Books by the Roadside

I

LAST summer, by way of taking a busman’s holiday from bookselling, I conducted (if that is the word) a little bookstall. It stood by the roadside in a small Cape Cod village to which tourists come, and it was in the company of hot-dog stands, gasoline stations, and those crude shelters that offer the traveler candies, ice cream, and ‘tonics.’¹

The bookstall, which I built myself one forenoon in the spring, was modeled after those that line the banks of the Seine. That is to say, it was about ten feet long and four wide, and it had a sloping top which during ‘business hours’ was propped up with a stick and at night was fastened shut with a padlock. The body of the stall was capable of holding about three hundred volumes, and on the under side of the lid were fastened a dozen or so of old prints and steel engravings.

It took about a month to accumulate my initial stock. The volumes which composed it I salvaged from attics in the neighborhood, sometimes paying a few dollars for a bundle, sometimes being thanked by the owner for carting away what had long been an encumbrance. It was an extraordinary collection of books. Methodist Hymns, odd volumes of Ouida, The Memoirs of U. S. Grant, The Report of the Secretaryof Agriculture for 1890—there was a little of everything.

One day late in June, when I had succeeded in filling my stall to capacity, I tacked a small placard on the stick which propped the lid, and opened for business. The legend on the placard read: ‘Old Books, 25¢ Each.’ Then I sat down on a high bookkeeper’s stool in a patch of near-by shade and awaited custom. When I closed my bookstall for the season, early in October, I had sold close to a thousand titles. And in the course of doing so I had discovered a number of things.

II

My first discovery — and a very heartening one — was that only a microscopic portion of the population can pass a bookstall without stopping at it. Now of course I have known for years that I can no more pass a bookstall than a dog can pass another dog without sniffing. But I had no notion that most other people are similarly constituted. On the first day my stall was open at least a hundred men and women stopped at it. Some, to be sure, glanced only fleetingly at the contents and then continued impassively on their way. But rare indeed was the man or woman who could stride by without so much as a peek. On that first day the stall was visited by little boys of nine and old men of ninety. Tourists, bowling along at thirty miles an hour in their cars, jammed on their brakes and got out to browse. I sold thirty books.

My second discovery was a great astonishment to me. I found that people almost invariably bought the books which I had supposed would be least likely to sell. This happened quite consistently all summer. Each morning I made a point of sprinkling through the stock six or eight volumes which were really great bargains — books which normally sell for three or four dollars, or even more. Not uncommonly these bargain books would lie in the stall for a week or a month, while all kinds of the most impossible trash would be eagerly snapped up.

I was bewildered by this until I finally realized — after a month or two as a bouquiniste — that most of my customers were sentimentalists, not bibliophiles. They bought books which they had read in childhood, and had not since had an opportunity to read again. Or they bought books which had ‘quaint’ woodcuts, or books which they had always meant to read but had never got around to. A scarce Massachusetts Gazetteer, worth six or seven dollars, remained in my stand for weeks, but I could be certain of selling any Rollo book — no matter how badly printed or how damaged by age — within a few moments of putting it out. Ouida, George Eliot, and Miss Braddon — I had complete sets of those, and each set was grabbed up almost as soon as it appeared.

Any kind of ‘freak’ book was a capital seller. By freak books I mean such as A Child Assisted in Giving the Heart to God, Two Years in a Lunatic Asylum, The Young Gentleman’s Compendium of Genteel Deportment, and The Murdered Maiden Student. These were purchased to be taken home, as a huge joke, to Cousin George or Uncle Alfred. Since the attics of New England houses contain tremendous stores of such works, I profited considerably from these wits among my customers.

I came to the conclusion, after the first few weeks, that if one can but wait long enough there is a buyer for any book under the sun. I remember that when I had been operating my stall only a few days I was continually astonished to see scholarly-looking men pounce with whoops of glee upon The Story of the Panama Canal or Somebody-or-Other’s Analysis of the United States Census for the Year 1866. After a while, however, I became accustomed to it. They wanted these books — had perhaps been searching for them for years; books which any ordinary, self-respecting bookseller would classify as hopeless junk and refuse to have on his shelves. I sold sixteen copies of Lady Audley’s Secret, and almost every one of the sixteen purchasers told me of spending years in fruitless search for it. The lady who bought from me a tattered little book on fish culture told me that her husband had written all the leading booksellers in the country in an effort to buy it, and had been unsuccessful. Now she was going to give him this ragged, wretched copy for his birthday.

