Booksellers Defend Their Honor

Speaking as the proprietor of a secondhand bookshop, I’d like to point out that our trade depends upon the confidence of the patrons from whom we buy our books, in addition to the goodwill of those who buy from us. Now The Times comes along to recklessly charge that the “real culprits” behind the increase in theft from new-book stores are secondhand book dealers.

As The Times discovered, the profits from the sale to secondhand book shops of expensive new books “were often paltry.” Because of the relatively slow turnover that we get on most of our stock, we can typically pay no more than 10% of the original cover price for a current title. The Times asks its readers to believe that gangs of thieves can be routinely recruited to commit felony theft for 10 cents on the dollar.

Reported losses by a store of as much as $100,000 a year would amount to the following: Assuming the current cost of hardcover bestsellers to be $25 per book, the average annual loss would be 4,000 books a year or about 11 books a day. Naming used-book dealers as the primary culprits for such epic-scale theft is not only unfair but also ignores what retailers of all stripes persistently cite as one of the most significant sources of loss: employee theft.

New-book stores are not alone as victims. Theft is on the rise in our business too, in particular at the highest end of our trade, where the theft of a single rare book could saddle us with a loss of $5,000 or more.

ROGER GOZDECKI

The Book Shop

Covina