scav·enge: to take or gather (something usable) from discarded material.
There are hundreds of them. They have gangster names like Tommy Books and Leprechaun and roam the streets of New York in the wee hours of the morning looking for books. Nothing is off limits – dumpsters, garbage cans, anyplace that might hold a discarded book is fair game. They gather as many as they can hold and then head to the corner of 12th of Broadway and wait.
What are they waiting for?
9:30am. For this is the time The Strand bookstore opens and they can turn their found objects into cash!
This sub-culture of book scouts is exposed in Susan Dominus’ outstanding piece in the New York Times Their House to Yours, via the Trash.
“Book recycling in Manhattan is … a perfectly efficient system with no fat at all: So many discarded books go from someone’s garbage to a scavenger to a bookseller and, often enough, land gently in someone else’s home.”
“Is there any other industry in which such high-quality goods regularly make their way to consumers via a trash bin?” wonders Dominus.
I wish this wasn’t one of those “only in New York” stories because this would make a compelling argument for the public library to begin buying used books. Unfortunately, you would be hard-pressed to find this type and level of book recycling possible in most cities.
Why let the public libraries buy used books?
Two reasons:
-It just might help deal with the massive social service nightmare that many libraries face.
-It gives the library a chance to acquire needed books cheaply.
The homeless, one of the leading groups in the “average time spent” category for public libraries, and the group with the most negative weight, can now become an asset for the library.
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to send all the homeless or people with special needs who are spending an inordinate amount of time at your library out into the world to earn money by looking for books for you.
Not only will this decrease their time at the library, which will increase the karma of the library, but it would also create the opportunity to acquire needed books for circulation inexpensively. Even if you don’t need the book for circulation you buy it anyway and then turn around and send it to the library sale to get your money back.
How’s that for library 2.0?
I also wonder what impact these book scavengers have on the low success rate of books found through the public book swap site BookCrossing.com. This is the site that encourages people to leave books in public places for others to find. “Only about 33 percent of the books released ‘in the wild’ are picked up by bookcrossers within 30 days” says CEO Scott Sorochak. That leaves a significant amount of books that are accounted for.
I can see it now – people signing up on BookCrossing.com to find out where people are leaving books and then going out an snatching them up and selling them to a local bookstore.
Are the BookCrossing police far behind?
Last month Michelle Slatalla had a piece in the New York Times, Love That Book? Then Set it Free, recounting her BookCrossing experience and the frustration of not being able to find books that were supposedly out there and of putting books out in the world without them being found.
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