Read Online The Testament of James (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens) by Vin Suprynowicz - Free Book Online

cents.”
    “Not here. They’re all marked individually.”
    “Like, how much for this green book?”
    “The first printing of H. Rider Haggard’s She ? I’m sure you’ll remember it as the one where Ursula Andress walks through the blue flame and comes out looking like Helen Gahagan Douglas. It’ll be marked in pencil on the first plain blank page.”
    The man fumbled to find it. “Seven-fifty? Well, it is pretty.” The book had beveled edges and the gilt Egyptian goose scarab to upper left of the front board.
    Matthew removed the volume from the character’s hands, a bit firmly. “This book is marked seven hundred fifty dollars, about 75 percent of its current market value. The gift inscription is dated the first day of issue.”
    “That’s got to be more than the thing sold for when it was new!”
    “I’m sure it is. Lone Ranger lunch boxes have gone up pretty well, too.”
    “You’re charging more than when it was new?”
    “We sell collectible books. I suggest you try the thrift stores. There was a Salvation Army out past Gano Street, last time I checked. You’ll find them right in your price range.”
    The father and daughter team took a few minutes to do a bad job of putting books back on shelves, finally just leaving their selections in a pile on the floor. As they departed, the staff and a few other browsing customers eyed them as though they were a pair of wildebeests about to be pulled to their deaths by hungry crocodiles on the Animal Channel.
    “Skeezix?”
    “Yes, Matthew?”
    “What’s the first edition of She doing out on the open shelves?”
    “It was on the go-back table.”
    “Check the prices, Skeezix, you know the cut-off. I’ll put it in on top of the safe for now.”
    * * *
    Marian was temporarily away from the front desk, helping a beaming, red-cheeked academic type who was buying several hundred dollars worth of Newport architecture. He always bought New England architecture. Matthew had been meaning to ask him if he taught the subject and if so where, but before he could mosey over, in the door came a bald guy with a cardboard box.
    “You buy books?”
    “Selectively, yes.”
    “How much for these?” The balding gentleman asked, plunking down his burden.
    “Did you have an asking price in mind?”
    “No. You’re the expert, you tell me.”
    Aside from the paperbacks, most of which he rejected out of hand based on condition and general potboilerhood, Matthew opened each book to the copyright page, flipped a few to look for a book-club deboss on the back, then formed them into two stacks.
    “These books we don’t need,” he said, indicating the pile he’d set gently back into the seller’s cardboard box with the well-creased paperbacks, topped by a fading starlet’s diet and exercise regime. “You could donate them to a charity thrift shop for the tax deduction. For this stack over here, even though we generally pay a dollar apiece for hardbacks, I could give you forty dollars. Some of them would be worth more if they had their dust jackets.”
    “Forty dollars for all of them?”
    “Cash. Other people will offer you trade, we pay cash.”
    “But this book right here is worth a hundred dollars! I looked it up on eBay!”
    Matthew gave a tired smile. “You may have found a book with the same title asking that price, possibly a first printing in a fine first state jacket, which this is not. Assuming your eBay seller had any idea what he was doing, of course. But more to the point, it sounds like you did have an asking price, didn’t you? Even though you told me you didn’t. So congratulations and good luck.” Matthew slid both stacks back towards the irate fellow. “You’re now an eBay seller.”
    “Well, no, I don’t want to go to all the trouble of doing that. I was just saying that’s what the book is worth.”
    “And I hope it gives you years of pleasure.”
    “Could you go fifty?”
    “I can take my first offer off the table, if you like, and