To one Internet mega-seller and a procession of small paperback exchanges, in an undisclosed Pacific Northwest location.

Seller A has shrink-wrapped banana boxes of bargain books stacked fourteen feet high in his suburban industrial warehouse. Several have toppled, spilling out an avalanche of Book Club hardcovers, diet books, and Lawrence Sanders thrillers: a three foot deep wave of pulp. Other pallets of boxes have, after fourteen-plus months of inattention, crushed the pallets beneath them, and these deformed, shrink-wrapped masses protrude from the sides of the towers like giant termite pupae.

No heat in the warehouse, and no lights, either. Seller A's employees navigate by mountaineering headlamp, like dwarves emerging from the Mines of Moria.

No heat in Seller B's shop, either. Seller B sits, swaddled up in coats and blankets like some low-rent Dickensian villain, beside his till. Seller B hates all other dealers, so my unnamed dealer pal and I conduct some disinformational chat back and forth as we go about assembling stacks of underpriced paperback originals. I feel no particular shame about this, as Seller B was once aggressively rude to fourteen year old me in a different shop in a different city.

Dealer C is loading banana boxes of books into his car out the side door of a Salvation Army store. Nothing special -- Johanna Lindsey, Martin Cruz Smith, Berenstain Bears. Dealer C has never met a book he doesn't like.

Seller D, a formerly prosperous local realtor, sits in his small shop dressed in shirt and tie, turning the pages of a paperback thriller and glancing up occasionally into the weak spring sun. No customers in the half an hour we browse, just the hum of the fluorescents and the sound of dust settling on Piers Anthony, on Nora Roberts, on Faye Kellerman and the Canadian Handbook of Actuarial Science.
- posted by cjb @ 6:30 PM