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How important second hand books are--a rant.
I want to ask you a question. Have you ever owned a new car? Like okay, we can include one that's a couple years old here, like you can still smell the showroom on it, there's bits of plastic wrap you haven't pulled off yet?
I want to ask you a question. Have you ever owned a new car? Like okay, we can include one that's a couple years old here, like you can still smell the showroom on it, there's bits of plastic wrap you haven't pulled off yet?
I haven't. We've always owned second hand cars. A car is not getting abandoned at a bus stop for four hours in the rain because the bus driver tired of Xmas shoppers and doesn't want to stop. A car is life or death. It gets you to the hospital or the vet or the grocery store.
I'm lucky we even had second hand cars. A lot of people don't. But we owned second hand cars because we were comparatively lucky, I suppose. Are car manufacturers constantly trying to undermine the second hand market? YES, FUCKING ALWAYS.
Like okay, here's an example: car A in the 90s is a piece of shit, but it's a piece of shit you can repair and hold together with pritt stick and dreams. It gets us to school when I miss my bus. My dad can fix the engine with the stuff in his garage because it needs common tools.
car B: from 2010--also a piece of shit, but it has a MAGIC FUCKING COMPUTER that you have to plug into the dealer's magic fucking computer so that a computer tech - not a mechanic - can tell you what's wrong with it then charge you a mint for specialist parts.
Also fun fact the car from 2010 has special body parts specifically designed to a) make parts of the engine invisible from any angle b) make them unfixable from any angle and c) can only be manipulated by special tools that only the dealer has.
I know what you're thinking--hey, CG, when the fuck are you gonna talk about books? Well here's the thing: if we couldn't have bought second hand cars, we simply wouldn't have had a car. I would have missed school. I'd have stayed at that bus stop in the rain all night.
Secondhand books are the same thing. Oh, we had books. Sort of. My grandparents were theologians, and my grandfather collected old books, exhausting, depressing treatises on various facets of Christianity, and pastors arguing with each other across several tomes and centuries.
These were also secondhand books, incidentally. When my grandfather bought them the authors were long dead, and the books only continued to exist because inexplicably there was a market for such things. Nobody tossed them into a giant book skip to be turned into furnace pellets.
My mum collected science fiction, again from second hand book stores. She had hundreds of books, having often not paid more than 10p for each of them, and she read them all. The authors were living, but let's be real, she had 2 kids to feed. Without 10p books, she couldn't read.
I haven't bought a lot of new books myself. Rarely, when straits were less dire. I bought my mum Jeff Lindsay's Dexter novels as a special Christmas treat, one year after another. It was a tradition, while they were still being published. They were a special exception.
Every year when I was in primary school the guys would come from the big reading initiative, which let's face it is just a front for publishers to strongarm parents them via guilt for their kids. Like, I get it, that's the game, and I know some of you guys make money that way.
But as a kid whose parents absolutely couldn't afford those books, and who couldn't understand why other kids could have them and I couldn't? That was some psychologically traumatizing shit. It was awful. I mean it. It SUCKED.
You see what happens after the publishing guys who are done letting you see all the cool glossy books and tossing you glossy magazine spreads to order from--they leave. A few weeks later your classmates are all given parcels with gorgeous books in. You aren't.
Books are important, like the car, and some poor kids didn't even get 2nd hand books--I know that. Now, when all the local second hand bookstores have all been driven so successfully out of business? They can't. I was lucky. I grew up with 2nd hand book stores, before they died.
We'd stop at this one shop on the corner on the way into town and there was this musty little shop and this guy in there who sold books and he had this really cool collection of UNEXPLAINED books. They were ÂŁ1 each. It took me months to buy the whole set.
Another second hand book shop, after we moved, was just down from the train station, next to the florist. I love flowers. Nobody ever bought me any. So I bought myself books. I bought Terry Brooks, Colin Dann and Elynne Michell. Second hand books. Different smell, same love.
Of those authors, only one of them has ever seen any royalties for my purchases (That's Dann, btw). But without second hand books I would never have read the Animals of Farthing Wood and its sequels. Without 2nd hand books, I'd have never discovered Landover or the Hidden Valley.
I didn't often have the privilege to buy new books. Those authors wouldn't have received a royalty check from me buying those novels because if I couldn't have afforded it then, just like the car, I wouldn't have had it. My life would have been poorer for its absence.
For those who weren't as lucky as me, there were libraries. Were. One council house we lived in only had access to a rolling library, with a very limited choice of reading material. About 20 years ago, most of the local brick and mortar libraries in my area closed permanently.
With libraries gone, and the second hand book market completely obliterated, what choices remain? Rent e-books from online libraries? Great, if you can afford a phone, nvm an e-reader. Or buy new books. Great, if you can afford the books. It's heartbreaking.
If we lose secondhand books, we lose readers. Without readers, you can kiss your royalty checks goodbye, period. Worse, we make reading something only the privileged can afford to do, has access to & has time to do. A dark, shitty world. 2nd hand books nurture future book buyers.
2nd hand books nurture book lovers, readers who fall in love with the worlds you create. No, it means you're not getting paid, but you wouldn't be getting paid anyway because they can't even afford a new book! And that might be the book that changes someone's life.
And look, I'm just venting my spleen. I can't change the fact that devaluing 2nd hand books has completely destroyed the market, caused the permanent loss of rare works and is a victory for Amazon's e-reader model. It's tragic. But it is what it is.
So I'm just going to hit "tweet all" before I second guess myself or piss anyone off any more. Back to the oubliette I of shame I go...
