a Harlem sparring partner now all washed up, his eyes like Marty Feldman's, who can't string together six words in English without the sense-nullifying padding of likes and you-knows, who wants you to believe A) he's in med school, and B) he no longer needs his as new textbooks even though the semester's just begun because he "memzerize 'em," every single one. He has over $800.00 of texts. I convince him we'll have to research them and consult our finances before I can offer him a fair price. We create a standard appraisal receipt, noting his name, Jim Roberts, and tell him to come back in an hour. I then call a University police officer who comes right over with stolen items reports only a few hours old that match Jim's books. In he staggers a couple hours later, having forgotten exactly where he'd last seen us, wanting his money for the stolen books. When the policeman, posing as one of our staff, asks for his name, he can't remember it. We watch him try but he can't remember his name. It's hard not to help him, not to point at the receipt we gave him, sticking out of his shirt pocket. He decides his name might sound like John Ratsomething, and assures us we'll know which books he brought in because, "they be the, you know, heavy ones, from, you know, like, the school I goes to." As we understood it, the police planned to impress upon Jim/John that stealing was wrong, that he wasn't very good at it, and that he should look in to a new career. We didn't expect to see him again. Nonetheless, the next day, Jim/John came back into the store with at least fifty pounds of almost as new chemistry and math books. Before he'd even unpacked them all, I warned him that we never buy from thieves and reminded him what happened to him not that many hours ago in this very same store. "Oh," he said, "was that, like, you?" Note: virtually all serial textbook thieves are caught because they try to sell the stolen items to stores like The Book Shop at the wrong time of year.

Non-Readers - Jimmy Sweets even showed us his ID when he brought in a brand new set of leatherbound Mark Twain volumes, each bearing a gift inscription "From Aunt Ginny and Uncle Max - To our favorite grad student, Michael. May 2004." It was still May 2004, the tenth to be exact. I was willing to believe that sometimes things aren't exactly as they appear, so said, "This is a wonderful set. Just get these books?" Jimmy said, "Well, I guess." I scratched behind my ear and must have made a face. "What's wrong," Jimmy said. "Is your middle name Michael?" I asked. "I don't know," he said, sighing. I asked him who gave him the books. "I … don't know," he said, as if surrendering to a plague of fatigue. I asked him if he could tell me where he got them. "I don't …." he said, unable to finish now exhausted by the whole subject. He left very slowly.

Just Bad Luck - If you've ever wondered what you'd do should the police storm into your workplace and order everyone present to put up their hands, the answer is you put up your hands. This knowledge came courtesy of the Millers, who rent out a neighboring house to college students. The Millers own home along the Iowa River was damaged in the terrible flooding of 2008. With help from their large family, they had moved everything from the downstairs of their home to a safe storage facility prior to the flooding, except for several paintings and a dozen cartons of older books on Iowa history that were moved to the loft above their garage. When the waters receded several days later, the Millers discovered the books and paintings had been stolen. That same day, pulling up next door to visit their tenants, they noticed in the bed of a pickup parked in front of our store several paintings that looked awfully familiar. Thus it came to pass a few minutes later, as we were preparing an appraisal receipt for several cartons of promising older books on Iowa history for a couple young men who sure experienced a range of emotions in a very short time, that we learned about the hands-up thing.

Mistakes Were Made - An angry young man came into the store, slammed a stack of brightly colored Korean anime softcovers on the counter, and growled, "You can have all six for a hundred dollars each, not a dollar less." Not exactly leaping at his generous offer as he had apparently thought we surely must, he turned the books over and pointed at their pricing. "Look, they cost a thousand dollars each. How much do you need to make?" he shouted, managing to mistake both 10,000 for only 1,000, and Korean Won for US Dollars. He'd never heard of a Won which didn't matter in the slightest because he was damned sure those were a whole lot of zeros and that equaled big money. Explaining that ten thousand Won was about nine bucks, he narrowed his eyes, put his hand in his coat pocket as if it were a gun, and gave up on the whole thing. Swearing like a hot tar roofer on a sunny Summer's day, he left the store muttering, "They weren't even worth stealing then!"

* * * * *

Then there are the bookscouts who use The Book Shop as one of their sources. These are the unusually savvy bookscouts who often search only a few distinct categories, or carry a list of quite specific books in which they're interested, and they often capitalize on our inevitable pricing mistakes. I do not resent this. If my research has been faulty, well, either they have buyers we don't, or I'll just have learned something.

* * * * *

I usually sit down for coffee with the people who come to us regularly to sell books. We discuss what The Book Shop is most comfortable buying and selling, and therefore what they can bring in that will make them the most money. We always remind them that they owe it to themselves to check around with the other stores that buy books to keep us honest.

