Earning a living from used books!
As I was browsing through my Google Reader list this evening, I came across an interesting link via the Kevin Smokler blog, where he shares links from his del.icio.us page.
The link was to an article from the New York Times about a small group of people who make their living scavenging New York City looking for used, unwanted books that they then sell to the infamous Strand Bookstore:
The men are regulars at the Strand, book-scavenging semipros who help the city’s best-known used-book store keep its shelves stocked. They have no overhead, no employees and no boss. They also have no home. What they have is experience, and a fitful sense of industry.
While it’s sad that the two men profiled in the article are homeless, I’m happy that books that would normally go to overflowing landfills are finding a new life as a used book. I’ve been to the Strand Bookstore and there’s only one word to describe it: Amazing! If you love books, the Strand is your Mecca and you can literally spend days in there and not even look through a quarter of the books on the shelves.
What’s more interesting is that these men belong to a sub-culture of people who scavenge books around NYC on a regular basis:
Hundreds of men and a smaller number of women eke out a living scavenging books in Manhattan, according to Mitchell Duneier, author of "Sidewalk," a book about the subculture of sidewalk book scavengers and vendors. Some of them sell their books on the street; others, the less entrepreneurial, or the more impatient, go for the surefire cash at the
Strand.
When I read this article, I first thought of a small but growing movement called "Freeganism" where people feel that our society is much too wasteful and would rather recycle other people’s trash than keep buying new goods.
Reading this article today is ironic, because yesterday, as I was laying on the couch enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon, I caught a documentary on television about teens who flock to San Francisco and live a purposeful homeless lifestyle.
Check out the entire New York Times article here: Their house to yours, via the trash
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