tore up from the floor up

Sup HUGE Garage Sale Utica LQQK!!!! TO MUCH TO LIST. You playin all coy advertising your wares on the craigslist. Say you gonna be there on Sunday selling books an seasonal items and when I roll up in my rizzle you aint no kinda there. WHAAAT? It coulda been ballin outta control boo, I brought the washingtons. I woulda been good to you. Why you gotta be like that baby? That shit is half steppin and my feelins is hurt now. That how you want ta represent HUGE Garage Sale Utica LQQK!!!! TO MUCH TO LIST? Wack.

peace out

Oh no I didn't!

Oh yes I did.

After the last post wherein I expressed my "inner fountain of fury and wrath" (thanks Carl Hiaasen) I thought a lot about what kind of bookseller I want to be. Turns out it isn't unskilled garbage picker. The local libraries feature hip hop classes and free internet porn, the one bookstore in the whole area is mostly a coffee shop. That's just the way it is. I can sit in my book room and spew out my frustrations over what isn't here or I can move on.
So, I canceled my expensive annual subscription service that allowed me look up isbns on a pda and get real time values. Yes, its super cool to put in a title about macrame or day trading and have that little machine tell you that you just scooped $10, $20 or even $60 dollars out of a pile of crap, but it doesn't increase my knowledge and connoisseurship. It just made me more anxious to find more books to sell as fast as possible, any books, where are they, omg I need more books. I have to justify the cost of this machine! Next garage sale! I only found $30 today! I am a failure! I hate everyone!
Meanwhile, the books I'm really interested in, the slow sellers, the long dollar: classic literature, Sci Fi, pulp, detective fiction, early Modern Library editions in perfect jackets, non fiction in interesting subjects like science, cooking, and history, pile up like driftwood in my book cave.
The fast dollar book dealer lifestyle is like day trading. A hot new book today could be worth pennies tomorrow. If you don't sell it immediately, you will shortly have a worthless book about fad diets or navel gazing self improvement taking up your limited storage space. Susan Powter anyone? No? Anyone?
I still feel the call of the fast dollar, but there are Iphone apps that do the same basic thing should I get the urge. In fact, I'm going to try one out at the thrift today. I'm still going to estate sales but not as urgently. AND I'm going to start cataloging the huge backlog of books I've already stashed for my website. It's like the Collyer brothers up in there only with fewer boobytraps and more Ulysses.
I won't have to sit up in my book cave to do it either thanks to my new friend MacBook. Hello MacBook, I'm making kissy noises at you. We're free to roam you and I. AND I can listen to pod casts and news feeds that give me news from outside this cultural dystopia. I'm as happy as a North Korean with a secret radio.

Who rules bartertown?

The past several weeks have been so devoid of any actual book sightings that I find myself worried that I may have found all the books in the Mohawk Valley. I did seven sales in quick succession last Saturday starting with an estate sale that had nothing on offer but disassembled bed frames and leather coats. On my way back into town I stopped at all the garage and block sales I could find, increasingly desperate to mitigate the expense in gas and time and exasperation with just one ohgod real book. I passed through no sidewalk having, ruthlessly bourgeois, white flight neighborhoods. There were tables with childrens clothing and plastic toys, homemade vhs tapes and last years big box store home decorating items. Many of these sales had actually spent money in the paper to advertise books, which to everyone but me means Bionocles and Dora the Explorer softcover propaganda. These are not really books. Not even when they have all the pages and don't smell like cheesy mac. Sorry to burst your bubble there, thirteenth grade educated suburban mom. And the presentation! Mwaaa! That's me putting my first two fingers and thumb together to my lips and making the kissy noise that designates French admiration. Cause I'm classy like that.
Classy like the aromatic pile of mildewy garbage you left out overnight in preparation for today's sale. A nice touch was telling me what what I don't buy goes straight to the salvation army. Because they enjoy having to rent multiple dumpsters to dispose of your toxic crap.
Hey! A box of readers digest condensed books from when you cleaned out grandma's basement? Just $2 each and dripping with earwigs?
IMA GET MY WALLET. It's in the car, which is partially parked on your lawn. Because you don't have any sidewalks, one of the hallmarks of civilization. This region ranked dead last in a recent Forbes magazine study of places to do business and have a career. We are one of the top ten worst places in the country to live and do business. We have a college attainment of only twenty percent, less than one percentage point of income growth, job growth and projected job growth. At least our civic leaders are concerned: "The first thing is, I've never bought a Forbes magazine in my life," says Utica Mayor David Roefaro. "I don't know many people who have." - Observer Dispatch. This man and all his colleagues own business in the area.
"I would say Forbes is one of the top-10 worst magazines in the country," Utica Community Revitalization Director Robert Sullivan said. "Who reads it anyway? When's the last time you were with a friend that just had to stop off and pick up Forbes?" -Utica Daily News. This man owns a local restaurant that is currently closed for fiscal malfeasance. Something about having to pay taxes and adopting the 'not gonna' business plan. Perhaps reading Forbes, which is one of the nation's premier business magazines and covers a "wide array of topics from the worlds of industry, finance, international business, marketing, law, taxes, science, technology, communications, investments and entrepreneurship" with an annual circulation of 900,000 could have helped with that.

