Amazon and Goo Gone
So we were rumaging around my parents’ house on X-mas, because the snow storm had kept us in for the night. I find a few old Tolkien books in the closet that I had bought more than a decade ago: The Complete Guide to Middle Earth and The Lost Road. Oh, I thought, I should take these since I have the car, and it’d be fun to glance through them again. The Lost Road has a big yellow Barnes and Noble remainders sticker on it, since I remember buying it for a few bucks over at the gone-but-not-forgotten Sales Annex on 5th Avenue and 18th Street.
For some reason, I decided to look up the Complete Guide on Amazon, possibly since I realized that I have no need of a glossary of all the proper nouns and Elvish words from The Hobbit through The Silmarillion. Lo and behold, it was out of print, and people were asking on average $15 for it. I listed it for sale, and sold it within 30 minutes at $14, a price somewhat too low because I was timid (I should have asked for more, because if you’re paying double digits for a twenty-five year old mass market paperback full of stuff you can find on the Internet, you must really, really want the book for its own sake). Gasp! This is in contrast to the near-disaster last week, when I got $10 for one of Grace’s old, heavy text books, and found that the shipping was about $10 because the buyer wanted it expedited.
I naturally looked up The Lost Road, since I really don’t need a historical account of how Tolkien developed the story of Numenor, and if I wanted one, I can pick up a trade paperback pretty easily. It was also a first edition Houghton Mifflin printing so I was hopeful. Double gasp! A buyer was asking $300 for a “very fine” copy of it, and a seller was offering $50 for a copy, though I’m not sure what condition he was looking for. My problem is the giant yellow remainders sticker on the dust cover. I was going to ask $25 for my copy because of it; still a nice little sum for something I had never read and had been sitting in the closet for most of the past ten years.
Later that day, I chatted with Scott about this whole collectible book craziness (surely amped up by the release of The Two Towers), and mentioned the big yellow sticker on the cover. Don’t peel it off by hand, he said, use Goo Gone. So, a couple of days later, I found Goo Gone at the hardware store, and gave it a try. I peeled back the yellow sticker, and it left old-glue residue on the cover. I rubbed the residue with a cottonball soaked with Goo Gone, and the residue vanished. Amazing stuff. The dust cover is now free of the awful remainders tag. It still has scuff marks on it — the book is however pristine –so it’s not “fine”, but it looks good. I changed the asking price on Amazon to $75. I’ll see if the guy who wants it for $50 goes for it. If not, after a couple of weeks, I’ll probably bring it down to $50. It’s all windfall, after all.
Next time I’m in Bayside, I have to rummage through the closet a bit more. Pity I mostly bought cheap paperbacks at the time.
Addendum: The Lost Road sold for $75 within twenty-four hours. I should have asked for $100.