4 MARCH13, 2022
of Restoration Hardware (now known as RH) in the United States
and Canada. The store wanted the books wrapped in linen and the
spines stained with tea. He plunked countless tea bags into
buckets filled with hot water. But once he’d made his industrial-
scale brew, he still had to confront the problem of how to apply it.
“That was a learning curve,” said Roberts, who typically holds
about 5 million books at his warehouse and three retail locations.
“Paintbrush? Paint roller? I finally came up with the idea of a
garden sprayer.”
Roberts, who has provided books for numerous films,
including the 2009 Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds flick “The
Proposal,” has plenty from which to choose. Somewhere in the
neighborhood of 600,000 to 700,000 books are printed each year
— about a million if you count self-published books — according
to a guesstimate by Publishers Weekly editorial director Jim
Milliot. Only a fraction become even modest sellers.
The rest are consigned to uncertain fates. They might siphon
down to a used bookstore, or they might find their way straight
from the publisher to bulk book dealers.
It’s often said that books sold by the foot enjoy an “afterlife” as
decoration. Untold numbers of less fortunate books die horrible
deaths, pulped and made into stuff like toilet paper or, worse,
dumped in landfills.
That is, unless people like Joe McKim intervene. McKim once
dreamed of becoming a doctor. Then he became entranced with
unloved books and scuttled the idea of medical school. He now
presides over about a million books at a time in a 40,000-square-
foot former tire warehouse in Richmond, where he packages
bundles of books for sale and marshals a by-the-foot and by-color
decor business called the Book Bundler.
There’s something about resuscitating books that produces an
irresistible tug in people with an instinct for lifesaving. Like
McKim, Pat Oza, who runs O3 Books, a thriving books-by-the-
foot business on Etsy and his own website, gave up medical school.
“It hurts to see them thrown out,” Oza told me.
At McKim’s warehouse, books arrive in 3-foot-tall, 4-foot-wide
circular cardboard crates that weigh about 1,000 pounds and are
known as “gaylords,” a box manufacturer name that has become a
catch-all, like Kleenex is for facial tissues. A gaylord is a magical
and mystifying thing — a grab bag, a treasure hunt. McKim, who
made his name selling bundles of children’s books, usually has
only the scantest notion about what will be inside.
On a recent afternoon, he burrows through a gaylord piled with
a mishmash of books, wielding a scanner like some science fiction
ray gun in search of works that might have some value and can be
sold individually, rather than by the foot. There are wounded
books with frayed edges next to works still wrapped in plastic.
There are textbooks. Technical manuals. Leather-bound
vintage tomes with gold-tooled spines so delicate and intricately
crafted that it breaks your heart to think someone tossed them.
Cheap and cheesy books. There are spectacular obscurities.
Here, a signed first edition of 1995’s “Treasures of the
Confederate Coast: The ‘Real Rhett Butler’ and Other
Revelations.” There, a limp copy of 1996’s “A Tea for All Seasons:
Celebrating Tea, Art, and Music at the Elmwood Inn.”
McKim’s scanner squawks when he happens upon
“Boatbuilding With Aluminum.” “That’s the cha-ching sound.
This is niche,” he says of the 2006 tome. “This is worth
something.”
McKim’s books-by-the-foot designer, Charlotte Tillier, is ever
on the lookout for those most-prized book spines: pink and
purple. Not many of those out there. She sells three feet of vintage
red-spined books for $138; but the same length of vintage pink
and purple goes for $300. Tillier has become expert at stockpiling
orange- and black-spined books for the requests that come
roaring in around Halloween, and red, white and blue ones for the
Fourth of July.
There’s a counterintuitive phenomenon in their business — it’s