I believe this region's dismal lack of higher education, mouth breathing intelligence levels, Appalachian style suspicion of the outsider and intense focus on children for vicarious thrills has a direct effect on the number and amount of desirable, clean, college reading level books. Anyone who enjoys activities not related to fetishising high school sports stars and personal watercraft is not doing it here. Even if they were, where would they be buying books? The last used bookstore anywhere near to Utica closed last fall and it mainly carried used paperback romances, one of the few literary forms generally deemed acceptable for adult consumption. New Hartford's Barnes and Noble is for childrens books, toys, the latest potboiler and for sitting hours in the cafe to read the free magazines. Books are for children and *whispering* the gays (FYI so are art and music). If you like those, you might be one or the other. The More You Know.

Actually writing out all of the above helps me pull the emergency vent valve so my spleen doesn't explode, and makes clear to me that I need to start finding books in other ways. Books I care to learn about, in defined niche areas. I'm already buying on the internet through various auction sites but now it's Serious Business. I'm not going to turn down a fast selling hypermodern or self help book that crosses my path, but I'm not going to waste my time trying to hunt them down anymore. Its time to move up.

I am thwarted in my goal

Honestly, I am never going to realize my goal of finding the next equivalent of Tammerlane in a box of old papers if you people don't stop selling abject crap at your yard and garage sales. Seriously, lets step it up out there. Alright, all joking but not really joking aside, if I'm going to drive 20 minutes to the literal middle of nowhere based on an ad that promises antiques, books, ephemera and other interesting items, I expect some of that to actually be present. Deerfield, I'm looking at you. What I don't want to see is your kids lemonade stand and a rat infested barn filled with used Tupperware, ripped up Simplicity dress patterns and a single pile of contemporary, chewed on kids board books. That's just cruel.

It took an immediate trip back to the Creekside diner for a short stack of pancakes to regain some enthusiasm. However the post pancake hunt was not roaringly sucessful either. I went to two garage sales in quick succession where the prices were pants on head retarded. At BOTH houses I heard mention that they were going to sell their items on Ebay after the sale. Why go to all the trouble to pay to advertise a sale, set it up, price everything, spend several days in your garage/driveway and then have to pack it all up again if you are not going to price things competitively? You are not an antique dealer/retailer and I'm not going to pay those prices if I'm standing in your carport. Frankly, with the amount of stuff both places had left over on a Sunday afternoon I don't think the strategy worked out.


The one place that did seem to get it was the tail end of an estate sale in its second weekend. I had been before but it was a hoarder's house and packed pretty tightly so in the hopes that new stuff had been churned up, I stopped by again. Everything was at least 50% off and deals were being made. Got a bag of books for $1.50. All interesting and I have hopes for a very old street guide to Venice.

