These crown jewels

I am sure I will get into trouble for revealing this, but my youngest child held a second-hand book sale on the street near where he lives over the most recent long weekend. We have a regular clear-out of books but as many readers of this magazine will no doubt acknowledge the titles pile up anyway, either read and ready to be passed on, or sadly languishing on a “never, ever” pile. Some, too, are duplicates (I know right), while others we have simply grown out of together. Anyway, this spirited young fellow, along with three of his friends, took a couple of boxes out onto the road and corralled some passing pedestrians to part with their hard-earned coins in return for these papery lovelies.

Bookselling is not an amateur profession, and neither should it be treated as such. My child used all the wiles of a good salesperson – deep but targeted discounting, hand-selling, product placement and emotional blackmail. Apart from a few serious hardbacks, his stock was mainly made up of children’s books, and his target market passing, perhaps merry, professionals and/or parents in need of some portable distractions. Last weekend early readers were in strong demand, as were graphic novels and chapter books. He even managed to sell a book token – in this version, a piece of cardboard with the promise of future books.

Of course, I view all this from a sort of discreet distance. I have never been a bookseller, and though I did work at Blackwell’s Reading Bookshop after university for six months, I never made it beyond the stock room – the right decision. Nevertheless, I learned some valuable lessons from watching my son and talking with a few punters. We think a lot about value and finding new routes to customers in our world: my spare copy of Spare went within 30 minutes and to a buyer who later returned because she felt it had been sold to her too cheap. Even though she’d bought it from a street corner (and from a child), she recognised the inherent value of what she’d purchased. She also confessed that although she knew the book existed, she’d never been actively sold it before.

What most turned customers on though was the enthusiasm for certain well-loved, well-thumbed titles

David Walliams was popular too, sorry, as was Marcus Rashford and the Usbornes – name recognition acting as a lingua franca between seller and buyer. What most turned customers on though was the enthusiasm for certain well-loved, well-thumbed titles – of course he wanted the money, but I saw too a tiny flicker of one human wanting to pass on something of worth to another. That made me happy.

I don’t think Nielsen was tracking all this, but our first-quarter report also makes positive reading with value sales up against a modest decline in the number of books sold, speaking to the power of good and opportunistic publishing at a time when the economy is subdued.

There were other amateur street stalls operating pop-ups near my son’s home over the weekend too, and I say this with all due modesty and really just to let you all know, the books one was by far the most popular over the Bank Holiday Monday. My son cleared a decent amount of cash, and once he’d paid me for the stock, business advice and local taxes, he had just about enough left over for some sweets. There’s a lesson in that, too.