6 ms·

The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars (sold individually on the second-hand book market, after being carefully catalogued etc.), but nobody interest

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.
  - MikePlacid 4y ago
    To be fair, Van Buren (and My Arabic Library project) was not in the military. He was in the State Department.
- The-Bus 4y ago
  Good double feature with the Shiv Ramdas rice truck story: https://twitter.com/nameshiv/status/1301521850552315904 https://twitter.com/nameshiv/status/1301521850552315904
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  The idea of sending books that are deeply close to American history seems like an obviously terrible idea. Yeah no shit that wasn't going to resonate with an Iraqi child. A lot of these books are culturally foreign to American kids.
  - MikePlacid 4y ago
    Great books are often cross-cultural. We Russian kids enjoyed Tom Sawyer very much. “It”s not every day that a boy gets a chance to paint a fence”… There was (and is) a lot of buzz in Russian culture about Moby Dick though I personally failed to enjoy it. Never heard of Of Mice and Men though - probably because our communists were rather puritanic. I think problem was that planting a book-reading habits require a lot more work than providing books.
- jibbawi 4y ago
  > “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.” Baghdad, before the invasion, was known for the high percentage of readers compared to other cities in the Middle East. We -Arabs- had a saying: "Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads." I doubt the above quote being the true goal of "My Arabic Library" project. I guess it was an attempt to change the culture of people by exposing them to American literature, which would help eventually the political cause of US government in Iraq.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars The article does not say that or anything remotely similar.
- ColinWright 4y ago
  Quoting: > ... I looked through some of the books in the top boxes and realized that there were some very old, and often valuable, books in this boxes. You're right that this isn't saying that the books were definitely worth a lot of money, so it really say something remotely similar.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    That's a far stretch to "tens of thousands of dollars." A valuable second-hand book can be $50.
    - kragen 4y ago
      It's true, if none of the books were rare, it might have only been thousands of dollars.
      - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
        It easily could have been worth tens of dollars. Random books donated to Salvation Army aren't likely to be ones that people actually want. Books by the Foot will sell you books for about $0.20 per book https://booksbythefoot.com/product/shelf-filler-bulk/ https://booksbythefoot.com/product/shelf-filler-bulk/
        kragen 4y ago
        The article said, "there were some very old, and often valuable, books in this boxes," which is somewhat difficult to interpret but seems to be saying that many of the books were valuable in the sense of fetching a high price, unlike those sold on the rather offensive page you link.
bluGill 4y ago
Good auctioneers make sure that there is a buyer for specific things like that. I'm surprised that there wasn't a used book buyer in the crowd. Though maybe his guy didn't show up.
- cperciva 4y ago
  Good auctioneers make sure there are at least two buyers for specific things like that.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    That depends. For things they expect to go be worth a lot they want two buyers. However for things like scrap metal they just want one buyer - they know that buyer will get a great deal, but the value in scrap isn't high enough to support two and so getting a second buyer means both will disappear soon. Good auctioneers know what goes to each category.
- vlunkr 4y ago
  It's a Salvation Army auction. I imagine the main purpose is to dump stuff that they haven't found any other use for. They get all this stuff for free, any money they happen to make from an auction is just a nice bonus.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Exactly this - and 99% of the time a “pallet of books from Salvation Army/Goodwill” will be entirely romance novels and cookbooks and not worth the pulp.
asciimov 4y ago
Like most used things these days, book buying/selling/collecting was way easier 20 years ago, before smart phones. Nowadays half of the market is flippers and scalpers, prices have shot up, and nobody is getting a pallet of good books for a dollar anymore.
- ornornor 4y ago
  I found bookfinder.com a very helpful tool for acquiring used books at the best price. I also love the 1999 UI, and it’s super snappy.
- betamaxthetape 4y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with this. The prices that things sold at might have been cheaper 20 years ago, but the advent of the web with used-goods marketplaces has allowed people to access things that were previously not available or hard to find. I can go onto ebay and order things from the US that were never available locally in my home country. The same with Yahoo! Auctions for items sold only to the Japanese market. And not only can I access things that I couldn't before, but I can easily search for things. Want a copy of an obscure record? No need to search dozens of local stores - Discogs will probably have a few copies for sale. Need a book to complete a collection? Try a quick search on Amazon or Abebooks. While the prices that things sell for may be higher, I find that it is considerably easier to collect things now than it would have been before the web.
- kbelder 4y ago
  I mostly agree, but there are exceptions. For my birthday a couple years ago my son showed up with a couple cardboard boxes full of books. Turned out to be a complete set of "Great Books of the Western World," worth well over $1,000. He had picked it up for about $30 at an estate sale a couple days before.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Lol. No. I bought a bunch of architecture books a few years ago at an estate sale for $5. Flipped through them and my son looked them up on eBay - we sold the collection for several thousand dollars.
obiefernandez 4y ago
In the late 90s in Atlanta I got my first ever Mac computer (Performa iirc??) at an estate sale for free because it was "broken". The way we established that it was broken was because the power switch on the back of it did not do anything. I got home, did some light digging on the internet and determined that the power switch on the back is the main power, and that actually turning on the computer involved pushing one of the keys on the keyboard. Booted up just fine. I miss estate sales.
- kragen 4y ago
  Why did you stop going to estate sales?

