Read The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap for Free Online

Home and Gardens cookbooks with Volume 2 missing, or Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. (In case you’re interested, those are why Atlantis sank.) Amid aerobic workout handbooks and treatises on U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, regional reading interests soon emerged: coal, country music, Christian romances, and every description of horror novel. The Coalfields population would prove complex in its reading habits.
    Booksellers need to have common sense. Title by title, sale by sale, I began to work out that if everybody had old Stephen King paperbacks, maybe we didn’t need them for our shop. If Harlequins were a dime a dozen, why would people buy them from us for a dollar? You know the old saying: “You’re not a real [insert profession here] until you learn to say no.” Even at ten cents a title, I had to learn to say no. Two life coaches aided me in this process: the books—silent on the tables and cement driveways, testimony to what had been popular last year—and the people hosting the sales, who almost always had specific questions about what we would stock once they found out about the bookstore.
    Never missing an opportunity to let others know about our new place, I chatted up sale-holders at almost every venue. They were quick to ask, “Will you carry Westerns/true crime/science fiction and fantasy?” In this way, I got to know the area’s real reading tastes, not just what people wanted to jettison in their driveway for a dime.
    Learning to recognize diamonds among dross became that summer’s lesson. It took a few weeks, but one memorable day I left a garage display of overpriced Anne Rice hardbacks to find a collection of prayer shawl pattern books on the same lawn for a quarter each. Rice wasn’t so popular once Stephenie Meyer sucked the lifeblood from the vampire market, but pattern books command serious cash in secondhand shops. It was a nice little moment, realizing I now knew which were more useful.
    Book valuing is a lot like car pricing: once you drive the new vehicle off the lot, resale plummets. Bestsellers at twenty-seven dollars new flood the used market once the first wave of readers tosses them aside. Classic literature is like a vintage MGB; it proves well worth having years later, but is easy to find and hence not that expensive as rarities go. What enthusiasts really want is an MGA, the model made just before MGBs; far fewer exist; they are older, hence harder to find in good shape; and they are hunted by those who know what they’re doing.
    Taking the car analogy back to the book world, aficionados have for the most part read Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow, but Hunter’s Horn is a lesser-known work by this famous author. That combination of obscurity and renown creates good prospecting territory. I picked up Horn for fifty cents at a thrift store one afternoon and listed it on an Internet bookseller site at nine dollars in “acceptable” condition. It sold the next morning.
    Giddy with success at an 850 percent markup, Jack and I congratulated ourselves for turning a profit before opening day. I had yet to learn this euphoria’s counterbalance, that those “big markups” were few, far between, and—as gas money goes—not that big. We were too green in the business to understand yet that we wouldn’t score “buy low, sell high” hits every day.
    Common sense can be a hard-slog commodity. We tried hard to hang on to ours in the early months. Jack and I had always been adept at calling each other on moments when one of us lost reasoning ability and began to dream too big, but euphoria is as addictive as any drug. We wanted to be happy. We wanted to do good. So we did stupid things—like assuming rare books were just lying around waiting for smart people like us to find them—and never examined the condescending superiority of our assumptions.
    An old joke has two economists walking along a road. One looks down and says to the other, “There’s a one-hundred-dollar