Friday 9 November 2012

Amazon Marketplace

Secondhand books!  One of the greatest pleasures of life.  I ordered 14 books about Thomas Hardy. Such was the enthusiasm with which I pressed "buy" that I later found out I had ordered the same book in different editions in three cases.  Never mind, three of the duplicates cost the enormous sum of £0.01 each.  I can scarcely believe that anyone finds it worthwhile to trade in books that they can only sell for one penny.  I suppose that they make a small profit on the post and package costs which are £2.80 per book.

The most expensive book in the collection was only £7.49.    Two are individually numbered copies of a book published in a limited edition of two thousand.  That feels rather special, even if they are both ex-library books, with the old date-stamps still intact.  The older of the two has date stamps going back to 1938. That is almost antique!  They are from university libraries.  One of these cost £3.99 and the other £2.49.

Another book cost £0.87.  How does that work? How did someone arrive at that figure for an out-of-print copy of TH's Notebooks? 

I am not complaining.  It has been like Christmas here for the last two weeks - exciting parcels arriving by almost every post, and an absolute feast of interesting reading.

1 comment:

  1. Old books in small bookshops cast a delicious spell don't they?

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