Special Announcements by Craig Stark 11 November 2025

By Craig Stark

Such a struggle for many, making a living at bookselling. What's more, even if you're doing ok today, do you feel confident that you will tomorrow? What about next year? The slow-sales topic has been around for several decades, but now it's taken on a new urgency. Changes are happening so fast that it's likely difficult for you to keep up with them. And the competition? Whoa. I trust that you're young and energetic because getting the best stuff in the field will almost always involve an athletic event. And I can attest to the fact that your athleticism won't last forever.

Today's feature article, Part II of Part I's "Where Love Has Gone: The Future of Bookselling?" appears today with a somewhat different subtitle: "Are We Moving Toward a Loss of Humanity?" For years now I've been hearing an almost predictable answer from other booksellers who are asked, "What is the most important factor in succeeding at bookselling?" The great majority of answers cluster pretty tightly around locating good inventory. Sourcing, in other words. No doubt sourcing is important, but what I've noticed again and again is that almost all sources eventually go away. The word gets out, whether you want it to or not, and the easy things go first. This forces you to be on the lookout, usually relentlessly, for new sources. And yet I've also noticed that there is one source of inventory that has never gone away and perhaps never will. Have you discovered it yet? The answer is given today, in Part II.

Another observation. In my daily search for inventory myself there appears a group of books that pop up time and time again as misrepresented. Most often this concerns an assertion that the copy one is offering is a first edition when it certainly is not. These are books that are familiar to most booksellers, seem to surface with almost daily regularity, and whose value as first editions is significant. My vote for the granddaddy of all misrepresented books on this autumn day, 2025, is

Gone With the Wind.

Identifying a "true" first (a first printing, that is), couldn't be easier. If "Set up and electrotyped, Published May, 1936" appears on the copyright page, you've nailed it. But trouble starts almost immediately in June and continues with twists and turns through multiple printings, months and years. Few books exhibit these complexities, and what makes this discussion important is that early and often not so early printings also have value, the earlier the better, not to mention that one of the June printings is a Book-of-the-Month edition that is identical to the trade edition in every last respect, including a priced dust jacket. How many booksellers even know this? If this sparks an interest in you, BookThink has published a detailed bibliography of this publishing mess that will guide you to clarity. This study includes bibliographic points of all printings through the 15th, a publishing background with biographic information on Margaret Mitchell, her signature variations, a marketing analysis, secondary material that will deliver profits and more - whatever I could think of to help you make more money off this book.

It's available in print version only here.

A final point - or announcement. Believe it or not, there was a time not too long after BookThink's founding in 2003, that it was statistically ranked in the top 100 US websites overall. Online bookselling was catching fire, and there weren't any competitors to speak of doing what we were doing - attempting to teach others how to make money selling books. In addition to what must be many thousands of competing entities today, over the years life has happened, and in our case it has interrupted things, slowed progress and otherwise limited what we could accomplish. Simultaneously, operating costs have risen and have continued to rise, this time to a point where it's making less and less sense to absorb them. As I see it, I can do one of two things: I can shut down the site permanently or I can continue to offer whatever bookselling insight I might have acquired in the past 25 or so years and march on. Currently, I'm in good health, mentally sharp and still enthusiastic about moving forward - and I believe I can still offer things of value to fellow booksellers. In turn, if you feel that I still have something to offer, some measure of financial assistance will enable me to continue without compromising my own bookselling business. If you haven't already noticed it, there is a small banner on the home page that, if clicked, will enable you to donate something to the cause - in fact, there's one right here that will work as well >>>

No amount is too small. Anything will be appreciated. If things go okay in the coming months, you've got me. If not, I'll respectfully retire to full-time bookselling and, most importantly of all, deeply thank you for the longstanding support you've given me. It's been one of the biggest blessings of my life.