Old Books Never Die; they Just Get Donated Somewhere To Torment The Living

Photo I took of Ken Sander's Rare Books in Salt Lake City Utah. After decades of inhaling the smell of toxic old books, I am no longer a fan. Sadly, shortly after I took this photo, the store lost its fight against developers and had to move.

 

I have spent so much time around old books that I'm not too fond of the smell. As a librarian in the tribal community of Standing Rock for almost two decades, people would send me literal truckloads of old books, thinking it would help the people on the reservation when I was mostly left to deal with piles of primarily useless, stinky books.

 

Several times a year, I would get offers from people to donate anything from a handful of boxes to truckloads of old books. I would often accept donations to get the few items we could use since our budget for materials was limited. I would sort through to find the few gems that could be sold to support the library or put into the collection, while I would give the rest to the community and a particular segment would be discarded entirely. Books, as complex amalgams of disparate and toxic compounds, are not easily recycled. 

 

There is nothing quite like old books. Long after people would have thrown away something of similar age and condition, they hang onto old sets of encyclopedias and crumbly paperbacks with mold on them. Part of it is that a set of encyclopedias or other old books look good on the shelf. Just look at the pandemic trend of putting shelves of books behind them during interviews and Zoom calls.

 

 I keep an old 2003 Britannica set because of its beauty and as an homage to the lost world when it was the Google of its day. First published in 1768, before the United States was even a nation and stopping publication of the print edition in 2010, its 240 year history act as good bookends for the "high age" of print dominance. It is hard to believe that only a few years ago, we believed print encyclopedias contained a compendium of the world's information. How simple those times were. I used them as the base for a transparent glass coffee table, a metaphor for a guy who loves metaphors. Now, they just look good on a shelf.

 

                      The interior of the old Ken Sander's Rare Books. Spending days in such alleyways was once a favorite pastime. Several years ago, I purchased an expensive book online from Sanders and had a spirited email exchange with him about his Sherlock Holmesian roll in catching book thief John Gilkey, the subject of the non-fiction thriller The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

 I once worked with a history class of midshipmen and women from the Annapolis Naval Academy who solicited donations to give to the tribal community. That summer, they loaded up everything, driving from Maryland to Standing Rock with a truck and enclosed trailer containing thousands of books. It was a great few days getting to know them as they were honored by local people for their military service and their kind donation. I still remember their heat burned faces from their first initiation into sweat lodge.

 

Later, when I went through the donations, most of them consisted of old, nice-looking books that were useless to us. Many were Reader's Digest Condensed Books, a hardback collection of book summaries published until the late 1990s. They were shorthand for a worthless book at the time--though they looked nice on a shelf. I always wondered why someone would want to read a condensed book. Their load was also heavily peppered with stacks of old encyclopedias dating back to the 60s. After sorting, moving, stacking, and looking at each book, about 90 percent were unusable for the library. While I ended up giving most books away, many were in poor condition or too old even for that.

 

Several times a year, people would contact me and want to send or bring me books. A boy scout from Virginia solicited donations from his community, the affluent government worker suburb of Alexandria as a service project. Mailing me the results at great expense, they consisted mainly of a predictable collection hundreds of old encyclopedias, almanacs, crusty paperbacks, and musty hardbacks from another era. I sent him a Lakota star quilt as a thank you, more for his intention than the result. Rule of thumb: if you can't use the books, neither can anyone else.

 

In addition to people keeping old books far longer than they would keep items of similar age and provenance, people think that books never lose their value. You would never give a fifty-year-old shirt with rips and stains to the local thrift store, but if the same were a book, people somehow think it is ripe for donation. People hang onto old books as if they owned copies of Gutenberg bibles, lost texts from the library of Alexandria, or the Dead Sea Scrolls. One of my favorite examples of a book that had outlived its usefulness, that I always wish I had kept, was a staid hardback titled something like: "How To Prepare For The Careers Of The 1940s". It would have been fun as a talking point here.

