Why Photo Requests Are Annoying
A short list of newly catalogued books, plus a book recommendation and an eBay sale
Paying the Bills: A short list this week
Why Requests for (More) Photographs Are Annoying
I haven’t done a scientific survey, but I’d wager that the number-one, most-griped-about aspect of modern antiquarian bookselling (not an oxymoron) is the never-ending stream of requests we dealers get for more photographs of our books. Most requests for photos don’t result in sales, and booksellers suspect that a lot of the requests are ruses to get a photo for some purpose other than making a buying decision (inclusion in school papers, for example, or to compare to the requester’s own copy).
A good percentage of the people who ask me for photos seem to be looking for copies described as very good that might grade as near fine. And rather than explain what it is they want to know, they ask for pictures.
Part of the reason photo requests grate on booksellers is that photography is a whole new task we now have to do in order to sell books. It used to be that a short catalog description was enough, but the Internet has destroyed the trust collectors used to have in written descriptions. Book photographs started out as a novelty, became a requirement, and are now needed as proof that you have the book and aren’t lying about its condition.
Booksellers are in an arms race, with more and more photos expected by buyers. They want to see the first edition statement on the copyright page; a simple assertion that a book is a first is no longer enough (see my previous rant related to that), nor is what I often do, writing out how I know the book is a first printing. Buyers want to see the boards and proof that the book isn’t price-clipped.
Buyers are not wrong to want this and booksellers have the option of not taking any photos if they are willing to sell fewer books as a result. But it is rather sad that the main purpose of photos now is to prove that written descriptions are accurate.
A (potential) buyer of a $50 book made the customer’s case in a series of five (!) emails he sent me when I declined to take more photos for him:
“If you want to be lazy and not provide more in your listings; fine; but for a serious buyer who wants to see for himself—like many serious buyers, as you ought to know—then you should accommodate… You oughtn’t be trying to decide for us, what we should or shouldn't want to know, or want to see.”
What started out as a nice way for buyers to see books online has turned into a defense against unscrupulous and uninformed sellers (of course, all booksellers make mistakes and there can be differences of opinion about condition, but those used to be settled with the occasional returned purchase).
Taking good pictures requires equipment, practice, and time. Then there’s cropping and adjusting the colors so they look right. Removing backgrounds is yet another task. AI has made this last easier, but it’s not foolproof. Then the images have to be named or otherwise linked to the right inventory item and uploaded to various platforms. Photos are a lot of work.
The demand for photographs is also changing the book market. Later today I am going to look at a large collection of mint condition books, kept in ideal conditions. I looked at them four years ago and passed because the books were too much work. I expect my conclusion now will be the same, only more so. You can’t sell hypermodern firsts without photographs and the prices of most books don’t justify the time required to get the images online.
Most weeks I spend a solid day on photography. Requests for one more photo can put me over the edge. Plus every time I pull a book off the shelf to take a requested photo, there is a chance that it will be misplaced because the phone will probably ring or the mail carrier will come in with a question about packages, or something else will distract me. Once a book is set down in an unexpected place, it can get lost very easily. If the book has a jacket protector, taking extra photos often requires removing it, increasing the risk of accidental damage and those damned pieces of plastic never really go back on as well the second time.
All this is part of an explanation why this week’s new arrival list is so short, just 22 items, for which I took 91 usable photographs (and many more that I rejected for one reason or another). Twenty-two books is all I could get done for this week.
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Grown from the Archives
The most captivating book I have read this year is Greg King’s The Ghost Forest, a work deeply rooted in archives, both personal and public. Back when I owned Eureka Books, Greg would stop in now and again and talk about his book-in-progress on the redwoods. As the years went by, I started to get concerned.
I shouldn’t have been concerned.
Greg took on the daunting task of retelling the history of the destruction and preservation of the once-great redwood forests of California. The topic is as big as the trees themselves, and while individual pieces of the story have been told, the whole saga has never been successfully attempted before.
The Ghost Forest, subtitled “Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods,” combines the King family’s legacy in the timber business, corporate logging histories, a first person memoir of Greg’s Earth First! activism, and a brutal account of the Save the Redwoods League’s intimate connection with the eugenics movement and its collusion with timber companies.
From an antiquarian bookseller’s perspective, I found Greg’s use of archives to be fascinating. By his own count, he copied 10,000 pages from the Save the Redwoods League archives in the Bancroft Library, finding in them smoking gun evidence that for much of its history the conservation group was a greenwashing front for corporate logging interests. Greg also draws from his own personal archive, assembled over many decades of environmental activism, and from that of Judi Bari, the beloved Earth Firster who survived a bombing assassination attempt only to die from cancer.
While in the popular mind, the late 20th century battle to save the last of the old growth redwoods is dominated by protests and tree sits, The Ghost Forest points out that the tree sitters also fought their battles in court, in administrative hearings, and even at shareholders meetings of public companies. They learned all the rules governing logging in California and used them to delay and occasionally thwart the timber companies who were used to rubber-stamp treatment of their plans. Those bureaucratic and legal victories were won by determined activists who read everything and kept it all.
Greg King will be at Powell’s City of Books on Monday, November 6, at 7 p.m., in conversation with my wife, Amy Stewart. I think it will be an excellent event. He will also speak at the Book Bin in Corvallis on November 9 starting at 6 p.m.
The Ghost Forest is available wherever you get your new books, and if you subscribe to Malcolm Gladwell’s Next Big Idea book club, it’s already coming to you in the mail.
Those Vonnegutt prints look great! Off to google to see if it's possible to clean the spotting on the paper...