A Day in the Life of a Bookseller, March 1st 2025
What sold on Saint David's Day in Steubenville, Ohio? You might be surprised.
On social media I encounter a great deal of pessimism. In fact online it seems universal: the liberals of course think everything is terrible now that Biden is gone, and the conservatives have been thinking everything is terrible since the summer of 1914.
I have a different perspective. Working in my bookstore does not incline me to pessimism. People come in and seem happy to be in a bookstore; their mere presence suggests that they have free time and some money to spend; they are of course curious and eager to learn; and they pretty much universally praise our store. What is more, my wife and I are continually astonished by the good quality of the books we sell. We have about 20,000 titles in the shop, and I will confess that not all of them are good. I move books off our shelves to the dollar shelf, and from the dollar shelf to the donations box, just about every day. But the books that people choose to read make us optimistic about the future. We think they bode well for the state of humanity.
Down below, with some annotations, is a complete list of all the books we sold last Saturday, March 1st. They are excellent books. We are proud we have customers that read these books, and proud that we managed to get them into their hands.
This doesn’t mean we like the economics of bookselling. In general in order to maintain the business we need to gross about $400 a day. On March 1st we grossed $740, but it was a Saturday, and we always hope that Saturdays will suffice for two days (we are closed Sunday). That’s one of the reasons why we keep this substack, to have a little extra money come in for our store. (You can also support our shop on our website, www.bookmarxbooks.com, and on Bookshop.org. We are the Bookmarx in Steubenville). Anyway, here were the books we sold that day, in order:
Sold Books March 1 2025
The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture by Wendell Berry. A bit academic for me, but it lays out the problem of the decline of American rural life as factually as can be done. I’ve written a bit about buying Wendell Berry books.
The World Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry. Great stuff.
The Liturgy of the Land: Cultivating a Catholic Homestead. A recent book that has sold well for us.
Crime and Punishment. I cannot believe how much Dostoevsky we sell. This was the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, which I always recommend.
The Idiot. More Dostoevsky.
Confessions (Word on Fire). The hardback of Augustine’s Confessions from Word on Fire.
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (Everyman’s). I think the Everyman editions are the handsomest around, and I hope to add more to our store.
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation I-II. A cinderblock but Solzhenitsyn is great.
Day by Day with Saint Francis: 365 Meditations by Gianluigi Pasquale.
The Odyssey (Loeb). The revised Dimock Loeb translation is actually my favorite translation of the Odyssey, and this edition of course gives you the Greek as well. I think this is our bestselling Loeb.
Surprised by Truth: 11 Converts Give the Biblical and Historical Reasons for Becoming Catholic. With a foreword by local eminence Scott Hahn.
Biographenwege: Lebensbilder aus dem Alten Bayern. We don’t sell many German books and I know nothing about the few we have, but one sold.
A Theology of Mark’s Gospel: Good News about Jesus the Messiah by David Garland.
Charles Dickens Black Tea. These Simpson and Vail teas are great.
Pride and Prejudice. The Chiltern edition – expensive and pretty. We just added these in 2025.
Wake of the Perdido Star, by Gene Hackman and Daniel Lenihan. This was the first I heard of Gene Hackman dying, as the novel he co-wrote sold. This is part of bookselling: people get on the news and their books start selling.
#7 Maisie Dobbs: The Mapping of Love and Death by Jacqueline Winspear.
Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot.
The Genesee Diary of Henry Nouwen.
The Wisdom of Fulton Sheen: 365 Days of Inspiration. I think our bookshop has one of the largest collections of Fulton Sheen in the country.
On the Incarnation: Saint Athanasius (Popular Patristics). I am amazed there is a demand for St. Athanasius books, but that “Popular Patristics” series is excellent – compact editions that just about dare you to read them.
Eternal Ones of the Dream: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Australian Myth and Ritual. By Geza Roheim. I’m impressed by our customers.
Introduction to Metaphysics by Martin Heidegger.
Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God, The Tree of Life, the Life of St. Francis (Classics of Western Spirituality).
John Climacus: The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Classics of Western Spirituality). Another from this series, great stuff.
Confessions (Oxford World’s Classics). This was the second copy of Augustine’s Confessions we had sold in the day. This made me realize: this was the last Saturday before the start of Lent. People were picking up books for Lenten reading. And I had to admit, Augustine’s Confessions has got to be one of the best books for this purpose.
The Way of St. Francis: The Challenge of Franciscan Spirituality for Everyone by Murray Bodo.
Chants of the Church: Selected Gregorian Chants with Interlinear Translations. Last summer we bought about 30 of these old 1950s chants books from a customer, and we’ve sold about 20 of them so far. Amazing.
Chicken and Egg: A Memoir of Suburban Homesteading with 125 Recipes by Janice Cole.
Purgatory – Explained by the Lives and Legends of the Saints by F. X. Schouppe.
The Wizard Knight (Comprising The Knight and The Wizard) by Gene Wolfe. I’m told Gene Wolfe is excellent fantasy writing.
Day by Day Through Lent: Reflections, Prayers, Practices by Daniel Lowery.
Doctrine is Life: The Essays of Robert D. Preus on Scripture.
Writings on the Spiritual Life (Works of St. Bonaventure Volume X). From the nice Franciscan Institute Press set of Bonaventure’s works.
Nothing Superfluous by James W. Jackson.
Let There Be No Divisions Among You by John MacLaughlin.
Spot’s First Easter: A Lift-the-flap Easter Classic.
Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance. A used paperback.
Pilgrimages: Poems by Andrew Calis.
Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, by Plato. This is the Hackett edition, translated by Grube. A good book but I am loathe to order from Hackett, which offers only a 20% discount to retailers: this means you have to sell the book four times before you finally stop losing money when restocking. I have now sold this book four times.
The Journey of the Mind to God by St. Bonaventure. Two copies of this in one day!
Matilda by Roald Dahl. I used to like this one a lot, but now I find it a bit mean.
A Year of Scrapbooking by Debbie Janasek.
Crafting and Decorating Made Simple.
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
Mary, Mother of All by Scott Hahn and Emily Stimpson Chapman. We’ve had local author Emily Stimpson Chapman read this book in our store.
Confessions (Oxford World’s Classics). Third copy in one day!
Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalksa: Divine Mercy in my Soul.
The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Our last copy.
New Seal Dictionary by Zhao Xiong. Not about talking to seals. A Chinese dictionary. All I can say is my customers are smarter than I am.
Speak Malay: Course in Simple Malay for English-speaking Malaysians by Edward King. Never thought I’d sell this one.
Varaviksnes Loka by Gundars Grislitis. In Latvian!
What is Mathematics? An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Methods by Richard Courant.
Mesh Teaball Cup
Paper Tea Filters
A Hunger Games Pre-order of Sunrise on the Reaping.
You Put a Song in My Heart by Darla Searle
The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. A fitting end to the day.
As I have said, this is not really enough to keep the store going, which I think calls to mind an interesting point: for readers, really, this is one of the greatest times in human history. Probably the best, in fact. In another era, a collection of books like this might have cost a fortune. Now they are not only available in places like downtown Steubenville, they are really quite affordable. For the 49 books we sold, the average price was $11.75. Cheaper than a Reuben sandwich.
Anyway, that’s a day in the life of our bookstore. As you can imagine, many of these books came with interesting conversations with interesting people. So when people tell us culture is finished and the world is coming to an end, you can see why I come to different conclusions. I’m looking at different data.
[If you want more, I’ve written on this theme before for First Things.]