From the Editor by Craig Stark #62, 13 February 2006

Another look at the Modern Library this week, this time an intriguing Catherine Petruccione interview with ML guru Henry Toledano. Henry talks about China, the present state of bookselling - and of course (at length) about collecting and selling ML titles.

Also on board is a guru in her own right - Book Repair Editor Gail Altman. Today, in Book Repair for BookThinkers, she'll explain how to dry wet books, repair bumped and exposed corners, clean covers and remove labels - all things we can do with minimal expense to improve our biblio-problem-children.

Part II of "How to Become a Full-Time Bookseller" (Gold Edition issue #24: "Strategies for Grouping Books into Lots") was delivered last Thursday evening. Didn't get it? As always, write me at editor@bookthink.com for a re-send. A suggestion for those of you who have aggressive spam filters - if you have the option of adding the above email address to your address book, it may facilitate delivery of BookThink's newsletters. For example, both AOL and Yahoo email accounts will usher us into your mailbox without pause if we appear in your address books.

Finally, in the coming month or so, we'll be upgrading BookThink's BookShelf page. Here's the antique (present) version.

There will be new photos, new descriptions - and best of all, new titles that could well prove to be valuable additions to your bookselling reference library. The idea is to turn this into the best shopping resource for bookselling books anywhere. At the same time, in the interest of steering booksellers toward useful titles and away from titles that aren't overly useful (or are overpriced), I'll be doing short reviews of BookThink featured books at Amazon. Here's an example.

At the time of this writing, this very, very average book was available for $184.29! Don't - do not, I repeat - bite.

It's a funny thing about BookThink and book prices. If it's something we recommend selling (via 50/50 and the Gold Edition), prices go down (usually, thankfully, temporarily - with a glaring exception noted in this month's Gold Edition); if it's something we recommend buying, prices go up. And up.

Want another example?

No copies available on Amazon (at the time of this writing), but a VG copy is - ahem, charitably? - available on Alibris for $362.53!!! Well, unlike the Romance reference, this is a pretty useful book, but, as you might suspect, not by any means $362.53 useful. (And ... shhh ... there's another copy available for a sort of reasonable price somewhere else.) Here's our review.

Efforts to contact the author for an interview (and perhaps scare more copies up!) have heretofore been met with silence, but if anybody knows Lynn Vigeant, see what you can do.