My Father Still Prices the Book Lots

My father ran this business for over thirty years before I took it over from him, and officially he’s retired now, has been for a few years, but retired for him mostly means he doesn’t do the heavy lifting anymore and lets me deal with the families directly. He still shows up almost every weekend there’s a sale with a decent book lot in it, doesn’t even call ahead most of the time, just appears in the driveway around nine with his own folding stool and starts going through boxes like he never stopped.

We disagree about pricing more than either of us will usually admit out loud. He came up in an era where a first edition without a dust jacket was basically worthless to a serious buyer, and I’ve had to explain to him more than once that the market’s shifted, that a clean reading copy of the right title can move faster and for more than a pristine one nobody actually wants to read. He’ll grumble about it, price something the old way anyway half the time out of pure habit, and then act surprised when it sells for less than I said it would.

What I’ve never told him, because it would embarrass us both, is that I learned to actually look at a book, not just read the title and guess, by watching him do it silently for years before he ever explained the process out loud. He’d turn a book over in his hands the same unhurried way every time, check the binding, check the corners, hold it up to the light to look for water damage you can’t see head on, and only after all that would he say a number. I do the exact same sequence now without thinking about it, and I didn’t notice until a customer commented on it a few years back that I’d basically become him at the folding table.

We had a real fight about a box a while back, an old run of games mixed in with paperbacks, he wanted to price the whole thing as one lot the way he always used to and I wanted to break it out piece by piece because I thought individual pricing would get more for the family. I won that one, mostly, though he still brings it up sometimes as evidence that I overcomplicate things that don’t need it. Maybe I do. He’s not always wrong about that.

He’s slower these days, won’t lift the heavier boxes anymore and I don’t ask him to, but he can still spot a real find faster than I can most weekends, some instinct built up over decades that I don’t think I’ve fully caught up to yet even doing this full time myself. I used to think I’d eventually stop needing him at the table. I don’t think that anymore. I just hope he keeps showing up.