An Old School Book Scout

The New Yorker discusses the life and times of book scout, Wayne Pernu.

From the piece...

Few days pass during which Wayne Pernu does not buy a book, or several hundred. During the summer, he hits as many as a hundred book sales per day in and around Portland, Oregon, cramming volumes into every inch of his car, stacking them on his lap if he runs out of space. For the last twelve years, he’s made a comfortable living reselling titles he’s purchased for quarters at thrift stores and at yard, estate, and library sales. As a book scout who listens to his instincts rather than to technology, Pernu is one of the last of his kind—an old-school purist in a digital world.

We’re at a hole-in-the-wall Internet café on a drizzly Saturday morning checking the weekend’s sale listings online. “You can tell if it’s going to be a good sale by how people phrase their ad,” Pernu says, peering over his thick-framed glasses at the computer screen. At fifty-one, he has dark, slightly receding hair and a taste for vintage clothing, like the snap-up Western shirt and neon-orange Converse sneakers he’s wearing today. “If it says something like ‘Treasures’ you know it’s going to be a lot of junk,” he muses. “If it says, ‘Student moving to Hawaii, lots of good books—philosophy,’ it’s going to be good. And if you want all the good book people to come, you say, ‘Professor died.’ ”

Though his competitors in the book-scout field rely on bar-code scanners to determine the value of titles, Pernu can tell within a few seconds of taking a book into his hands whether it’s worth anything. “A lot of times I have no idea what I’m buying, but I do know that I should buy it,” he says.