New Life for “Forgotten Books, Remembered,” Part Three
Showcase interviews bookseller Howard Prouty
ReadInk, located in Los Angeles, specializes in “uncommon, obscure and interesting books with particular interest in American Culture (Popular & Unpopular), Art, Literature, Life and People from the 1920s through the 1960s.” Its motto and operating principle is: “Forgotten books, remembered.” We discovered owner Howard Prouty at this year’s California International Antiquarian Book Fair in Pasadena, then tracked him down for this interview.
Showcase left you cliff-hanging at the end of Part Two with the question “How does someone go about finding a reputable bookseller or bookstore?” We continue now.
Showcase: How does someone go about finding a reputable bookseller or bookstore?
Prouty: Unfortunately, the era of large general used bookstores, along the model of the old “Acres of Books” in Long Beach, or Hollywood Book City, is mostly past. Much of that business has migrated to the online world, and many people selling books through platforms like eBay and Amazon Marketplace tend to be a bit amateurish – and hard to contact anyway, since those sites go out of their way to make customer-to-merchant communication difficult, because if too many people “step outside the room” to do business directly, that deprives these sites of their fees and commissions, their only source of revenue. However, there are two booksellers’ organizations whose websites make it fairly simple to find dealers in your geographical area: the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA, abaa.org) and the Independent Online Booksellers Association (IOBA, ioba.org).
Showcase: Any advice for people who don’t care about getting money for their books, but just want to find them good homes?
Prouty: There’s always donating to libraries and thrift stores, but neither option is ideal: not all libraries will take large numbers of books, and thrift stores tend to treat books very badly. I honestly think the best option is to deal with experienced booksellers first, let them identify the “best” 10% (or, if you’re lucky, more than that) and give you a fair price for them. You can be pretty well assured that no bookseller worth his or her salt is going to leave anything of serious value behind, so whatever’s left over can be disposed of in any way that causes you the least amount of trouble.
Showcase: Congratulations on your nearly quarter century in the business.
Prouty: Thanks. I still shake my head sometimes when I realize that I’ve been at it for that long! I was among the “first wave” of self-taught online-only booksellers – not that that’s anything to brag about, it was simply a necessity, since the circumstances of my life made it impossible for me to follow the traditional means of getting into the used and rare book trade (i.e. some form of apprenticeship). I had a full-time career, which I both loved (and still have, and still love) and needed (for the steady income) – so from the get-go, my bookselling enterprise was destined to be a part-time/spare-time business, and it was up to me to make of it whatever I could. It’s brought me the extra income I’d originally hoped for, but more than that it’s brought me a lot of pleasure, it’s introduced me to a whole new universe of friends and colleagues, and it’s given me the best possible excuse to keep hunting for and buying interesting books!
Showcase: Thanks, and we’ll use this opportunity to invite readers to visit www.readinkbooks.com.