Second-hand page-turners

Frankfurt / DPA

Joerg Mewes is down at the paper-recycling collection with another 20 banana boxes of old books. As far as Mewes is concerned, these are mass-market titles of the past which are now unsellable and just take up space in his bookshop.
It’s best to just get rid of them. For pulp. It’s getting harder and harder to earn money with old books, says the second-hand-book seller from Overath, Germany. “Supply is increasing, demand decreasing.” It’s the same as it is with milk, Mewes says. “The stuff gets cheaper and cheaper, but you can’t consume more of it.”
Fellow bookseller Sibylle Wieduwilt takes a completely different approach. She runs the Tresor am Roemer second-hand bookshop in Frankfurt. There are no overflowing shelves or bargain bins to be found here. The most expensive book she currently has on sale costs 22,500 euros — a large-format, illustrated scientific work from 1771.
“The collapse in prices mainly affects the 20th century titles,” says Wieduwilt. It’s definitely possible to earn money with rare, special and valuable books, she says. There aren’t any fewer second-hand bookshops than there used to be — estimates put the figure at between 1,000 to 1,200 businesses in the German-speaking countries alone.
This includes private individuals making
additional income, wholesalers trading at penny prices, specialist dealers for rare items and little stores that still make perfect browsing spots for booklovers. “There’s no such thing as the death of second-hand bookshops,” says Wieduwilt, who is also chairwoman of
the German Association of German Antiquarian Booksellers.
“They’ve just moved — to the internet,” says Mewes, who in his second job is chairman of the second-hand booksellers’ interest group of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association. The internet is both a blessing and a curse for second-hand bookshops.
An online catalogue for used books, ZVAB, has existed in Germany for around 20 years ago. It was at first a makeshift outfit, but is
so valuable it has since been sold several
times over and now belongs to a subsidiary
of Amazon.
The advantage of online catalogues like these is that customers are much more likely to find what they are looking for, regardless of how unusual or far away it is.
The downside is that, thanks to the internet, there is a glut of practically every book on
the market. For mass-market paperbacks and anything else which was originally printed
in the tens of thousands, this drastically lowers the going price today to just cents. Purely bricks-and-mortar bookshops can’t survive
in this market.
Unless they find themselves new sources of income. Take Antiquariat Schutt, which is hidden in a back courtyard in the Bornheim area of Frankfurt. Angelika Schleindl’s store boasts a grand piano and a sofa — and there’s also a small kitchen in a side room.
She hardly sells any books there at all. “Most people come in to get rid of books,” Schleindl says. Sales? Hardly any. She sells a few books on the booklooker.de website, a popular book-listing trading site, and maybe one book a month in the store. But still she is determined to keep up her second-hand bookroom.
“This is my playroom,” says Schleindl. “I always wanted one as a child.” Schleindl earns the money to pay its rent by running a new-books shop on the street frontage, and by renting out the second-hand bookshop for events. The room is popular for readings, writers’ groups and book clubs.
With packed shelves up to the ceiling, it’s
the ideal backdrop for a bookish evening. Sibylle Wieduwilt’s motto is “less is more.” The bookseller would rather pay a private vendor 1,000 euros for a book than buy 1,000 books at a euro each.
“Mass-market stuff is fatal,” she says. Mewes says that 20 years ago, if he was offered a
stock of 5,000 books, he would select two thirds of them – today he takes just 10 per
cent. Sometimes, heirs clearing out the home of someone who has died insist that he takes everything.
Then he replies, “I’ll pay you 2,000 euros for everything, or 2,500 if I can choose.” At home too, ever fewer people want their walls filled
with bookshelves. Not even intellectuals build up a library for themselves these days, says Mewes. After all, academics tend to move often, and therefore prefer a simple, minimalist approach. Many books and articles can be stored electronically.
“Bookshelves are no longer a status symbol.” Anyone who inherits a whole private library and wants to sell it will struggle to find a
second-hand bookseller willing to make an offer. “The heirs are just stuck with their mountains of books.”