Books by the Pound

At precisely 3 o’clock on a Kodachrome perfect July 4^th afternoon arrived the end of the Montauk Book Fair on the town green, where from 9 o’clock in the morning books are sold by the tens of thousands ~ not by the cover price but by the pound.

Going price per pound: $1.75.

The 2009 Book Fair was graced by the most exquisite summer blue skies, fair and cooling breezes from the ocean, and a happy band of Montauk Library friends and employees, whose hospitality and alertness made anyone nearby smile.

The eastern half of the grassy green was set out in the open air with long tables upon which box after cardboard box of books of all sorts and sizes were laid, at first in some kind of order (music, biography, sex, art, diplomacy, cooking, etc.) As the morning moved on, things got a bit messier and disorganized, until, by the end, the remnants of books were all pushed together and the $1.75 price was waived and anybody who cared to carry away a box full of books (piled high as you like) might do so for just $3 for the whole kit’n’caboodle.

“What happens to the books that are still here when you all are ready to go home?” we asked of the library lady behind the glass jar stuffed with dollar bills.

“They all go in the Dumpster,” she said apologetically. “We’ve been doing this for 25 years, and nobody will take what’s left. Nobody wants even one of them. We can’t store them, and old age homes don’t seem to want them, so we must dump them.”

“How would it be if a listing of the Dumpster books were made so that we can see the authors and titles that absolutely nobody will save from the landfill or the incinerator?"

Oh, no!” she gasped and touched her mouth to close it. “That would take us weeks and weeks. There’s no budget for it. The names of the dumped will have to remain unknown.”

We stuck around until Mickey’s trash truck showed up, and took a long, sad look at those books that were destined to have been consigned to the grave. At the last moment, we saved twenty, in two full boxes. Among them:

The Hotel New Hampshire, John Irving; Hercule Poirot’s Casebook Agatha Christie; The Island, Peter Benchley; The Covenant & Chesapeake, James A. Michener; Dead Silence, Randy Wayne White; The Last Best Hope, Ed McBain; Nevermore, William Hjortsberg.

We then bid a melancholy goodbye to the thousand or so sad and fearful books who were overlooked or rejected by thousands of book-loving people, none of whom would rescue them for any price. Those who Mickey’s carted away were mostly biographies of people you might have heard of, by authors or ghost writers you haven’t; a family of Tom Clancys; a tribe of bodice rippers; a few Art Buchwalds and a biography of Sigmund Freud by Irving Stone. Missing entirely from the doomed piles were cookbooks, poetry and picture books.

We wondered: Have any of our readers ever, with malice aforethought, consigned a book to the Dumpster or the equivalent fate?