"Sophistication"
I don't normally bother to write online reviews, but this storefront's used book sales policy is so ridiculous that it prompted me to write a review.
First of all, the proprietor of this store seems to think he's sitting on hoards of books made of gold. In reality, they're a vast mix of popular mass-market books (Anchor paperbacks, etc.), some university press books, and a miscellany of other small-press and, sometimes, yes, "scarce" books (but usually not all that rare). Unfortunately for any prospective buyer, none of the secondhand books have any prices inscribed in them! Effectively, his sales are dependent on the volunteered labor of the browser to express interest in a book, which he'll then individually look up online, probably through amazon.com.
Months or years ago, when he first acquired all these books, likely from a deceased humanities academic, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and had him lookup several for me, which apparently is the only way he knows how to assign any prices. One screenplay book from a UK press he offered to me for $25-30, but I already had it, used, for about $10. He seems to pick an average or higher-than-average used price online, irrespective, also, of the physical condition of the specific copy he's trying to sell.
I was walking by more recently and popped back in just to see if he had any pricing for his books yet, and lo and behold they're still all unpriced. If they had been priced, I probably would have spent a couple hours in the store browsing and would have ended up buying at least ~$100+ worth of books, but I'm not going to waste my time while he has to look up ~20 books individually just to price them after I've already expressed interest in them.
I can't speak to whatever else he's selling, but the used books aspect of his business is an opportunistic scam to take advantage of the free labor of browsers tipping him off as to which books are actually desirable.
In short...
1. A book isn't "rare" just because it's out of print.
2. University press books are not automatically "rare."
3. Condition matters -- of the actual book being sold, not some Platonic idea of the book in question.
4. It's standard practice for used bookstores to pre-price their books, or at least, if not, to have set price ranges based on specific criteria. This place's excuse seems to be, "But we have so, so many books!" Quantity isn't an excuse to push all the labor onto the book browsers. read more