My Backlogged Pages
By John Feffer, Published New York Times: June 3, 2010

In this age of Amazon recommendations and Kindle downloads, I still rely on the old-fashioned services of a book buyer. My personal book buyer has an uncanny ability to anticipate my tastes. He has introduced me to out-of-print novelists, obscure playwrights and classic philosophy tracts. I’ve enjoyed nearly all of his choices, though quite a few remain stacked in my bookshelf, still unread.
(Illustration by David Plunkert)

My book buyer follows a simple rule that I set for him long ago. No book should cost more than 25 cents.
You might also be surprised to learn that my book buyer is a teenager. Sometimes his purchases reflect youthful enthusiasms like science fiction and the novels of John Fowles. But he never fails to throw me the occasional literary curveball, like the collected plays of the Belgian avant-gardist Michel de Ghelderode or Eugene Burdick’s prescient 1964 novel “The 480.”

Every time I read one of the jewels that my book buyer has picked out for me, I want to call him up and thank him. But I can’t. Nor can I submit any special requests. He’s been out of business for some time.
My book buyer, you see, is myself.

I made these purchases three decades ago when still in my teens and in the initial phase of my love affair with books. It all took place at a book sale that happened one weekend a year, just before Halloween, in a church around the corner from my house in suburban New Jersey. After Saturday soccer practice I’d hurry over to the church, still dressed in my sports gear, cleats skittering among the fallen leaves. I was so eager to get there that I didn’t want to waste time changing clothes.

By the time I arrived, the volunteer staff, bookstore owners and early-bird bibliophiles had skimmed the most valuable stuff off the top: first editions, recent hardcovers with high resale value. But that didn’t matter to me. Wandering through the tables piled high with unsorted books, I vacuumed up all the Heinlein, Asimov and Bradbury I could find at 10 cents a pop. I stocked up on authors — George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, Kurt Vonnegut — I mistakenly thought wrote nothing but science fiction. Then there were the titles that caught my eye because they sounded vaguely fantastical, like “Ten Days That Shook the World” (about an asteroid strike?) and “Invisible Man” (clearly the inspiration for Claude Rains).

By late Saturday afternoon, the organizers of the sale reduced the price to $1 for whatever you could fit into a bag or box. Even on my meager newspaper route savings, I could afford to splurge. I ranged far from my comfort zone of science fiction. I judged books by their covers. I stuffed any and all recommended reads into my sack.
The full piece at NYT.