If You Like to Read . . .

I enjoy reading very much. Put me in a bookstore and I am sure within 15 minutes to have found at least 6 books I would like to own. However, like most people reading this blog, I don't have unlimited money to buy all the books I'd like.

One of the solutions to this is an online and catolog remainder house called Daedalus Books.

Here, as I understand it, is how remainder houses work. A publishing company prints 10,000 copies of a book. Sales are great the first year, but then they slow down. After a few years perhaps they still have 1,500 copies in their warehouse. Warehouse space isn't free. There's no use storing 1,500 copies of a book the company will only sell a dozen copies each year for the next decade.

So what can a remainder house do to come out as best as possible financially ? One possibility might be to sell the remaining copies for scrap paper. I don't know what scrap paper sells for but I don't think one could sell a book for scrap for more than a few cents a copy. Another possibility is to sell the remaining copies to a remainder house, which surely pays more.

A remainder house can mark up books way beyond their purchase price and still make a handsome profit. (Don't think the business is easy. There are still large costs in staffing and warehousing, not to mention the printing and mailing of catalogs.

Nevertheless, consumers can find great bargains. For instance, I recently bought several different volumes of The Essays of Aldous Huxley for $5.98 each. If you bought the same volumes in a boostore they would cost $35 each. Being a photographer who works occasionally in Africa, I bought a book of black-and-white photos called Broken Spear: A Maasai Journey for $9.98. The price in a boostore is $50.

I could list a lot of books I have bought from Daedalus. Once when I was working rather than retired and was really flush, which I definitely am not now, I bought a complete set of a limited, special edition of the compete works of Joseph Conrad (one of my favorite authors) for $1000. The edition is strictly for collectors -- limited to 500 copies, I think it was, bound in Nigerian goatskin, with specially watermarked pages. Brand new and with pages still uncut, it sold for $3,000 a few months before I made my purchase.

No matter what kind of books interest you, Daedalus has them -- novels, poetry, fuctioon, non-fiction, short stories, childrens books, you name it. They also sell DVDs and CDs.

You can contact Daedalus at 1-800-944-8879 and get on their mailing list or go to www.salebooks.com or www.salemusic.com. I have shot my financial resources for a while, but I'll probably be temped to buy more than the next catalog arrives.