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Stealing Books-A Bookscout's Guide To Book Collecting
Chapter 2 - Where To Find The Books (continued)
Scanning the books in the used book stores takes practice. When you first start doing it, it’ll be slow, and you'll be reading the entire title, and the entire author's name. But the more you do it, the smoother you'll get. You be able to very quickly go down a shelf of books. Depending on the size of the shelves, it may be most efficient to scan the first shelf left to right, and then the next shelf, right to left, and then back to left to right for next. After a while, you might even recognize the color, or the artwork, or even fonts used on the spine of the book. A few weeks ago I was in a used book store, and caught a glimpse of a book out of the corner of my eye. The sky blue book with a white paper airplane caught my attention. I looked and it was a first edition of The Paper Chase which I ended up buying for a steal.
If you are trying to hit a lot of bookstores in a day, then speed is important. If the bookstore seems to be promising, you can slow down, and take your time so as not to miss any good books. If most of the books seem to be priced at par or higher with no steals in sight, scan faster so you can get on the to next book place where maybe there will be better deals. If the books are in alphabetical order, you can almost skip from collectible author, to collectible author. Keep in mind that some collectable authors have published books under pseudonyms, so be careful not to miss any of these. Some bookstore may place the books written under pseudonyms along side the books published under the author’s actual name. But others won’t, or they may not recognize the pseudonym. The less known the pseudonym, the less likely you will find them beside the books under the author’s name. Some of these books may be very valuable. For example, Dean Koontz wrote several gothic romance novels under the name Deanna Dwyer, and these books are difficult to find, and command a good price.
As you're preparing to go off book scouting, what I like to do put a couple boxes in my car, usually in the back seat, but sometimes in the trunk, or both. This is because I'll might be buying a sizeable quantity of books. Then as buy books throughout the day, I stack them in the boxes. This will help protect the books by preventing them from sliding all over the place.
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