A Tale of Two Orders

Here then, a tale of two books, ordered from two vendors, through one source, to two different purposes, though both in a way, work related.  First, I think, the good news.

The Stricken Deer: The Life of William Cowper, by David Cecil, published in this US edition in 1930, by The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis.  It is a book I've wanted for a long time and finally felt myself justified in buying because I can call it "research" now without blushing, as I will be doing a public reading of Cowper come October.  By then, it will be the third biography of Cowper I will have read; the first being a short life in the English Men of Letters series which I had reprinted for me some years ago on the bookstore's Espresso Book Machine.  The series is an old one, and one I like, of brief biographies by eminent critics of the day.  (The original run was from 1878 to 1892, and included Anthony Trollope on Thackeray, and Henry James on Nathaniel Hawthorne, both from 1879.  No small beer there.)  The life of Cowper was written in 1880 by one Goldwin Smith, one time regius professor of Modern History at Oxford.  It was entirely adequate to my purpose at the time, and no more.  More recently, I found The Life of William Cowper, by Thomas Wright, 1921, Second Edition, at my other favorite bookstore, Magus Books, just down the road from work.  The book required some repair, and remains a rather homely object, but better than the first, certainly, and well worth the time and the glue.  This latest was actually on my list of hunted books for years, not because of Cowper, but because I collected David Cecil, or more properly, Lord Edward Christian David Gascoyne-Cecil, CH, author of The Young Melbourne (1939), A Portrait of Jane Austen (1978), A Portrait of Charles Lamb (1983), etc.  He's very good.  If I was ever going the shell out the thirty five dollars plus shipping for Cecil's Cowper, now was the time.  I'm already glad I did.  The book arrived in very good shape for it's age, and in less than a week from the time it was ordered.  I've read the first two chapters already.

I ordered the book through AbeBooks.com, something I haven't done much of since the company was acquired by the you-know-who.  Still, beggars and choosers and all that.  I'd never seen a copy in a bookstore in all the years I had the title on my hunting list.  So, I ordered it.  My copy came from, of all places, Leiper's Fork, TN, with an elegant brochure from the seller, "Yeoman's in the Fork: A Rare Book & Document Gallery."  Check out the link.  Classy, in fact, just the sort of antiquarian operation that usually scares the Hell out of me.  I'm just a guy who reads old books because the books I want happen to be out of print.  I'm not the kind of collector who can usually afford to patronize such lovely places.    Still, they clearly know their business, and I'm grateful.

Very much on the other hand would be the vendor from whom I just today received the other book I ordered that same day, two weeks ago.  At the Used Books Desk at the bookstore where I work, we recently bought a very nice set of the definitive edition of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews and published in eleven volumes in the United States by the University of California Press between 1970 and 1983.  Or rather, we bought every volume but one.  As sold to us, the set was missing Volume 11, The Index.  That missing volume makes our set incomplete.  That makes something that might be worth hundreds of dollars worth... not so much.  I asked the seller to look for the missing volume.  He did.  He didn't find it.  I bought his books anyway.  They are are very good hardcover copies; clean and bright and tightly bound hardcovers, with nice clean dust-jackets.  Then I did something I've rarely done, I went online and looked for an equally nice copy on the missing volume (#11, remember) to complete the set.  I found a listing at a very reasonable price and ordered the book.

I'd begun to wonder just how long it was going to take to get the damned thing, since the Cowper biography showed up so promptly and it had been at least a week since then.  Today I came home, found the package from this other vendor, and opened it with the anticipation that at last I would be able to complete our set and maybe sell it.  Inside the rather flimsy packaging I found no invoice, no wrapping, and the wrong book.  Same edition of Pepys -- though the British from Bell & Hyman rather than the University of California Press -- but Volume One, which I didn't need instead of Volume 11, The Index, which I'd ordered.  Then I noticed this:

That's right, in addition to being the wrong book, the book they sent as "very good" in fact had a front cover that had completely detached from the front endpaper; in other words, it was busted as well as wrong.  

In the business, we call that, "not as described."

I realize this may not exercise the reader quite so much as it does me, and I have in fact already initiated a refund through the website and will mail the book back promptly as soon as I get to work tomorrow, but... what the bloody, blue-blazing Hell is wrong with people?!

Look, we sell our used books online as well at the bookstore where I work, and we have certainly made our share of mistakes and had plenty of shipping mishaps and the like.  I understand that things can simply go wrong.  I'm glad to say that we are always prompt to admit our errors and do our best to rectify them when and where we can, and to refund what we can't fix.  Sometimes our best isn't good enough, but there we are.

That said, when  I compare the two orders, the two books as and how they arrived, and the level of service from one order to the other, I must say I am drawn up short by the truly glaring disparity between what is obviously a very professional, smart shop and what I can only assume is some kind of third party, "virtual" dealer.

I'm not going to use the vendor's name as it is listed on Abebooks.  (Though I'm happy to tell any friend who asks.)  We'll see how prompt they are about a refund first, shall we?  I will say that, now that I've looked, it is very strange that the name and address in Texas listed for the vendor is not the return address on the package which came from a different company altogether in Toledo, Ohio.  When I searched either name and address, I found nothing for the address in Ohio, and nothing for the vendor from whom I ordered the book beyond links to their identical profiles on three separate used books sites, including the one on Abebooks.com  So... 

It seems safe to assume that this business is not a traditional bricks-and-mortar bookstore.  (I suppose I should say, "businesses," since I would seem to have been dealing with at least two in this transaction, not counting Abebooks.)  Whatever this operation is, it seems to exist, at least in public, only online.  I am not reassured, may I say, by this fact.  Nor am I much moved by the following, copied from the vendor's page at AbeBooks:

"I've been selling books for a long time and have achieved more than 99% positive feedback on eBay and amazon.com. I always strive to achieve best customer satisfaction and have always described books accurately. I will ship book within 12 hours of confirmed payment. We have more than three new and used million books list for sale on ABE, including a huge selection of affordable textbooks for college."

That use of the first person seems rather suspect, does it not?  I mean for a dealer who lists a book on what looks like a residential street in Texas (I peeked) and then ships it from a Post Office Box in Toledo, Ohio.  (To say nothing of the frightful English.)

All I know for sure at the moment?  I think we can trust the booksellers in an actual bookstore "in historic Leiper's Fork, Tennessee,"more than we might the un-named "I" in that paragraph above.  We'll have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, I will read my Lord Cecil and be grateful.