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> He looked around at the faces in the crowd and said, “I’m opening the bidding at one dollar.” I about shit myself. I bid the $1 immediately to get things roll

> He looked around at the faces in the crowd and said, “I’m opening the bidding at one dollar.” I about shit myself. I bid the $1 immediately to get things rolling. Well, after I bid, he looked around and said, “Once, twice, sold that man there for $1.” I just laughed… and wondered how the Hell I was going to get this pallet home and what I was going to do with all those books. > When I asked the auctioneer afterwards why he’d let it go so cheaply, he said, “Did you see anyone trampling you to get in a bid?” I said no, I didn’t. His reply, with a smirk on his face, was, “Gotta’ know your audience in this job.” > Well, needless to say, I got the books home and spent a few years going through them and selling some, giving some away, etc. However, that’s not the point of this story. The point was finding things in books. So, with that in mind… Dude goes to an auction and finds books. Nobody bids on the books. Dude is amazed that the auctioneer is willing to sell him something nobody wants for a low price. Dude spends years going through those books. I'm happy for this guy.

weberer 4y ago
I feel stupid for just now realizing there's a link and OP is not just asking HN.
ColinWright 4y ago
Your summary is kinda accurate, but I can't help but feel that you've missed the point completely.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  It's not the point, it's just the part of it I enjoyed
motoboi 4y ago
Dude found friend.
jacobolus 4y ago
The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars (sold individually on the second-hand book market, after being carefully catalogued etc.), but nobody interested in buying books happened to be at the auction and the auctioneer set a $1 minimum bid because he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale. The auction house could surely get significantly more for their books if they knew the right venue to sell them (somewhere frequented by used booksellers), but I guess it wasn’t worth their trouble to figure out where that might be. This is sort of like the time I went to a car auction as a kid and some college students bought a lightly used stretch limo in perfect working order for (the minimum bid of) $100.
- MikePlacid 4y ago
  > he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale. This reminds me of one of the strangest things I ever read in the books: My Arabic Library About eighteen months before I arrived in Iraq, one of my predecessors had ordered My Arabic Library, $88,000 worth of books, an entire shipping container. My Arabic Library was a Bush-era, US government–wide project to translate classic American books, so we now have Tom Sawyer, The House of the Seven Gables, and Of Mice and Men in Arabic. The Embassy had big plans for the books, claiming, “It is so important that the children of Baghdad, the next generation of leaders of Iraq, obtain basic literacy skills. A love of learning and literacy will mean better job opportunities for them when they grow up. They will be able to better support their families and help build a more prosperous Iraq.” Everyone forgot about the books until we learned that a truck was bringing them in from Jordan. After our prayers that the driver would abandon the truck en route failed, my team was stuck with the problem of what to do with a container of books that no one wanted. Apparently, there was little interest among Iraqi schools in reading The Crucible or Moby-Dick, as the books didn’t fit into their centralized curriculum. I was charged with getting rid of them, to anywhere; the lucky winner needed only a truck. We cajoled a nearby school to take the whole mess from us as a personal favor. Their only condition was that they would not have to do the loading themselves, so that is how a couple of us ended up humping books into a flatbed truck while a high school principal and a local truck driver sat in the shade smoking, watching us. We heard later from a third party that, failing to sell the books on the black market, the principal just dumped them behind the school. Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People This was very strange to me cause I used to think of American government as very efficient, and with experience of solving exactly the same problem many times already - Germany, Japan, Korea. And the thought that somebody could just waste my yearly taxes on nothing - was very strange and disturbing.
  - BarryMilo 4y ago
    > And the thought that somebody could just waste my yearly taxes on nothing - was very strange and disturbing. I've been told the US military is a veritable cornucopia of waste.
highwaylights 4y ago
You’d love the “Time Enough at Last” episode of The Twilight Zone if you’ve never seen it. Maybe don’t Google it, though!

weberer 4y ago

I feel stupid for just now realizing there's a link and OP is not just asking HN.

ColinWright 4y ago

Your summary is kinda accurate, but I can't help but feel that you've missed the point completely.

spywaregorilla 4y ago
It's not the point, it's just the part of it I enjoyed

motoboi 4y ago

Dude found friend.

jacobolus 4y ago

The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars (sold individually on the second-hand book market, after being carefully catalogued etc.), but nobody interested in buying books happened to be at the auction and the auctioneer set a $1 minimum bid because he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale. The auction house could surely get significantly more for their books if they knew the right venue to sell them (somewhere frequented by used booksellers), but I guess it wasn’t worth their trouble to figure out where that might be. This is sort of like the time I went to a car auction as a kid and some college students bought a lightly used stretch limo in perfect working order for (the minimum bid of) $100.

MikePlacid 4y ago
> he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale. This reminds me of one of the strangest things I ever read in the books: My Arabic Library About eighteen months before I arrived in Iraq, one of my predecessors had ordered My Arabic Library, $88,000 worth of books, an entire shipping container. My Arabic Library was a Bush-era, US government–wide project to translate classic American books, so we now have Tom Sawyer, The House of the Seven Gables, and Of Mice and Men in Arabic. The Embassy had big plans for the books, claiming, “It is so important that the children of Baghdad, the next generation of leaders of Iraq, obtain basic literacy skills. A love of learning and literacy will mean better job opportunities for them when they grow up. They will be able to better support their families and help build a more prosperous Iraq.” Everyone forgot about the books until we learned that a truck was bringing them in from Jordan. After our prayers that the driver would abandon the truck en route failed, my team was stuck with the problem of what to do with a container of books that no one wanted. Apparently, there was little interest among Iraqi schools in reading The Crucible or Moby-Dick, as the books didn’t fit into their centralized curriculum. I was charged with getting rid of them, to anywhere; the lucky winner needed only a truck. We cajoled a nearby school to take the whole mess from us as a personal favor. Their only condition was that they would not have to do the loading themselves, so that is how a couple of us ended up humping books into a flatbed truck while a high school principal and a local truck driver sat in the shade smoking, watching us. We heard later from a third party that, failing to sell the books on the black market, the principal just dumped them behind the school. Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People This was very strange to me cause I used to think of American government as very efficient, and with experience of solving exactly the same problem many times already - Germany, Japan, Korea. And the thought that somebody could just waste my yearly taxes on nothing - was very strange and disturbing.
- BarryMilo 4y ago
  > And the thought that somebody could just waste my yearly taxes on nothing - was very strange and disturbing. I've been told the US military is a veritable cornucopia of waste.

highwaylights 4y ago

You’d love the “Time Enough at Last” episode of The Twilight Zone if you’ve never seen it. Maybe don’t Google it, though!