E-Mail This Article to a Friend Second nature Threatened by technological advances and market vagaries, the independent resale industry clings to one abiding principle: From books to clothes to music, one person’s old crap is another person’s treasure BY CAMILLE DODERO

A few Sundays ago, Barry White got me some money. A while back, a brand-new copy of the crooner’s swan song, Staying Power, fell into my hands. I’d never bothered to play the damn thing, not even as a eulogy after White died of kidney failure. So when a friend asked if I’d accompany him on a CD-selling binge, I brought along Barry — and about a dozen other woeful embarrassments from my past (among them Lenny Kravitz’s Are You Gonna Go My Way ... ah, Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits ... and, double ah, the Wallflowers’ Bringing Down the Horse). I figured I might get $10 or $12 for the lot. But when a scraggly clerk, after rejecting the Wallflowers, read me the final tally, the total was an eye-popping $59.

Sure, the return on the original investment was measly. But this was the first time I’d sold back music in years, and I’d assumed record stores had stopped buying used discs — especially now that music owners can convert CD tracks into MP3 files before selling the discs back. Everyone’s selling, I figured; who’s actually buying?

As it turns out, independent merchants continue to occupy a curious niche in the retail industry, buying and reselling the CDs, clothes, and books of complete strangers. They aren’t nonprofit organizations scavenging through dumpsters in hopes of feeding the hungry, fly-bitten children of Mozambique. They’re more like private recycling companies doling out cash for trash, or professional curators trying to find the overlap between good taste and commercialism. They invest in dead people’s stuff, profit from bad memories, and pay people’s rent. And if they’re not careful, they can become a dumping ground for stolen goods. In a sense, resale merchants have become cultural pawnbrokers.

They’re also in a tenuous position. With the advent of eBay and Antiques Roadshow, quality old clothes and housewares are harder to find than ever. People hold on to stuff longer because "everybody thinks what they do have is worth money," says Kathleen White, owner of the vintage-goods store Oona’s, in Harvard Square. In literary retail, booksellers must deal with the fact that people just don’t read as much anymore. And in the used-CD industry, people tend to sell more than they buy.

But as long as secondhand dealers are still in business, one variable won’t change. Says Planet Records owner John Damroth: "We sell old crap."

In the Used department of the Harvard Book Store, an airless basement crammed with 20,000 secondhand volumes, the only suggested reading lists can be gleaned from posted transaction rules. A sign by the counter informs potential sellers that the staff is choosy about the merchandise it purchases from customers, buying only "selective" paperbacks — salable titles in good condition (no broken spines, no missing pages, no highlighted passages) — for 15 percent of the original cover price in cash, or 20 percent in store credit. There are also two illustrated figures informing patrons that the department discriminates against certain genres: SORRY PARDNER, NO WESTERNS, declares a silver-mustachioed cowboy taped to the front counter; I’M SORRY DARLING! THEY JUST DON’T BUY ROMANCES HERE, gasps a raven-haired maiden to her impassioned lover.

"Someone told me you buy books," croaks a droopy-eyed man who materializes in front of the counter, towing three cardboard boxes and one milk crate of antiquated hardcovers. "I found them on the side of the road," he informs the three employees stationed behind the counter. "A boxful of Poe, Mark Twain, and a boxful of plain books. You interested?"

They are. The staff — 16-year veteran Hilary Brant, small-press sci-fi publisher and decade-long employee Steve Pasechnick, and newbie Churchill Pitts, who was hired partly because he could name all the Beatles — jointly sorts through the cobwebby containers, carefully examining each volume, flipping through the books’ dusty pages and inspecting their bindings. Tucked inside one of the Twain books, Brant discovers a yellowed postcard of the author’s summer house, postmarked 1917. The seller doesn’t have a clue where it came from. "I found them when I was out walking the dog last night," he says.

After deciding that two-thirds of the collection is worth acquiring, Pasechnick says they’ll pay fortysomething dollars in cash, more if the man wants store credit. The seller seems quietly disappointed. What about the Mark Twain autographs on the title pages, he asks, already knowing the answer; were those just stamped on? Yes, someone explains, the signatures were just part of the design. Like most customers, he accepts the cash. "Can you keep these?" he asks, pointing at the leftovers, a heap including a thin paperback with a young Phil Donahue on the cover. "I don’t want them."

People are always leaving books with the Used department. A few minutes ago, a woman pulled a hardcover out of her purse; when Pasechnick said the store didn’t want it, she pushed it back, telling them, "I don’t want to carry it around." This creates a problem, especially in a shop where limited space is a constant concern. The store has a satellite warehouse, but it’s packed — Brant says the last time they counted, it contained 72 boxes of unwanted books. "A large portion of those, we didn’t actually buy," she explains, "we just kept."

What the Used department actually wants are paperbacks that experience says will sell. Most people who read works of philosophy treat their tomes like reference manuals and don’t sell them back; because of the dearth, the Used department wants the likes of Derrida and Nietzsche. They want sociology, yoga, Eastern religion. They want big, bulky, gorgeous visual-art books — coffee-table tomes with heavy-paper stock. They want classic fiction, the sort creative writers consider canonical: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway. And James Joyce — but only Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. "[Book owners] don’t keep Dubliners. They keep Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake," says Brant. "If you get as far as [reading] Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, you did it by choice."

"Things go through little trends of hotness, too," she adds. Right now, what’s hot is "chick lit" — romance novels disguised as forgivable smart-girl indulgences because they’re set in New York City. What isn’t hot are the Cold War/Central America/feminist manifestoes from the ’70s, and gay and lesbian books published before 1995. And, she says, "Africa hasn’t been hot since the whole apartheid thing ended."