Who's our best bookscout? It's a toss-up between the policeman who spots books curbside and goes back for them after work, and the real estate attorney who's probably in fifty different peoples' homes every month. These guys get around, they meet a lot of people, and they have books on the brain.

And that's the secret for all of the bookscouts who sell to us in significant quantities. Books are in their blood. They are tuned to the scent of books. They never stop looking. They go where the books are.

Which brings us to perhaps the cleverest bookscout we know. He parks his book truck outside the university bookstore during their textbook buy-back days. He spots students who are so hellishly mad at the money they were offered by the store, they'd rather throw their books away than give the store the satisfaction of buying their books for so little. Textbooks often cost a hundred dollars and more and to be offered four or five dollars at semester's end is insulting. The wily bookscout knows this. He has grown so adept at empathizing, at the charming hucksterism practiced by only the very best carnies, he acquires the students' books for little or nothing. And then he sells them at The Book Shop for a ton. His completely transparent bookscout secret to success? Go where the books are.

What Most Bookscouts Want To Know - Likely Sources

How hard do you, the bookscout, want to work? If you're only going to dabble, tell your friends and family you're interested in books and check the want ads, just like everyone else who flirts with the trade.

If you're ambitious, move beyond newspaper ads, and become a student of every kind of shopper and supermarket advertiser you can find. Ask yourself where a person might post a sign that they have books for sale, or to give away, perhaps because they're moving: laundromats, rental offices, neighborhood cafes, anywhere a do-it-yourself sign might be hung.

Remember that when people move, they are also likely to downsize or reduce the volume of their possessions, and that books being heavy is one reason they are often left behind.

Who moves most? Who is most likely not to move all their possessions? The answer to both questions is college students. So be aware of where college students live, of when semesters end, and be ready to be of assistance finding new homes for unwanted books.

Get to know Craigslist and Freecycle, and probably a zillion other websites. Anytime there's an ad for books, be the first to pounce. You don't have to make an offer. You may only want people to read your response, indicating what sort of books you're interested in, and what you're likely to offer if certain sorts of books are available.

Write to realtors and estate attorneys. Announce that you have an interest in acquiring books, and when the collection is worth it, you offer a commission.

Of course, you'll want to be familiar with the new crop of book sale finder websites. There used to be only one truly great site but for good or ill, there are now many that a bookscout will want to haunt frequently. The best ones will have notices of all the library book sales, church and other charity book sales, fundraising book sales, school and neighborhood book sales you should not just already know about, but have etched in your memory. By the way, many local newspapers now have online versions which are searchable: get used to plugging book, booksale, and book sale into the search box every day or two for results you wouldn't find any other way.

eBay is searchable by location. Learn how to search for auctions of collections in your area, or any area you plan to visit. One of the downsides to internet transactions is the cost of shipping. You can avoid this if you only bid on auctions where you can provide the transportation.

Perhaps the most unexpected source of books may be from your local used bookstore, perhaps even the very bookstore where you sell most of your finds. Ask if they've received books that have yet to be shelved, or for which they don't have room, or are about to be recycled. The truth of the bookstore business is that we cannot make any money offering books beneath a certain dollar amount that, of course, varies from one store to another. What do we do with all the books that we feel can't be sold for that required amount? It wouldn't hurt you to find out, especially as someone such as yourself might be able to put several of these lower dollar books into an attractive lot.

What Does A Bookscout Earn

Expect to be paid somewhere between ten percent and fifty percent of the price the bookseller plans to charge for the books you sell to him or her. If you bring in a decent mass market paperback that the bookseller will price at a dollar, you may not be offered more than ten cents. If, however, you bring in a highly collectible item that the bookseller intends to sell for a hundred dollars, it's not unreasonable to expect a larger percentage, somewhere between twenty-five and fifty percent. It's appropriate to expect even more when a book is priced in the stratosphere.

Every bookseller is going to have his or her own buying strategies. Booksellers all have unique experiences with specific titles and it will always be a judgment call how much capital a bookseller is willing to tie up in new inventory. It may help to remember that just because a bookseller buys a book from you doesn't mean he or she is guaranteed of then selling it. If merely offering a book for sale were the same as selling it, there would be a whole bunch more booksellers.

Some booksellers couldn't tell you how they arrived at the selling price for a certain book if their lives depended on it. Their process is too Zen-like for that. The same is true for what many booksellers offer to pay for the books brought to them by bookscouts. There isn't exactly a right and wrong. If these more or less standard percentages discussed above seem insufficient, if you're unhappy with the amount you've been offered, it may be time to move from bookscouting to bookselling.

