Atd (37) p. 1041. Erie Line, 'home', Lincolnwood, fascism and a pink tab

[Mark Kohut]

the used book market is a 'secondary' market....pure supply and demand
as the impure saying goes..............

those high prices are because few are available (book is out of print)---Cf. antiques; rare stamps (!)---and the sellers believe they can get that price......others have sold
for around that price, for example.

The buyers are mostly libraries, I would presume, who if their constituency
wanted the book would pay the price. Some new institutionally-oriented books get priced that high because some libraries will buy them.

(With new and available books, prices are 'suggested' based on total cost of production--including author's advance, if any---'overhead and maximizing sales.

So, fewer books are ever so high.


--- On Tue, 7/22/08, robinlandseadel at comcast.net <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: robinlandseadel at comcast.net <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Subject: RE: Atd (37) p. 1041. Erie Line, 'home', Lincolnwood, fascism and a pink tab
> To: "P-list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Tuesday, July 22, 2008, 6:38 AM
> Monte:
>           Nah, must be the Vibe-Morgan-University Press
> cartel at work.
> 
> Good Point . . . .
> 
> But seriously folks, $80.00 for a used copy of the
> facsimile of "Meritorious 
> Price"? For that kind of money, the very least they
> could have done is 
> reset the type, perhaps a touch of Websterization to smooth
> out the 
> reading process? Maybe an explanatory footnote or two? A
> Translation 
> of some of the more antique or arcane passages perhaps?
> 
> It's not like your local library has a copy either.
> 
> And Steven Weisenburger's "A Gravity's Rainbow
> Companion"—in
> print in a reasonably priced QP edition, now in its second
> printing—is
> as useful a book as can be found in the Pynchon Lit-Crit
> sub-genre. A 
> lot of work went into that book and it sells because anyone
> trying to 
> thread themselves through GR's labyrinth will find the
> "Companion" as 
> useful a guide as anything out there.