Digging for Treasure

This visit home is, or rather was, something of a working vacation, at least for the first couple of days. What this meant was flying into Pittsburgh -- after ridiculous if entirely predictable delays with my connection through Atlanta -- and then staying for a day or two in McKeesport, PA to shop a remainder warehouse for the bookstore where I work. (Anyone who has been in the books business as long as I have, and is still at it, will have come to appreciate the value of discounted books, and publishers' discontinued -- or remaindered -- titles in particular. Once just the stuff of discreetly labeled bargain tables, remainders now are or ought to be a considerable part of what a successful bookstore sells. Not sure how anyone keeps the doors open nowadays without them.) To be honest, I haven't bought remainders for a bookstore in a very long time. My concentration for years now has been used books, all but exclusively. But, as I was coming back to Pennsylvania anyway for a little family time, and as this time I was traveling alone, it seemed an admirable idea that I stop in McKeesport first and do a little business before heading North to my folks house.

The warehouse is in a town that has seen better economic days. The factories and mills, for the most part, closed about a generation ago. The businesses that have survived have all seemed to adapt to existing spaces left vacant by disappearing manufacture and the like. One can drive through such places for the length of what was once a manufacturing corridor downtown, and see nothing but sandwich shops, bars, and real-estate signs. Some few businesses, have simply started from scratch. Book Country is just such a business. The building used to house a bakery operation on a fairly large scale. Now it houses thousands upon thousands of books. Everything in the place is something a publisher has sold off, unsorted, in lots to companies like this one for sale to retail. Booksellers like me, or more often people who do this sort of thing regularly and with considerably greater expertise, like my boss, come out, pick the books they want for their inventory and bargain tables, designate the quantities they want to sell, and then, working with one of the wonderful staff people at the place, have the lot picked, packaged, and shipped off.


I met the owner, had a grand lunch across the street at "Hoots" with Jerry, the sales exec., and then set to work in the sweltering warehouse, with my helper. The temperature inside on a sweltering July day in Western PA was... unpleasant. But the work was actually rather fun; like shopping, but in a sauna.

My only issue beyond the sloppy wet heat, and the dust and dirt to which such a big, open operation is naturally prone, was in trying to buy books in quantities appropriate to the bookstore's needs. As a used books buyer, quantity is not usually something I have much opportunity to think about. I only hope I did well enough with the numbers. (I did talk a couple of times on my cellphone with dear N. at the store, who runs the remainder tables at the bookstore, and with my boss, but... we'll see.)


I was buying paperbacks and a few hardcovers from Oxford, Harpers and the like, so it wasn't that hard to pick out recognizable and saleable titles, but did I buy enough? or worse, too much? I don't suppose I'll know really until the books arrive and those who know better review what I bought and then decide if I'm ever to be let loose in such a situation again.

Meanwhile, I must just say how impressed I truly was by the dogged good cheer of everyone working at the place, and by the genuinely hard work everyone on the floor does every day. I worked there just two days, with helpers, hardly lifting a thing, with water bottles offered me every few minutes and company on the stoop when I had to go out and smoke, and I frankly thought I might die. Meanwhile, these good people do this year 'round. Good people. Hope I get to see them again -- though maybe on some nice, cool, September morning next time.