Twice a year, an old warehouse on Esty Street in Ithaca is home to one of the country’s largest used book sales, put on by the Friends of the Tompkins County Public Library (http://www.booksale.org). Each sale takes place over three weekends and includes more than 250,000 books, CDs, DVDs, records, and puzzles. There is also a collector’s room for rare or signed books. Every day of the sale the prices get lower, until on the final day it’s $1 a bagful.
I attended my first sale this fall, during its second weekend. Over the past year, stories from faculty and fellow English majors of the sale’s enormity made it something of a legend in my mind. One woman, a professor told me, bought a first edition of a rare Vladimir Nabokov book for less than a dollar (it was worth several hundred). Driving to the sale, I saw people carrying boxes of books for a five-block radius; my excitement increased.
But when I arrived, the legend that I had built up in my mind began to fade. The building looked run down, and it seemed smaller than I had expected. I waited in line for my chance to enter, trying not to feel disappointed.
But when I got inside, the ceilings were high and the building extended back farther than I’d assumed it would. I was handed a bag and a map with seventy subject areas. I could smell the old pages of thousands of books. All I had been told was true. I made my way to the far left corner—literature and short stories—and picked my way slowly through the titles. An hour and a dozen books later, I found myself in the collector’s room; the shelves were a little bare. I searched, not seeing much that interested me, until I found the title: Pnin, by Nabokov. It was a first edition, for $24. I had read it for a class I took as a junior—a book that Nabokov wrote while teaching at Cornell.
— Justin Reed ’09