SECOND-HAND PROSE COLLECTOR'S CORNER

 On-Line Sales  

When you walk into Second-Hand Prose, you’ll see a large section labeled Collector’s Corner, which is devoted to books that are rare or collectable.  Many of these books are listed for sale on line at http://www.abebooks.com.  Our books are listed there under Friends of the Georgetown Public Library, and not Second-Hand Prose.  ABE has a pull down menu for book sellers, so if you type in Friends of the Georgetown Public Library it will bring up all the items we have for sale.  Take a look…you’ll be surprised at the titles and prices!  

The Collector’s Corner team works very closely with the sorting team - they have all been trained to look for signatures, first editions, presentation copies, books of specialized interest and the like.  Cyndi Crawford, Chuck Kraby , and Janet Thompson, the Committee Chair, write the majority of listings for the on-line postings, with Margaret Ricketts helping when the back log   gets out of hand.   There is a particular vocabulary that book sellers use to describe the parts and the condition of a book and the dust jacket.   All of the listers are familiar with this vocabulary, and additionally how to handle older, more fragile books. 

During the sorting process the team looks for books that are signed, that are about unusual subjects, or books that just look interesting.  They compare these books in terms of condition, rarity, signature of author/editor/contributor to other listings already online to determine our price.  They’ve learned that you can't judge a book's value by its age, a signature or its cover, having  been surprised too many times by books they would not have deemed to be valuable at first glance.

Rosie Rocke and Gary Thompson take the photos of the books that are uploaded to ABE when stock photos are not available.  ABE allows five book seller supplied photos for each listing, so we now add photos of signatures and can use the photos as an opportunity to enhance our listings.  Our goal is to have a photo of every book we have listed.

Our group of sorting volunteers - Phyllis Graves, Cyndi Crawford, Margaret Ricketts, Chuck Kraby, Rosie Rocke and Susan Biggs meets weekly.  In our last fiscal year, The Friends of the Georgetown Public Library sold nearly $12,000 worth of collectable books.  Each of the members of the Sorting/Shelving and On-line sales group made the top ten of all FOL volunteers based upon hours worked.