The Testament of James (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens) by Vin Suprynowicz Read Free Book Online Page B

that Marian’s mother must have once been frightened by a brightly colored clown. She’d stacked the contents of the diminutive scout’s morning pasteboard boxes on the front counter and was tallying up his pay.
    “Cleaning out a house?”
    “The lady calls me first because I’m willing to haul away so much. She thought a buck a book was fine.”
    “Look what he found,” Marian held up a couple of 12mos from the box — 12mos being books the size of a Hardy Boys mystery, slightly smaller than your standard octavo, “duodecimos” if you wanted to get technical, so named because they were originally printed by folding a full sheet of printer’s paper into 12 leaves, instead of eight.
    “Edgar Rice Burroughs in jackets? Good work, Skeezer. How early?”
    “ Fighting Man of Mars is Metropolitan, a first,” Marian answered, proudly.
    Marian would probably pay the Skeezer close to a hundred bucks for that one alone, confident it would bring four or five times that, online. Assuming it wasn’t dampstained. If you wanted people to stay eager in their work, you saw they were properly compensated when they got something right. As long as you could still make your four-bagger, of course. A triple had once been enough, but no more. Regulatory costs and other government extractions were up across the board, at the very time people were doing more of their shopping online. Modern retail overhead was murder; somebody had to make sure the lights stayed lit, even on days when you didn’t bring in enough to buy lunch. Which meant on occasion Skeezix would pay three bucks for a book that would only sell for six, and he’d have to keep it or eat the buck-and-a-half. The store was not a charitable enterprise.
    But knowledge was the real wealth, and once the Skeezer had learned the authors, the topics, the grading standards that made it worthwhile to gamble a few bucks, he’d have knowledge that would last him all his life, from the auction rooms to a barn sale in Chepachet.
    Most of the books that had ever been manufactured weren’t worth the cost of hauling away, especially with the corners chewed by mice or silverfish; it was easy to end up with an apartment full of boxes of crumbling junk with the covers falling off. No sense spending a week’s grocery money to have a book rebound if you knew that when you got done it would barely buy you lunch.
    So how did anyone learn which ones were worth grabbing? Over in the corner of the store this morning a scannerboy was sliding books out from the shelf and running his little electronic gizmo over the bar codes on the dust jacket rear panels, scan scan scan, waiting for his mindless toy to beep and tell him he’d hit one of the thousand best-selling books on Amazon this week, or whatever it was supposed to do. They thought this allowed them to avoid the drudgery of actually reading, studying the bibliographies, learning anything. In the thrift shops where Niven & Pournelle’s Mote in God’s Eye was shelved under “Religion” and illiterates marked everything at a fixed price they undoubtedly did find the occasional Maclehose first of Dragon Tattoo for a couple bucks, but there were no bar codes before 1980, and a scanner couldn’t tell you whether a book had been signed on the title page to the author’s good pal Ernest Hemingway. A real book scout — and Skeezix was quickly becoming one — could spot value across the room, sometimes just from the way books had been treated and shelved.
    “Excuse me.”
    “Yes?” Marian being tied up with Skeezix, Matthew had remained on the floor to help out.
    “Why is one of these Hardy Boys priced at eight dollars, and the other at twenty-four?”
    The stout matron seemed legitimately curious. “Because one of them has a dust jacket,” Matthew explained.
    “Three times as much, just because it has a paper wrapper?” The fragile jacket had actually been encased in a removable clear polyester protector, though Matthew saw no point