lunch hour liaisons

Over a recent lunch hour, I waddled over to Artspace and then up and down the hall just outside the MWG's offices, running my fingers along the spines of...the books on offer there.

Though not usually such a stickler at used book sales, I refused to buy the galleys of Lydia Kwa's new book, not because I didn't desire it, but because it somehow seemed wrong.

I did, however, pick up Carolyn Slaughter's A Black Englishman despite the stamp inside that said "Entry No. ---154 Kiriyama Prize."

This may have been because I recently cut and pasted Winnipeg poet Sally Ito's bio into a document and knew that she'd recently judged said competition...but is the sale of the donated short list of a contest any less illicit than the sale of a donated stack of unreviewed galleys/ARCs?

I'm not sure. Authors obviously don't get royalties from the sale of used books, but I can't help feeling the sale of a purchased-but-passed-along book is less onerous than the sale of a book meant exclusively for marketing/promotion.

On the other hand, if the books weren't wanted by the original owners - the books review editor and the judge (after she'd read them, of course...), then the fact that they're being recycled instead of dust-binned is good, isn't it?

I suppose it depends where you stand on second-hand goods. Most of the time, I find second-hand books, clothes and furniture more interesting than first-hand alternatives. I like the idea that things stay in circulation, that objects survive their owners and sometimes even retain evidence of their owners before making their way to me - and also the idea that nothing is irreplaceable. That my house could burn down and I could spend the summer garage saling and find reasonable replacements that might make me as happy as my current collection of knick-knackery.

I like the idea that value is fluid, that something is only worth what you're willing to pay at the moment you buy it.

That said, I'm terrible at bargaining. When I travel, I long for price tags. I prefer it when the seller has a fixed price so I can accept or reject his/her valuation of the good/service on offer.

But sometimes it's not that easy. When I lived in Korea teaching English as a second language, for instance, our apartment was near a fruit market. On my way home from work, I'd usually pick up a bag of whatever was in season, and enjoyed the fact that the mounds of produce usually had a sign indicating so-many-for-so-much on them.

Almost every time, however, the vendor would slip an extra apple or persimmon into the baggie.

I thought he/she was being nice, because as a foreigner I was often gifted with an extra dish or a free drink or two when at restaurants, but it turns out that the listed price on the fruit was only meant to be a starting point in the negotiation.

Apparently, the vendors felt badly that I didn't adhere to the social contract and so gave me, silly foreigner that I was, what would have been the benefit of bargaining with him/her...

But back to the book sale, where I wasn't the only one with a quandry. A co-worker, who was scanning some of the piles of books with what looked like dismay, finally turned and asked me what I thought a collection of postcard-sized lithographs he'd found among the stacks was worth.

I told him I didn't approach buying that way - if an object seemed interesting to me, then it was worth buying but otherwise I didn't pay attention to market value.

We left the sale soon after, after I'd also picked up hipster Sheila Heti's slim novel Ticknor and the slightly thicker Listening with the Ear of the Heart: Writers at St. Peter's.

I spent two weeks this winter eavesdropping-via-blog on many of the writers collected in this tome, including Kimmy Beach and Brenda Schmidt. It was lovely to encounter them again, even fleetingly, even in the dim of the hallway...

...or it was until halfway back to the office when the publicity materials for the book, cunningly tucked into the book and overlooked by yours truly, fell between my bloated feet.