Book Online Store Used

Used Books Available Online Too

The book online store used business has succumbed to the age of "collectibles." These days the first folks in line at those school fundraisers aren't bubbling bibliophiles, but canny dealers who hope that the alums who donated books for book online store used sale didn't realize what they had on their hands--but who seem to be increasingly frustrated by what they find because, as it turns out, the alums are just about as canny at the game of collecting as they are.

In a world in which everybody is canny and savvy and energetic, there's nothing left for the big old stores such as Dauber & Pine to sell. There's plenty of room in the old-book business for the antiquarian with his high-priced firsts, and there's room for the used-book dealer who's willing to go to the trouble of arranging his titles alphabetically by category; but there seems to be no room left for the dealer who'll buy and sell anything, toss it anywhere he finds an empty space, and take his chances on doing enough volume to make a living.

"It's sad, it's very, very sad," Murray Dauber told a customer the other day, according to The Times. "There's not much room for a place like this any more. But nothing lasts forever, dear." He was right on all counts. The truth is that the life given to Dauber & Pine was far longer than that granted to most independent bookstores, and anyone who shopped there must be grateful that it lasted so long as it did. But we will miss it: its books, its clerks, its mildew, its dust. Especially its dust.

The ill wind which caused the withdrawal from bookstores of a shockingly frank biography of dime store heiress Barbara Woolworth Hutton may blow some good the author's way after all. But it has left the publishing world nervous and more cautious of accuracy than it has been for some years.

On Dec. 1, Random House recalled 58,000 copies of C. David Heymann's ''Poor Little Rich Girl'', which it had distributed a month in advance of its announced publication date in the hope that it would be a winter best seller. The action touched off a seismic wave of dismay in the book publishing industry, already sensitive to long-playing rumors of slipshod fact checking and sloppy editing.

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