Twice-Sold Tales

Not a problem.

Wonder gets a lot of books from people who bring them to its stores to sell. (It's a big reason to keep those stores alive.) Roberts and his colleagues also make "house calls" to bid on personal collections. They buy batches of "hurts" -- new books, sometimes damaged but mostly not, that bookstores have returned to publishers. Sometimes they scarf up whole inventories from deceased bookstores.

Then comes Roberts's favorite part of the job.

Dressed in a sweat shirt, sweat pants and funky shoes, he'll stand for hours at a sorting table in the middle of the warehouse. That's where he and a longtime employee, Ernest Barrack, determine the fate of the books in the "raw boxes" that come in every day.

"It's like book mining. You never know what you're going to get," Roberts says.

Decisions must be split-second. By way of demonstration, he pulls a copy of a health book called "The Iron Time Bomb" from a raw box and immediately whips it onto a nearby cart. "Looks like it would be a good Internet book," he says. Other possible categories include: stock for the retail stores; books to be shipped overseas in bulk; collectibles whose pricing requires extra research; and something Roberts calls "interior decorator."

Huh?

Perhaps this is a good time to note that Roberts will buy just about any collection of books if the price is right -- and that he really, really hates throwing them out. Even if that means selling to clients who care only about their covers.

"These are books by the foot," he says, pointing out stashes pre-sorted by color: red, green, yellow, white, black. On the floor not far from the sorting table sit stacks of expensive-looking art books destined for a mansion in Beverly Hills, Calif. Nearby, a huge carton of earth-tone books is being assembled for a decorator who specified "anything from off white to dark chocolate."

Dick Francis, Frank McCourt, Anne Rice, Garrison Keillor -- no author overrepresented on the book sites is immune. Most dealers would pulp these books, Roberts says. "Selling them by the foot, we give them another chance at life."

No decorators want mass-market paperbacks -- but Roberts won't throw them out either.

"We sold a whole bunch of these to Brazil not long ago," he says, gesturing toward a carton brimming with the likes of John Jakes and James Michener. The price: maybe 10 cents a book. The wholesaler who bought them, Roberts assumes, is supplying street vendors.