Zealous book enthusiasts compete for ownership of a rare tome
I am currently writing a history PhD thesis which pivots on the First World War. In the month leading up to Christmas, I was busy putting together a chapter on peacemaking during the conflict: both ideas pertaining to peace, and the actual negotiations in Paris in 1919. One book which I used in writing this chapter was published in the United States in 1915 by a group called the League to Enforce Peace. I used a version available at the Online Archive. Last weekend, I discovered that I own a copy of this very book. It has been lying unopened, on a shelf in my room, for at least a year.
Why? Blame the Trinity Booksale.
It turns out that I bought this book at the Trinity secondhand Booksale last year. Or the year before (to misquote Camus, I can’t remember). The Booksale has that effect on people.
The Booksale is held once a year in the University’s Exam Hall. It lasts from Thursday night until Saturday afternoon, and books are extremely cheap. The selection of books is also eclectic, with an abundance of academic and antiquarian tomes available. For those in the market for the latter, Thursday night is where it’s at. Crowds form outside the Exam Hall at least half an hour before the sale begins, then storm the building when the doors open, much like the television footage that one associates with the launch of the latest Apple product.
This is where the problem starts. The Booksale is incredibly competitive, mostly due to the fact that a good proportion of the buyers are there on behalf of second hand bookshops. Frequently, they will equip themselves with a cardboard box, and rather than risk losing out on a potential bargain, they simply fill the box with anything looking remotely interesting (or even not – it has been known for them to load stacks of books into their boxes without a second glance, Supermarket Sweep style).
The remainder of the mass of people – seventy percent or so – is a discerning academic crowd, who know what’s what. And the most popular section each year is the history/antiquarian table. Thus, to a history student who wants to make a purchase, there is quite a bit of pressure to make sure that you don’t let anything get away. If you do, it’ll be sold sooner rather than later.
For me, the Booksale is the land of the unnecessary impulse buy. Potential purchases are assessed by two criteria:
1) How many people are in the general proximity of the potential buyer. This is key. On the opening Thursday, casual browsing of the shelves becomes more akin to the primitive ancestors of football known as ‘mob football.’ If you’re surrounded by a number of hard headed buyers, all elbows and shoulders, you’re more likely to put a book into your ‘buying’ bag.
2) Price. Given that books are ludicrously cheap, a potential buyer is more likely to put their cash on the table and stump up for a volume on Medieval Fisheries in Southwest France than they might ordinarily do. Especially if they’re being rucked from one side and mauled from the other.
It is rare that I will ever emerge from the Trinity Booksale with something that I actually need. That is the joy of the event. You emerge with things which you either may need or intend on developing an interest in (such as my stack of Teach Yourself German books from the 1940s – current status: untouched). For buyers more at ease with themselves and the world, books may be purchased with the rationale that they will never actually read them at all: some volumes just look great on a shelf and give the veneer of being well read. What did Umberto Eco say about unread books in a personal library?
Having done this dance for four years now, I am not sure that any of the above explanations really apply in my case. I still have stacks of unread and untouched books lying in a wardrobe in my room, as the opening anecdote demonstrates. I have come to the conclusion that the Trinity Booksale people are, in fact, marketing geniuses: they sell these things on for very little, knowing the exact psychology of their target market. Then, they wait three or four years for the penny to drop and for the fools to realise that they’ll never do anything with these books. What happens then? The buyers give the books back to the Booksale, who sell them on again to more gullible idiots, pocketing the thinnest of profits.
I’ll list a few of my purchases over the years and try to explain how they came about, and what use they have been put to:
This is a book.
1) The Warren Report, €2. This was one of this year’s purchases. I really have no idea why I bothered with this. I have no intention of reading a 700 page report into the assassination of President Kennedy, especially one with so many, shall we say, question marks hanging about it. Even were I a scholar of the period, I’m not sure that I’d read the thing in full. So why buy it? Does it look good on a shelf? Possibly. But what sort of people would be impressed by such a thing? This is the sort of existential second guessing which the Booksale provokes in me. It has me imagining scenarios where hypothetical acquaintances would regard a bookshelf, pick out the Warren Report, and declare themselves impressed with the owner. Do I really want to know these people?
2) The Road to Terror (eds J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov), €5. Another hulking doorstop of a book. Another volume that I am confident I will never open. I have no doubt that it is a very good book for people interested in a certain period of history (namely, the Stalinist Terror of the 1930s). However, right now I have no need for 600 pages of primary sources translated from Russian. Why the purchase? Peer pressure. A friend – who keeps across all the latest publications in European history – spotted it, asked if I owned a copy (seriously, why would I do such a thing?!), before heartily recommending that I buy it. His copy, purchased while doing a Masters, cost €35. That’s a saving of €30 for me. Sold. Expect to see it in a second hand bookshop within five years.
I own this. Well, not this actual copy, but still. Woo!
3) A History of Europe (H.A.L Fisher), €1. This is one that I’m proud of. In fact, it might be the only purchase that I have made at the Booksale which has been used more than once. The book, written by a leading liberal historian and sometime politician, was published in 1936, and treats the history of Europe from the beginning of time up to Hitler and Mussolini. While the work was also published in three volumes dealing with a different time period, this edition is a complete volume, numbering 1200 pages in total. That means that I paid .08c per page of history. That is, surely, a good thing. Just don’t ask me what happened after 1936.
4) League to Enforce Peace, Addresses, 1915, €1. The irony is that, of all the purchases that I’ve made over the years at the Trinity Booksale, I was oblivious to my ownership of the one which I actually needed, as discussed in the opening anecdote.
The last example demonstrates the peculiar psychology of the Booksale. You go in fully expecting to make a spur of the moment, impulsive, rash, and thoroughly unnecessary purchase which will be of no longer term use. You are so conditioned to the idea that any purchases will be of little long or short term use that when you do find a gem, it gathers dust on the shelf with the rest of the ill-thought out purchases.
