There are three secondhand bookshops I can reach on foot, and each of them has a different theory of what a book is worth. I have spent an unreasonable amount of the last two years thinking about this.
The first: by condition
The shop on the hill prices by condition, strictly. A fine copy of something nobody wants is eighteen euros; a reading copy of something everybody wants is four. The owner is a retired surveyor and it shows — there is a laminated card behind the counter with the grades on it, and he will hold a book up to the window and show you the foxing before he tells you the price, so that you understand the reasoning.
This is the fairest system and it produces the worst shop. Because condition is uncorrelated with interest, the shelves are a random walk. You cannot browse it. You can only search it, and searching requires that you already know what you want, which defeats the purpose of a shop you walk into on the way home.
The second: by author
The shop near the market prices by author, using a mental league table that the woman who runs it has never written down and which is, as far as I can tell, entirely a record of her own affections. Pessoa is expensive. Saramago is expensive. A minor mid-century novelist she happens to love is nine euros, which is absurd, and a major one she finds overrated is three, which is a gift.
This produces a shop with a personality — a strong one, occasionally an irritating one. You learn her taste within four visits and after that every price is a small argument you are having with her. I like it enormously and I almost never buy anything there, because the books I want are the ones she also wants.
The third: by time on the shelf
The third shop, in the basement off the square, prices by how long the book has been there. Everything arrives at eight euros. Every month it loses a euro. At one euro it goes to the cart outside, and after two weeks on the cart it goes away, and I have never asked where.
This is the good one. Not because it’s fair — it is wildly unfair, it punishes exactly the books that are hardest to place and rewards the ones that would have sold anyway — but because it turns the shelf into a clock. You learn to read the price as a date. A three-euro book has been sitting for five months, which tells you something true about the book, or about the neighbourhood, or about both.
A price that encodes time is a price that tells you a story. A price that encodes quality only tells you what one person thinks, and you knew that already by looking at the book.
I have bought more from the basement than the other two combined, and I have bought worse books, and I have been happier. There’s a lesson in that about browsing that I have tried to write out properly four times and cannot get to hold still.
The closest I can get: browsing is not searching with a worse method. It’s a different activity with a different goal, and the goal is to be surprised by something you would not have known to want. Any pricing system that makes the shelf legible at a glance — even by an irrelevant variable, even by a cruel one — makes browsing possible. Any system that makes each book an independent puzzle makes it impossible, however fair it is.
The surveyor’s shop is fair to books. The basement is fair to readers. I think I would rather be a reader.