Caspar Bookster

It's Sunday evening after the book sale at the Caspar Community Center. You can see pictures on the right of the north room before and then at the start of the sale. Later on in the morning there were as many as 30 people at times looking at books. We did very well, this one scored a 7 1/2 on a scale of 1 to 10.

These book sales are somewhat obsessive behavior for me but I enjoy them a lot and the  money is good. I basically move 50 to 60 boxes of books 4 times before, during and after the sales. All that to create a bookstore for 5 hours.

 I enjoy this game I play with books, basically I'm looking for useful and interesting books for myself and also friends, neighbors and people who happen to come to the breakfast, many from out of town. Another part of the game is finding books that have more than expected value. It's almost always something unexpected. The books I see and think that they might be valuable usually aren't, it's usually some odd little volume out of left field that surprises me with what it's worth.



 

Two examples: recently I found a very sweet little book about butterflies, it was a Hallmark book with watercolor pictures of species of butterflies and side by side pictures of the caterpillar and the moth or butterfly that it became. Very nicely done but it was Hallmark after all. I paid 50 cents for it and supposed I would sell it for $4 or $5. As it turns out the
cheapest one on the internet (listed by major sellers) was $65. It's hard to figure why, it was published in 1998. I guess they didn't reprint it and a demand developed for it. The other was a
little hardback called 85 Ways to Tie a Neck Tie that I picked up for a dollar at a library sale. Nice looking book that I thought I would probably sell for $6. After checking it on the internet, I listed it on Amazon and it sold very fast for $55. One aspect of this game is that I have to check great numbers of books online. Assessing value is certainly incredibly easier than it used to be, before the internet when you had to acquire printed catalogs or communicate with sellers by phone or mail or in person.