 

 There is a bit of magical thinking and misunderstanding of communities in need; when people box up books, they would never use themselves and send them to people who they think need them because they are economically disadvantaged. People in challenging situations need the same books as more privileged people. In fact, they need them even more because books are expensive, and it is hard to buy a book when you are just trying to get by. A 1960s encyclopedia is usable to some extent, but not to someone who needs a new one more than anything because, unlike the more privileged donators, they cannot afford to buy.  

Once I learned that people would box up anything to send, I would preface accepting donations with "send this, but not that."; I didn't get so many old encyclopedias. One donation stands above all others by its sheer bulk that would dominate my life for several years. 

 In 2004 I received an entire semi-truck load with some forty plus thousand books. The owner of a famous downtown Dayton, Ohio, bookstore called Wilkie's Bookstore and Cafe was looking for a place to donate its remaining inventory. At the time of its closing, it was Ohio's oldest independent bookstore. The owner was friends with a member of the Standing Rock tribe who lived in Dayton, and they contacted me. In time, they arrived with a semi-truck and trailer full of thousands books of all shapes and sizes. Moving the boxes into the library, I devoted a whole wall of shelves and a sizable amount of floor space to storing these books. I wish that I had some photos of Wilkie's and the donation. I may have them stored away somewhere, but just like in print, 2004 was still the era of the film camera and we didn't take near as many photos as we do today.

 

At the time, online book sales were taking off, decentralizing the ancient practice of bookselling from musty shops to suburban garages. The closing of Wilkie's, a Dayton, Ohio institution, was just part of a more extensive process that gutted the corner bookstore in favor of online selling. Before the advent of the Kindle and iPhone in 2007 would turn the ancient world of physical bookselling even more on its head, selling physical books was still in a moment.

 

I wish I had photos of Wilkie's in Dayton Ohio. The owner quoted in the linked article above had a similar rebellious spirit to Ken Sander's and his belief in the important place of a bookstore in a community. Photo from side of old Ken Sander's books in Salt Lake City.

The content of this massive donation consisted mainly of titles published in the 1990s with significant niche collections on Ohio, fantasy, science fiction, LGBT, and erotica. Science fiction, LGBT, fantasy and erotica proved to be the few bright sellers in a group. These collections were the best sellers, often bringing prices beyond the couple dollars that most items brought. Books from these special collections often sold for ten to seventy dollars. The years that I ran the bookstore, from 2004 to about 2006, were the final years of print dominance in books before the introduction of the Kindle e-reader and iPhone in 2007.

 

 While I put many LGBT+, fantasy and science fiction titles into our collection, I didn't see a need for us to have many things on Ohio or erotica outside classics like the Kama Sutra, the writings of Anais Nin or the poetry of Sappho. Much of the erotica would make Fifty Shades of Grey look like a children's book and thus didn't fit with our library mission and collection. I remember one that had a sinister clown that was a mix of horror and standard latex and leather BDSM that was so unsettling it has stuck with me.

In the end, I sorted through the thousands of books, pulling vast numbers of timeless and relevant titles to put into the Sitting Bull College Library collection. If I had to do it again, I would have been better off devoting my energies to grant writing, but bookselling seemed exciting. In the end, even as a nonprofit, the amount of work of researching, listing, and selling each book amounted to much more energy expended than money gained--but naive and excited at the prospect of selling to raise money, I didn't know that at the time. Bookselling was a laborious process of researching each book to see what it was worth. If the book was worth at least two dollars, I would create a listing for sale; if not, it would go on a large giveaway shelf to give to the community. If there were books on the for sale shelf that local people wanted, I always gave them and took down the listing.

In the end, the money I raised for the library was less than what I could have gotten from putting energy into a modest grant. The bookselling expended much more power than writing and administering large grants that I received later. If I had to do it again, I might do something like what the Bismarck Public Library does: sell books by the pound to move them fast and let the community worry about teasing extra dollars out of scarce books. 

Photos off Sanders and two of my favorite authors: Wendell Berry and Kurt Vonnegut