Advice

If you're sold on being a bookscout, do yourself enough of a favor to at least occasionally check the market yourself for specific books you intend to sell. There are many very easy to use bookselling websites available these days including meta search engines that allow author/title/publisher/edition/ISBN searches simultaneously across several venues.

Be informed.

Trust but verify.

Be prepared.

If you're going to be in the business, treat yourself fairly.

Should you look up a book that's uniformly priced at fifty dollars and the bookseller is only offering you five for it, ask why. (The reason may not be sinister. The bookseller may already hold ten copies of the same printing that haven't sold at any price.) Don't allow yourself to be horrified by differences between what you were paid versus the bookseller's asking price for the same book.

The best bookscouts work hard to be informed.

If you're going to be a bookscout, beware the danger of filling all available space with books that you'll never be able to sell and/or don't want to read. A bookscout's job is to sell books, not store them.

Advice Plus A Little History

Since the very first books began to appear about five thousand years ago, nothing has reshaped the enterprise of bookselling as profoundly as the internet.

Until the mid-1990s if booksellers wanted to attract distance sales (sales to persons who did not enter the premises), they had to advertise in magazines or issue self-produced catalogs, expensive undertakings that neither guaranteed results nor pleased potential buyers who tried to buy books that were already purchased.

As booksellers discovered the internet and began listing their inventory online, book buyers discovered that the items on their want lists were no longer illusive. A remarkable period of buying and selling ensued as word about this wonderful development spread and ever-increasing numbers of buyers and sellers flocked to the world wide web, satisfying their want lists as never before. Naturally, the frenzied pace couldn't be sustained. By 2000, pioneering online generalist booksellers were almost universally reporting reduced sales.

During this five-year boom, thousands of brick-and-mortar booksellers in the US re-evaluated their strategies and many, thinking the internet boom would last forever, closed their doors in favor of selling online. Other long-time booksellers with open shops failed to adapt in any measure to online marketing, and if and when their in-store sales dropped even slightly, they closed shop. The result is that there are far fewer physical bookstores across the country in 2010 than there were in 1995.

The flipside of this somber development is that for roughly ten years, from 1995 through 2005, the number of online booksellers soared beyond all reason. Anyone with computer access and a couple books on the nightstand was suddenly a bookseller. Not surprisingly, a fairly venerable profession began to suffer the taint of the dilettante, customer service nightmares made headlines, and because so many of these newcomers began a pricing race-to-the-bottom, they couldn't help but carve their own tombstones. As a result, although there are still a poxful of pretenders who make not the slightest effort to represent their wares online as a bookseller should, there are fewer of them than there once were. Hardly a week goes by when we don't hear from a kitchen-tablist looking to leave the business, which we can't help but celebrate as mostly terrific news.

For career bookscouts, these trends ought to indicate that there may be a fairly urgent need to adapt to the new bookselling climate. There simply aren't as many bookstores to buy your finds as there used to be. The remaining bookstores are often swamped with new acquisitions and many if not most of them, perhaps for the first time in their histories, are restricting their purchases.

Thanks to the internet, anyone with access can see at any moment how many copies of a specific title are available. We now know almost to a certainty, which books are so plentiful as not to be worth listing on any of the online venues, from which so many booksellers now derive at least a part of their income. So, unless they're brand new and would enhance a bookseller's shelves, common books have no place in a bookscout's inventory because they cannot be resold at anything resembling a profit.

Except, there is an exception.

The Part We Hope You've Been Waiting For

As we have for many years, we encourage those bookscouts with good instincts (and a better work ethic) to consider taking the next step. Selling online has never been easier than it is today. While the workload increases, packaging and shipping is a necessary part of every sale, the income also increases. There are bookselling websites that charge monthly fees which can become overbearing when sales are down, but there are also websites that only charge a bookseller a per-sale fee no matter how many books might be listed.

Think about growing. Think about maturing. You don't need to jump in over your head. Instead, consider offering a few of your better finds online by yourself. You may find the proceeds altogether more lucrative. You may even find that you can offer, sell, and ship fairly common books at enough of a profit to please you.

Conclusion

Take heart. Your calling is safe.

Keep it up, as long as the pursuit brings you both pleasure and the amount of money that makes it worth your while.

Opportunities abound for bookscouts as never before. It's easier to find books than ever.

Selling your finds to bookstores may be less certain than in years gone by but selling directly to the book reader/book collector is a process almost anyone can master, usually profitably.