When it could conveniently be done, I liked to ask my customers just why they had selected the particular books which they held out to me for wrapping. One man, who had bought a sadly defective little spelling book for which it was sheer robbery on my part to charge a quarter, assured me solemnly that he had bought it because it had a picture of an owl stamped in gilt on the cover. I thought he was joking, but he was n’t. It turned out that he is a collector of owls — owl stickpins, owl cuff links, owl watch charms, all manner of owls. I had, as a matter of fact, just been planning to throw the spelling book away, as being too utterly worthless for my stall, when he happened along and purchased it.

I discovered symptoms of the tremendous veneration which Americans have for things that are ‘old.’ Any book printed more than a hundred years ago would be snapped up instantly, and the purchaser would walk away with a smug look which showed quite clearly that he was confident of having found a priceless treasure. Once I put in the stall a very imperfect copy of a Scotch Bible published in 1698. Unfortunately two people saw it at the same time, and there was an argument of great bitterness as to who should have it. I was able to restore peace by allotting the Bible to one of the customers and offering the other a book of French poems, with the first eleven pages missing but printed in 1692, for the same price. Both these people, I am certain, thought I was an ignorant yokel, and expected to sell their books for enormous sums when they got home.

III

A nice old lady came to the stall one day and wanted to know if I had a Spanish grammar. I did not have one, but I suggested that she look through what I did have and she might perhaps find something else that would appeal to her. Well, it seemed that the Spanish grammar was for an old colored man who was in prison. ‘So?’ I said. Yes, he was serving a life sentence for killing a lady, and, finding time heavy on his hands, he had decided to learn Spanish. My customer fussed and puttered among the books as she told me about it. Finally she bought a History of Mexico and an odd volume of the Conquest of Peru. ‘I guess they would be Spanish enough,’ she said.

I have heard of people buying books just to fill up their library shelves, but I had never actually encountered such a person until the lady from Mobile came to my stall. Her car, with the Alabama license, pulled up at the roadside one gray day in August. The lady nodded to me and asked whether all the books in the stall were only twentyfive cents each. I assured her that was the price. Whereupon she began selecting volumes at a great rate, laying them aside in a pile on the ground. She selected only books bound in old calf. Ultimately, indeed, she took every calf-bound book I owned. I counted them; there were sixty-two volumes. ‘They will look charming in the library of my new house,’ she said. ‘Please send them by express, collect, to Mobile. ’ The amount which I received was $15.50. The expressage cost $11.00.

I discovered that even in so small and informal an enterprise as an old bookstall ‘the customer is always right.’ There was, for instance, the elderly lady who puttered so long among my volumes that I produced from the little box of my ‘private’ books behind the stall a vellum-bound Sophocles printed in 1592 which I thought it might interest her to see. I observed that she seemed to be struggling with the Roman-numeral publication date on the title-page, so I took the liberty of explaining that it was 1592. The lady handed back the volume with a snort. ‘I happen to know, young man,’ she said, ‘that in 1592 there were no books, but only parchment scrolls.’ I ventured gently to dissent, and my lady got into a great wrath. ‘I should like to inform you,’ she said (and the manner was worthy of a greater occasion), ‘that only last week I delivered a radio broadcast on “The History of Books”!’ That, of course, squelched me. I apologized. I all but crawled under my stall. Once I was vanquished, the lady smiled with regal condescension and charming pity, and went away.

There are, it seems, collectors of every known species of book. There was the man who collected any old volumes on etymology. There was a collector of books with gilded Victorian shelfbacks. A lady bought any book that was equipped with metal clasps, and it mattered not whether the volume was a Bible, a hymnal, or a diary. One man (the only one, perhaps, in existence, except in the pages of Peter Whiffle) accumulated first editions of J. T. Trowbridge, and innumerable people were willing to buy any book that had a picture of a locomotive in it.

If there had ever been any suspicion in my mind that the popularity of Charles Dickens was waning, my bookstall summer would have dispelled it. No volume of Dickens ever remained unbought for more than half an hour. Odd volumes from Dickens sets, cheap reprints published in the nineties, paper-covered editions ‘for the millions’ — anything at all that had the name of Charles Dickens on it. Only two other authors were as consistently sought: Oscar Wilde and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

IV

The sale of old textbooks was perpetually a riddle. Early in the summer, in order to acquire a collection of books from an attic, I was forced to take also a bundle of some two hundred old textbooks. I did not want them. I did not imagine that anyone would want to buy them. The merest chance restrained me from throwing them away. And then one day, when my stock in the stall was a good deal depleted, I filled in some of the empty spaces with those old textbooks. Most of them were dated in the eighties and nineties; there were Latin Grammars, Algebras, Geometries, French Courses, Correct English, and Xenophon’s Anabasis by the dozen. And they were just about the best sellers I ever had!

