A proposed new law, the Second-hand Goods Bill, currently before the parliamentary select committee on security, may sound the death-knell for second-hand bookshops.
The days of ambling down to your favourite bookshop on a Sunday morning to browse for and buy an old copy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four may soon be a thing of the past. It may very well be an unforeseen consequence of a laudable attempt to put an end to the trade in stolen goods.
The schedule of regulated goods mentioned in the Act includes jewellery, household goods, any controlled metal, vehicles, communication equipment, photographic equipment, factory equipment, antique goods, motor vehicles, clothing and, startlingly, books. Controlled metals are defined to mean, among others, copper, aluminium, zinc, lead, brass and bronze.
The mere list serves to explain the obvious need for this Act. It seems clear that it is aimed at preventing the illegal sale of copper cable and other frequently stolen goods. But including books in the list may lead to the death of the second-hand trade. Bookshops that deal in used books exist because they are the only places where out-of-print and rare books are found, and because they are cheaper than new bookshops, making them an attractive option for ever more cash-strapped readers.
The burden that the new law proposes to place on the trade in used books is such that it will become economically unviable to buy and sell them. Among the envisaged provisions are the keeping of a register of every single title, including the particulars not only of the seller, but also of the buyer. Furthermore, all books are to be described according to their identifying features.
In practice a trade will then have to look like this:
The bookdealer buys a 1961 Signet Classics paperback edition of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from Mr Blair, and records his name, address, identity number and proof of identity, of which a copy must be kept, in a register. After the sale the bookdealer records the identifying marks of the book, including all previous names, stickers, annotations and even that suspicious and rather alarming stain on the last page, and accords the book a number in his inventory.
When he sells the book to Ms Bloom he has to record her name, address, identity number and proof of her identity, of which he must similarly keep a copy. Simple economics dictate that the book will now not sell for about R40 as it used to. The yoke of administration required by the law will mean a much higher cost, negating the benefits offered by used books.
The volume of books flowing through any second-hand shop, sometimes hundreds a day, will also make the task well-nigh impossible. Some dealers have tens of thousands of books in stock, some hundreds of thousands. According to the new Act, dealers will also be required to catalogue all their existing stock within three months of the Act becoming law. It is feared that the burden this places on small traders, as second-hand bookshops invariably are, will effectively force them out of business.
The trade, mindful of the negative and possibly unintended effects of the law, recently and by way of its representative body, the Southern African Book Dealers Association, made representations to the parliamentary subcommittee on security raising their concerns.
It pointed out that most books are of low commercial value and as such not attractive to organised crime, that they have no scrap value other than as recycling, which is negligible, and cannot be chopped up or melted down, nor have their physical state altered as is possible with copper cables. Traders are usually small businesses employing two or three people, and are often owned and operated by retired or semi-retired people. Bookdealers function on a high volume and low value premise where most used books sell for less than R100.
The committee was also urged to take into account that not all trading is restricted to bookshops, but that the law would also make it impossible for fleamarket traders and charities to deal in used books.
It was also impressed on the committee that the used book trade is not one normally associated with crime, such crime as there is being restricted to petty shoplifting, where most books stolen are read, not resold. Thieves who target bookshops are invariably identified and caught. The trade prides itself on the close links and collegiality among dealers and information about suspicious people and books is freely exchanged, leading to the apprehension of those who commit book-related crimes. It is clear, and needs no further elaboration, that burglars never pause to slip a rare Ian Fleming first edition into their bags of swag.
After concluding its presentation, the Southern African Book Dealers Association reports that the committee accorded it a sympathetic hearing. Indeed, some members of the committee expressed surprise that books had been included in the schedule of the proposed Act. It was also discovered that there had been a proposed and accepted alteration to exclude articles priced at less than R100. Though this was welcomed, they felt that it was better that books be removed from the Act altogether.
There is no doubt that society will be impoverished should second-hand bookshops cease to exist. They serve as centres for the affordable dissemination of knowledge and their absence would, as such, lead to more than mere economic loss. As Jerry Seinfeld said: ”A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.”
How poor we all would be without access to affordable and rare books. How sad it would be not to be able to find copies of those rare South African books published by AfricaSouth Paperbacks in the Eighties, books such as Todd Matshikiza’s Chocolates for My Wife or Can Themba’s The Will to Die — books that are only found in second-hand bookshops.
It is hoped that the committee will reflect on the Law of Unintended Consequences and remove books from the Act before it is passed into law.
André Krüger is the owner of Tall Stories bookshop in Irene Village Mall, Gauteng