I cast my nets

This weekend was lovely and called for some semi serious book hunting. Pictured is my haul. I did alright for my first time out this spring. There were a few advertised sales here and there around the region to choose from but none of the ads gave me that lucky feeling so I decide to take the shotgun approach and hit a neighborhood sale in a not wealthy, but middle/lower class area with tiny one story starter homes on small plots. Not old Utica. No sidewalks. Detached garages. Decade built circa 1970.
Very generally, the kinds of people in these neighborhoods are not readers. Reading is for children and old women so what is mostly on offer are scruffy kid's books, ratty paperback romances and James Patterson in hardback.
The big draw for most shoppers here is 'kids clothing'. Nearly every house had two or three folding tables set up with eight metric tons of clothing. Under the tables were boxes full of plastic toys and cheap junk. Every garage was packed to the ceiling with stuff which was not for sale. In fact, while browsing along line of plastic kitchen implements in tubs, I got to close to the open garage door of one gentleman who sternly ordered me away. Glancing inside I could see a wall of cardboard boxes marked 'kids clothes-storage'. Who knows what kind of Wallmart dragon's horde of treasures lie within! I shiver to think.

I come to these when I have limited time because I can hit ten to fifteen houses in quick succession. I am hoping that someone will decide to finally get rid of granddad's old worthless civil war reference books or train books or Aunt Mabel's crazy alternative medicine manuals. I'm just sayin, its happened before. However, the books on offer were mostly as described above and no antiquarian gold mines were struck.
I did hit one house that had a box full of recently printed text books and culled out the keepers. These are fairly advanced biology text books indicating that someone was doing some serious book learnin. I probably should have asked after more. Once I talked my way into a house of a nurse who was selling medical books and emerged with several hundred dollars worth of texts. It helps that I don't look like an ax murder. Also I impulse bought two vintage magazine ads which are both seductive and irresistible so clearly I had no choice. OH! and the book on knitting your own farmyard. Not just the animals, not just the farmer, but the houses and landscape too. That one is going to be hard to part with even though I have no intention of knitting, not ever.

In May, as the weather creeps up to above 60 degrees and it edges past likelihood of snow,(although it still might), we enter my favorite season. Summer.

In the Mohawk Valley, the months of June, July and August are liking waking up from a horrible collective nightmare. All the rest of the long year is slogging through snow and frost and sleet and waking up in the dark and heading home from work in the dark. Everyone burrows into their homes. I only go out to go to work or walk the dogs and absolutely no one shovels, not even businesses. A blanket depression settles over the city. There is one thing that keeps me from going totally Donner Party, Hunting For Books.

I spend the winter scouring the internet for books to buy and hoard until I can part with them for hopefully a small profit. It gives me a wild satisfaction and its usually just enough money to support my craving to buy more books. There is no such thing as a garage sale in Utica in the wintertime. Very few estate/moving sales too, but in spring and summer they pop up like crocus ripe with promise. Maybe crocus isn't the right metaphor, because I have seen some weird stuff here. Some creepy stuff, that I now wish I had taken pictures of. Utica isn't like anywhere else I have ever lived.
This immediate area has been culturally and genetically isolated for decades. The '80s and '90s saw a huge population drop and anyone without connection to the area fled. The remaining Utica natives, and by that I mostly refer to the second and third generation Italian and Polish families, have entrenched themselves as an unofficial higher cast. There is a distinct Utica accent, special Utica only foods, easily identifiable Utica facial traits, a fond remembrance of the Italian mafia, supposedly not active here anymore, and a 'friends and family' system of government which I believe is a direct result of the former.
As an outsider but with an Italian last name I can get by, although sometimes I get weird looks and asked if I'm really Italian. Technically neither are they. I don't mention that.
All that was a long way of saying that sometimes I go to a house sale and its like stepping back in time and into another country/dimension. Sometimes I remember to take a photo and I'll be putting them here, in this blog. Also, sometimes I find some really cool stuff and I feel like sharing. I'm also going to be documenting how to speak Utican, eat Utican, and stuff that generally fascinates or repels me about this area. Oh and weird stuff I find in books.
How's about we start with what I hope to be the first in a continuing series I am calling I don't need to spell it to sell it.