New Life for “Forgotten Books, Remembered, Part One”
Showcase interviews bookseller Howard Prouty
ReadInk, located in Los Angeles, specializes in “uncommon, obscure and interesting books with particular interest in American Culture (Popular & Unpopular), Art, Literature, Life and People from the 1920s through the 1960s.” Its motto and operating principle is: “Forgotten books, remembered.” We discovered owner Howard Prouty at this year’s California International Antiquarian Book Fair in Pasadena, then tracked him down for this interview.
Showcase: How did ReadInk get started?
Prouty: The original impetus was to cultivate a source of supplementary income, so that when it came time to put my kids (then 13 and 10) through college, I wouldn’t be caught short. I was then in my mid-forties and had been accumulating books for most of my life, and although I was gainfully employed, in terms of extra “assets” the books were pretty much all I had – not rare or especially valuable, but definitely a lot of them. I started by selling a few things to a local bookseller I was friendly with, and briefly entertained the idea of becoming a book scout for him – until he gave me a life-changing piece of advice, namely: that I should just get myself an online account with the Advanced Book Exchange (nowadays known as AbeBooks) and sell my books directly to customers for full value, instead of “wholesaling” them to guys like him.
Showcase: What did that involve?
Prouty: It was actually pretty simple. I found a source for free book-cataloging software, got myself a business license, spent a month or so doing very rudimentary cataloging of about 800 books, and went “live” with my inventory in October 1997 – wondering all along if I was just being foolishly optimistic. And almost immediately – I think within 24 hours – I started getting emails from people, saying “I’d like to buy this or that book of yours, can I send you a check?” And before long, the checks started pouring into my mailbox – two, three, four a day! In those days, all the business was still checks-in-the-mail – before PayPal, and even before most small online merchants had the capability of accepting credit cards.
Showcase: How and when did you grow your business beyond just selling your own collection?
Prouty: In those days thrift shops were a largely untapped gold mine of fresh inventory, for minimal cash outlay. (This is no longer true.) Buying a book for 50 cents or a buck, and selling it for $10 or $15, or even a little more, seemed like a pretty good deal – and every once in a while, I’d stumble on a real “score.” One early Salvation Army find was J. Edgar Hoover’s 1958 book Masters of Deceit that Hoover himself had inscribed (to, of all people, Steve Allen). I sold that one right away, for I think $100. So this was a decent and fun spare-time activity for a few months, and lucrative in a small-potatoes kind of way – but it wasn’t until the following spring that I made the score that hooked me for good. On May 2, 1998, in the makeshift used-book room of the short-lived Sherman Oaks branch of a store called Circus of Books, I paid a quarter (plus two cents sales tax) for a pristine copy of the first edition of Sue Grafton’s first Kinsey Milhone mystery, A is for Alibi – which I sold, a couple of months later, for $950. That was…. a moment, for sure.
Showcase: Are all old books valuable?
You’ll have to wait until next month for
the answer to this question
in Part Two of this three-part interview.