THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

Regarding “Books in the Trash,” in the 1990s when I taught and did other things in Michigan, I knew many senior faculty members who, coming to their retirement and considering a move to smaller quarters, wanted to sell off the books that they had acquired over a lifetime of scholarship.  In those days it was still possible to invite one of the second-hand book dealers in East Lansing, Ann Arbor or Kalamazoo to take a library off its owner’s hands for a fair price.  When my wife and I left Michigan to come to Upstate New York in 2001, I was able to sell a cumulus of several hundred “academic titles” to a dealer in East Lansing who fully expected to resell them swiftly to humanities graduate students at Michigan State.

More recently, however, this situation appears to have changed.  In various journals dedicated to teaching in the humanities – and on various websites with the same focus – anecdotes have appeared about how very nearly impossible it is to get rid of books.  The second-hand dealers have become extremely selective even as they have diminished in numbers.  It might have been in Academic Questions that I read the sad story of a retiring English professor who, unable even to donate his library, ended up consigning much of it to a bonfire simply because in smaller quarters there would be no space for the many volumes.  A colleague of mine who is about to retire after thirty years of teaching college English also can find no one to take his books.  Not even the campus library is interested in them.

What is the explanation for the phenomenon?

I can think of two or three plausible reasons.  The first is that, since the 1980s university presses have been driven by what amount to fads (deconstruction, postmodernism, multiculturalism, and the proliferating “studies”), which naturally supersede one another with accelerating rapidity.  The professoriate having bought the idea that even the humanities are governed by “progress,” they have decreased the resale value of second-hand books, the “back-catalogue list” that every “up-to-date” person now disdains.  Graduate students, for example, who seek to festoon their CVs with a publication record, wish not to cite “old books,” but only “new ones” in their bibliographies.  So again, no one wants yesterday’s titles.

Second – fad-driven books tend to be badly written.  They are full of jargon and slogans.  Publishers market them under the claim that they are “cutting edge.” The invariable claim about any new book is that it is “ground-breaking,” obviating all previous books on the same topic.  There is nothing as deadly-dull as a “ground-breaking” new “studies” book.  No one should buy such a book in the first place – and once it has served its purpose of furnishing references in someone’s dissertation or journal-submission, it becomes so much useless pulp.  I suspect that the people who do buy such books swiftly, if secretly, regret having wasted their money.

Amazon has revolutionized the second-hand book market by making it possible for independent dealers and private parties to sell books – and just about anything else – through the website.  In many cases, academic titles that sold for whopping high prices when they appeared fetch only a few dollars on resale – or they even belong to the category of one-cent books, on whose sale the seller profits only on the shipping charge.  This would seem to confirm what I guess above.

A second-hand book dealer from Long Island once told me, concerning this topic, that “Derrida’s books burn the hottest.”

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