Boxes

We never see these at the Used Buying Desk.  Oh, we get fruit-boxes, but usually just the cardboard kind.  One of our most loyal scouts comes in every week or two with his haul from the charity-auctions, etc., and his stuff is always in cardboard fruit-boxes; much abused, much repaired, damned heavy fruit-boxes.  Some of his boxes are of such antiquity, one wonders if they mightn't be "heirloom" by now.  Not the kind of fellow, our scout, to invest in new containers, or let go of anything before it actually composts naturally.


The most common box we see, alas, is the liquor-store.  Few containers are more ubiquitous or less well-suited to carrying books.  There's something almost perverse about the way rectangles just don't match.  The liquor-store box, even with the dividers removed, while it seems like something that should work for the average hardcover book, never quite accommodates all that it should.  Try as one might, the space that, from the look of it, should hold two books side by side almost never does.  As a result, liquor-store boxes may be the despair of used books dealers, just because people will cram books into them as best they can, whether the books like it or no.  (Those huge Rubbermaid storage containers are the other bad sign when they come dragging through the door.  Not only are the tapered bottom and curved sides, again, wrong for rectangles, the bins seem to be the favorite real estate of spiders, dust bunnies and general garage-related-filth.  Ick.)

 Now, a real wooden fruit-box, while not necessarily any better than most other-purposed containers for books, are at least squared at the corners and usually big enough to hold even those larger format Time/Life books -- even though we never buy those Time/Life books.  A nice, wooden fruit-box is at least a sturdy object.  What's more, there's an aesthetic pleasure in the things; a enduring design of great practicality, the sweet nostalgia of wood and nails in a moulded plastic age, and in those colorful paper-labels, which can actually be quite beautiful.  Even when there's nothing to be bought out of such a box, it's nice to see.

There are also the kind of commercial boxes that are made unlikely just by putting books into them.  Discovering that a box from a cosmetics company actually contains a fairly wide collection of Greek & Latin classics suggests a better story than may actually be in the telling, but one does rather like the fantasy of some brilliant young woman working her way through a Classics degree while selling Mary Kay After-Sun Gel to pay the bills. 

 The Spanish label, if anything, only adds to the romance of the fantasy, no?

Far from the weirdest story to be spun from the incongruity of box and book, may I say?  Once, while working in a different shop, some years ago, someone brought in quite a haul of perfectly respectable, even unremarkable fiction and non, in boxes clearly labelled as having originated at the Chic tract factory.  Now, if you don't know what a Chic tract is, consider yourself one blissfully ignorant urban sophisticate.  For those of us who grew up at least nearer the still bloody heart of the Bible belt, Chic tracts were those hideous little comic books usually distributed among the children of the faithful, explaining how almost everything would probably send all of us sinners straight to Hell.  Terrifying, until one came to appreciate just how delightfully demented both text and pictures would prove to be to anyone not actually in the thrall of a dark and vengeful, and ironically "Evangelical" God.  (Come to Jesus, you worthless, filthy little sonofabitch.)

As one ought not to judge a book by its cover, according at least to some old saw maker, so we who buy used books for a living probably shouldn't evaluate the potential quality of unseen books by the boxes in which they are carried.  I'll tell you what though, while my evidence for this is purely anecdotal, I have to say there are few sights as heartwarming as a nice clean box, of the right size and shape, presumably full of nice clean books.  Bankers' boxes, the nice ones with lids and handles are the best, but any box not so big as to be impossible to lift -- think of most of those huge moving company boxes actually better suited to thick linens rather than heavy books -- is welcome. 

For that matter, if the books are good enough, forget the box, bin, bag or armload by which they arrived.  All about the good books.  Always.

Still, nice to see that "Sunny Slope Brand Carolina Peaches" label this morning, even if I didn't buy the Riverside Shakespeare, or anything else out of the box.  (Condition, condition, condition.)  The crate made my day.