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.
- MikePlacid 4y ago
  To be fair, Van Buren (and My Arabic Library project) was not in the military. He was in the State Department.
The-Bus 4y ago
Good double feature with the Shiv Ramdas rice truck story: https://twitter.com/nameshiv/status/1301521850552315904 https://twitter.com/nameshiv/status/1301521850552315904
spywaregorilla 4y ago
The idea of sending books that are deeply close to American history seems like an obviously terrible idea. Yeah no shit that wasn't going to resonate with an Iraqi child. A lot of these books are culturally foreign to American kids.
- MikePlacid 4y ago
  Great books are often cross-cultural. We Russian kids enjoyed Tom Sawyer very much. “It”s not every day that a boy gets a chance to paint a fence”… There was (and is) a lot of buzz in Russian culture about Moby Dick though I personally failed to enjoy it. Never heard of Of Mice and Men though - probably because our communists were rather puritanic. I think problem was that planting a book-reading habits require a lot more work than providing books.
jibbawi 4y ago
> “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.” Baghdad, before the invasion, was known for the high percentage of readers compared to other cities in the Middle East. We -Arabs- had a saying: "Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads." I doubt the above quote being the true goal of "My Arabic Library" project. I guess it was an attempt to change the culture of people by exposing them to American literature, which would help eventually the political cause of US government in Iraq.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

> The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars The article does not say that or anything remotely similar.

ColinWright 4y ago
Quoting: > ... I looked through some of the books in the top boxes and realized that there were some very old, and often valuable, books in this boxes. You're right that this isn't saying that the books were definitely worth a lot of money, so it really say something remotely similar.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  That's a far stretch to "tens of thousands of dollars." A valuable second-hand book can be $50.
  - kragen 4y ago
    It's true, if none of the books were rare, it might have only been thousands of dollars.
    - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
      It easily could have been worth tens of dollars. Random books donated to Salvation Army aren't likely to be ones that people actually want. Books by the Foot will sell you books for about $0.20 per book https://booksbythefoot.com/product/shelf-filler-bulk/ https://booksbythefoot.com/product/shelf-filler-bulk/
      - kragen 4y ago
        The article said, "there were some very old, and often valuable, books in this boxes," which is somewhat difficult to interpret but seems to be saying that many of the books were valuable in the sense of fetching a high price, unlike those sold on the rather offensive page you link.

bluGill 4y ago

Good auctioneers make sure that there is a buyer for specific things like that. I'm surprised that there wasn't a used book buyer in the crowd. Though maybe his guy didn't show up.

cperciva 4y ago
Good auctioneers make sure there are at least two buyers for specific things like that.
- bluGill 4y ago
  That depends. For things they expect to go be worth a lot they want two buyers. However for things like scrap metal they just want one buyer - they know that buyer will get a great deal, but the value in scrap isn't high enough to support two and so getting a second buyer means both will disappear soon. Good auctioneers know what goes to each category.
vlunkr 4y ago
It's a Salvation Army auction. I imagine the main purpose is to dump stuff that they haven't found any other use for. They get all this stuff for free, any money they happen to make from an auction is just a nice bonus.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Exactly this - and 99% of the time a “pallet of books from Salvation Army/Goodwill” will be entirely romance novels and cookbooks and not worth the pulp.

asciimov 4y ago

Like most used things these days, book buying/selling/collecting was way easier 20 years ago, before smart phones. Nowadays half of the market is flippers and scalpers, prices have shot up, and nobody is getting a pallet of good books for a dollar anymore.

ornornor 4y ago
I found bookfinder.com a very helpful tool for acquiring used books at the best price. I also love the 1999 UI, and it’s super snappy.
betamaxthetape 4y ago
I'm not sure I agree with this. The prices that things sold at might have been cheaper 20 years ago, but the advent of the web with used-goods marketplaces has allowed people to access things that were previously not available or hard to find. I can go onto ebay and order things from the US that were never available locally in my home country. The same with Yahoo! Auctions for items sold only to the Japanese market. And not only can I access things that I couldn't before, but I can easily search for things. Want a copy of an obscure record? No need to search dozens of local stores - Discogs will probably have a few copies for sale. Need a book to complete a collection? Try a quick search on Amazon or Abebooks. While the prices that things sell for may be higher, I find that it is considerably easier to collect things now than it would have been before the web.
kbelder 4y ago
I mostly agree, but there are exceptions. For my birthday a couple years ago my son showed up with a couple cardboard boxes full of books. Turned out to be a complete set of "Great Books of the Western World," worth well over $1,000. He had picked it up for about $30 at an estate sale a couple days before.
Spooky23 4y ago
Lol. No. I bought a bunch of architecture books a few years ago at an estate sale for $5. Flipped through them and my son looked them up on eBay - we sold the collection for several thousand dollars.

obiefernandez 4y ago

In the late 90s in Atlanta I got my first ever Mac computer (Performa iirc??) at an estate sale for free because it was "broken". The way we established that it was broken was because the power switch on the back of it did not do anything. I got home, did some light digging on the internet and determined that the power switch on the back is the main power, and that actually turning on the computer involved pushing one of the keys on the keyboard. Booted up just fine. I miss estate sales.

kragen 4y ago
Why did you stop going to estate sales?