Please don’t buy my books

Like everybody else in America, I was looking for a side hustle. Something to make a few extra bucks so I can afford my favorite grande cappulatte Machu Picchu with xtra xpresso.

So I read all the clickbait articles about taking surveys (for pennies) or becoming a remote receptionist (too much work). I even briefly considered delivering pizza but realized I’d be fired after the first night for picking all the pepperoni off of customers’ pizzas and leaving just the naked dough.

I looked around my house for inspiration, peering over and around the piles of books tottering like enormous games of Jenga. “Maybe I can sell my clothes. Surely somebody would want the Size 6 Calvin Kleins I wore in high school. They’re vintage. I can’t get them past my knees.”

I leafed idly through one of my four copies of “Infinite Jest” (which I’ve never read), and an idea slowly formed. I could sell books. My books. No, not books I’ve actually written, but all of the hundreds of books I’ve compulsively purchased over the years and never quite gotten around to. Like “Candide” and “The Gulag Archipelago,” both of which feel like homework. Or real page-turners like “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which I presume is about mindfulness and small-engine repair, neither of which interests me.

I watched a YouTube video by somebody who was (allegedly) earning $3,000 a month selling books online. I was sold.

Since all roads lead to Amazon, I requested permission to join Amazon Marketplace. 

All I had to do now was choose which books to sell, post them to my account, ship them off to my millions of happy customers, and watch the money roll in.

I needed a system. Piles are, technically, a system. But I needed different piles. I needed “keep” and “sell” piles. 

I started out strong because I own three copies of Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger.” No, I don’t know why.

It was easy enough to post a copy to Amazon and follow it up with several other less-than-beloved books like Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia” and Gary Zukav’s “The Dancing Wu Li Masters.”

After a certain age, you forget about the person you used to be. Apparently, I was a person who thought deep thoughts and bought books like Gary Zukav’s “The Dancing Wu Li Masters.” 

Part of me wishes I was still that person. Someone with intellectual curiosity and without the fatal allure of the internet calling to me like the sirens of Homer’s “The Odyssey,” which I also haven’t read, but I think I’ve got a copy lying around somewhere and I know there are sirens in it and something about a sheep.

But I forgot about all that when I discovered that my copy of Steve Martin’s 1977 masterpiece “Cruel Shoes” is worth $35.

Should I hang onto it? Maybe I should hang onto it. It can only appreciate in value, right? What if Steve Martin dies? Well, not if, but at least before me. The price will go through the roof. My copy of “Cruel Shoes” will become memorabilia. And everybody knows memorabilia is worth more than ordinary stuff.

And what about all these other books I’ve never read? I should read them first, and then I’ll sell them.

A year has gone by. I’ve added a measly 10 books to the “sell” pile, and only after the kind of tortured internal debate usually reserved for buying a new home.

I sold one copy of “The Gunslinger” and shipped it to Colorado at a loss. 

And even though I owned three copies of “The Gunslinger,” I felt ambivalent about letting it go. It was a book, and I loved it. I loved the feel of the slick cardboard cover in my hands and the smell of the musty paper it was printed on. I loved the memories of where I was in my life when I first bought it at a mall bookstore.

The mall is gone. And now the book is.

But each book reminds me that authors live forever through their work. Each book, too, reminds me of a younger me, and I don’t want to let that younger me go.

So, please, whatever you do, don’t buy my books.