There does not seem to be any one reason to which this can be ascribed. Young couples would pore over the stall, and go away laden with Allen and Greenough, Chardenal, and Anthon, and I would stare after them in astonishment. Many of the buyers were obviously teachers, and in that case it was of course understandable. But the others? Often I asked pointblank what had induced a customer to buy one of these out-of-date volumes, and I generally got a vague and unsatisfying answer. ‘Oh, I used it in school, and it would be fun to look at it again.’ Or, ‘I’d sort of like to have a few good, solid books like this on my shelves.’ To this day I really cannot explain it, but the fact remains that I am sold out of textbooks; every volume is gone.

One day a burly Portuguese fisherman came to the stall. ‘Have you,’ he asked, ‘ an early edition of Quackenbos’s History of the United States?’ I was dumbfounded, for I felt quite sure my man was little above illiteracy, and it seemed unlikely that he planned to spend his evenings reading Quackenbos. As it happened, I did have an early Quackenbos — two or three copies. I fished one out. I got my quarter, and the fisherman was moving away in evident delight when I called him back and asked him what on earth he wanted with the volume. ‘Well, you see,’ he said, very seriously, ‘Quackenbos is the only guy that ever said Vasco da Gama was a Portygee. All the other books say he was Spanish, and even Quackenbos says so in the later corrected editions. Now, you see, when guys ask me, “ What did any Portygee ever do that was worth mentioning?” I can just get out this book and show ’em!’ Then he added, ‘Say, I wonder would you mind just showing me the page where it tells about Da Gama? I don’t read so good.’ So I found the page and marked the passage, and the fisherman marched happily down the street, hoping with all his might, I am sure, that some Yankee would ask him what any Portygee had ever done that was worth mentioning.

The greatest riddle of the summer was afforded by a little old colored woman. She came to my stall quite early in the season, and was one of my most regular patrons until late in the autumn. I had acquired from the son of a deceased lawyer in the village about two dozen ponderous law books, all of ancient vintage and hopelessly outdated for present-day use, but handsomely bound in stout legal buckram and morocco. With no expectation that I could sell them, I put them in my stall, and it was these volumes which captivated the little old colored woman.

The first time she visited me she bought some massive opus on torts, published in the sixties. She told me it seemed too good to be true that such wonderful books could be had for only twenty-five cents. When she came again about a week later she bought three more volumes. They must have weighed at least twenty pounds, but she staggered away with them. Thereafter, every Thursday all through the summer she set aside fifty or seventyfive cents of her week’s wages and purchased ancient law books. Eventually she cleaned out my stock. I do not know who she was, or where she lived; she told me she was in ‘domestic service,’ and that was all I ever got to know. Somewhere in the world there is a little old colored maid who possesses a collection of ancient legal tomes weighing at least a quarter of a ton. I would give a great deal to know what on earth she does with them.

V

The present generation is increasingly interested in the Civil War, if the sale of books on that subject is a criterion. Not only books, but little steel engravings of Lincoln and of the surrender at Appomattox and of the engagement between the Monitor and the Merrimac. Tattered copies of Four Years in Secessia and The Field, the Dungeon and the Escape — how quickly they were snapped up! Could I have supplied the demand for copies of the Memoirs of U. S, Grant, I should have made a small fortune. And yet some booksellers have told me that Civil War books are ‘plugs.’

Perhaps it is because a bookstall has a certain mellow or Old World atmosphere that I could not interest my customers in modern books at all. Occasionally friends gave me copies of new books which were still in mint condition but which had been read and were no longer wanted. I would put these in the stall at twenty-five cents regardless of the published price. Some were still on sale in bookshops for four or five dollars, but could I dispose of them for twenty-five cents? No. They would stay in the stall several weeks, while Airy Fairy Lilian, by The Duchess, and The Dove in the Eagle’s Nest, by Charlotte M. Yonge, were finding immediate delighted purchasers.

At the end of my summer in a bookstall I compiled a list of best sellers. A fantastic list it is, and one which might well make a great modern bookshop proprietor gape. Here is the list, arranged in a descending order of popularity: —

1. The works of Charles Dickens

2. Books of any kind bound in old calf; old textbooks

3. Works of Oscar Wilde and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (neck and neck)

4. The novels of Ouida and Miss Braddon; Civil War books

5. ‘Freak’ books — that is, books with peculiar titles

6. The novels of Charlotte M. Yonge, The Duchess, Mrs. Opie, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (the younger), and the poems of Lydia Sigourney, Felicia Hemans, and Lucy Larcom

7. Old hymnals, Bibles, and religious treatises

8. (Way below any of the others) Scarce ‘collector’s items’

Four months I maintained my bookstall, and it was, I dare say, the point of dissemination for more early, middle, and late Victorian odds and ends than any other source in its part of the world. I discovered some things which I had never before suspected about the American book-buying public. I had a great deal of fun.