Fifteen cents

It’s “back to school” time again. Hey, don’t look to me for any wisdom. Me, I got most of my basic education in 15-cent increments.

Fifteen cents was the price of used paperback books at a local store. They sold hardcover books, too, but they weren’t as portable as the paperbacks which, for good reason, were sometimes called “pocket books.” Maybe these books didn’t put the world at my feet, but they did put a good slice of it in my head, or at least in my pocket.

The only thing as valuable as what I learned from getting these books is what I learned from losing them.

But, first things first. The cheap price isn’t the direct point here, but it’s certainly related to the abundance we enjoyed, so I can’t ignore it. On that note I’ll admit that it’s an eye-roller when some old bore wants to blather on about prices in the old days, waxing nostalgic about when a peck of coal cost only two doubloons plus a demi-pence for the collier, or whatever it is they talk about, since I’m not paying attention.

So here’s some relevant context: When I started paying 15 cents per used book, I was earning $2 an hour for doing odd jobs. So this came to about 13 books per hour. On a purchasing-power per unit of labor basis, that’s a pretty sweet deal.

On a constant-dollar basis, those 15-cent books would cost about 68 cents in today’s dollars. Hey, still a sweet deal.

Of all my pals back then, only a few were interested in books. But of those few, we found that teaming up made things better. So the books were always circulating within our ranks. And on the procurement side of things, we all had a pretty good idea of which writers the other guys liked, so we’d scoop these books up when we found them.

More on procurement: Even by the standards of the day the prices must have been cheap, since, at the store, we had to jostle with the grown-ups who would also pick through the tomes.

The grown-ups, mostly tired-looking salarymen on their way home from the office, didn’t really stand a chance against us. They would have been better off if the books were more expensive, which would have pushed my pals and I out of the market. But, as it was, the grown-ups were competing with ants for raw sugar, and if there’s one thing you’ll note on Saipan or anywhere else, it’s that the ants always win.

Most of the paperbacks were from the fiction and non-fiction bestseller lists. I think these books were released in hardcover first, with the cheaper paperback versions coming along later. Hey, that was fine with us. We just consumed whatever came along. We didn’t care how the listing end of things worked.

But the respectable, bestseller, middle-brow fare wasn’t our only interest. We also liked some pulp fiction that came in numbered series. I think these were released as paperbacks from the start. A series called “The Destroyer” was a favorite. It was both a wry spoof of, and a shameless example of, pulp fiction. That’s a pretty wacky concept. Little wonder then, that all these decades later, I still chuckle at some lines from those books.

Anyway, whatever they were about, and whoever wrote them, the books had to go somewhere after I read them and after they were passed around, so I kept them in organized in shelves at home. My friends were doing the same thing.

A few years into this routine, when I was in high school, my family had to pack to move out of state. At this point, the books became heavy paper elephants that were too expensive to keep because they were too expensive to move. I told my best friend that he could have them.

As I boxed them up, I was worried that it would be difficult to part with them. But, when the time came, it turned out that I was happier to see my friend get them than I was sad to lose them. After all, they had served their purpose. I was looking forward to my family’s newer, and far better, home, and it struck me that, while I liked getting 15-cent books, I sure as heck wasn’t going to let them get me.

A bunch of years later, when it was time to move my office to Saipan, it was mercifully easy to pare the books, yes, even “important” professional ones, down to absolutely minimal essentials. Many books can be re-purchased if necessary, some others can be largely summarized by taking good notes, and a lot of others, well, we just don’t have to keep them around.

Meanwhile, computer technology, and the weightless nature of data, is, of course, changing things. Information is conveyed via electrons, not ink. So maybe someday this whole gig about keeping books, or leaving them behind, will be as archaic as quill pens.

But, as for today, I’m still a low-tech guy. And I would like to buy just one more old-fashioned, ink-on-paper sort of book, but they’ve sure gone up in price. Can you spare a doubloon or two?