QMR Book of the Week by Craig Stark #119, 21 April 2008

Besides attempting to explain in this weekly column why our featured books have value, sometimes I also try to toss in a bookselling principle or some advice. My advice this week is not to look for flashpoints with blinders on - to a point, that is, where you see only one flashpoint at the expense of others. So very many books yield additional flashpoints, often without much of a fight, if you're willing to dig some. The more you unearth, the more likely your outcome will be better compared to that produced by simply searching the title for comparables, pricing it on this basis alone, and moving on.

In the case of this week's title, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, there are three major flashpoints: Roy DeCarava, Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. I suspect that most of you have heard of Hughes if for no other reason than he was a prolific writer whose work ended up being published in the very things we sell - books. I'm guessing that fewer of you know who DeCarva is and perhaps fewer still what the Harlem Renaissance was.

The Harlem Renaissance, which had its genesis in the 1920s, was one of the more influential artistic and intellectual movements in the 20th century - influential to both to blacks and whites, though it expressed itself in the context of black culture. It was a significant departure from that which preceded it because the black experience finally began to become the black experience, one based on black identity instead of that awkward knockoff of white culture that had long prevailed in America. Both DeCarva and Hughes grew up in Harlem during this period and, as adults, became important figures in the Renaissance, DeCarva as a photographer who documented (among other things) Harlem culture and Hughes as a writer who produced related work in poems, short stories, novels and plays.

At first glance, this might seem like the sort of thing that would hold interest for blacks exclusively, but no. In 1926, Carl Van Vechten published Nigger Heaven, a controversial yet immensely popular novel that exposed the sometimes harsh reality of Harlem life. Van Vechten himself was white, and many white readers not only saw inside what he described as the "great black walled city" for the first time but were genuinely intrigued by what they saw. In turn, many began to venture into Harlem and explore its vibrant nightlife, sometimes using Nigger Heaven as makeshift guidebook.

With this historical background in hand - and it doesn't take long to come up with this - you'll be better able to communicate the significance of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a memoir of early Harlem, to your potential buyers - and add value to it.

You'll see 100 profit-producing books like this every 3 months in BookThink's Quarterly Market Report of Common, Profitable Books, each one presented in a clear format with bibliographic essentials and links to photos. Here is the actual entry for The Sweet Flypaper of Life, #28 in QMR, issue #4:

TITLE: THE SWEET FLYPAPER OF LIFE
AUTHOR: Roy DeCarava, Langston Hughes
ILLUSTRATOR: n/a
EDITOR: n/a
PLACE:
COPYRIGHT DATE: 1967
IMPRINT: Farrar Straus & Giroux
ISBN OR LCCN: 080901338X
ISBN-13: 978-0809013388
BINDING: Softcover
COMMENTARY: Renowned photographer DeCarava and equally renowned poet Hughes chronicle growing up in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, and these multiple flashpoints sends values up and up. Grab anything, hardcover or softcover.
LINK:

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