Free The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap by Wendy Welch Page A

you by holding their value and resisting silverfish.)
    Lulu wandered the shop speaking loudly to no one in particular as I checked over her books. The Hughes was worth twenty dollars on Half.com , while the Hemingway—which I left in the box because it looked so mangy—was selling for two dollars on AbeBooks. I gave her the good news about Hughes first, intending to soften the blow.
    Her face fell. “That all?”
    Oh well.
    She held out the Hemingway, picking off a piece of mouse poop and dropping it to the floor. From the corner of my eye I saw Beulah trotting over at a brisk pace. “This’ll be worth a couple hundred, at least.”
    Saints preserve us.
    I took the book between finger and thumb, laid it on newspaper (not a good idea for a truly valuable hardback, but I hate touching mouse poop) and began to rifle its pages. Beulah jumped into the box of barn offal and started purring. At least one of us was happy.
    As I launched into an inane explanation I knew Lulu wouldn’t listen to about how book club editions were never worth much, my eyes fell on an unexpected object. Worked so deep into the spine it was almost invisible, an unused stamp showed Ben Franklin’s profile facing left on a blue background, surrounded by scrollwork. It had been a long time since my grade-school stamp club days, but adrenaline shot through me, cold and prickly beneath my flesh.
    “Gimme a sec, Lulu,” I said, sitting back down at the computer.
    “Whad’ya find?” she asked.
    I pointed to the stamp. She reached to pull it out.
    “Don’t touch it!” I shrieked, and Beulah leapt from her box and shot into the back room. Lulu yanked her hand back in fright, then skewered me with a reproachful look.
    “No need to yell,” she muttered, sitting down at the table with her back to me.
    Many interesting details about stamps were to come my way that day, including when they were first dated, received glue on their backs, and other fun trivia. Lulu had a stamp inside her mouse-pooped, disgusting book that philately Web sites called a Scott #134. They assigned it a value considerably higher than its 1870s price of one penny; one site suggested two thousand dollars.
    Lulu went home a happy camper. I have no idea what she did with that stamp. I just hope she didn’t use it on a letter.
    From that day forward, I tried to remember to rifle a book’s pages before selling it. We have found numerous photos and letters, some dull, some poignant (one from an adoptive mom telling the birth mother she could no longer see her biological son); ancient movie tickets and library notices and raffle sale stubs; funeral prayer cards we gave back to family members, sometimes tracking them across state lines; social security cards for (usually) deceased people; voter registrations for the living; traffic citations; old medical bills; programs for bygone plays, which we gave to local theaters; and money. Two dollars here, one dollar there, and once, to my husband’s joy, an English five-pound note. (We find money biannually, so don’t get excited.) Probably the oddest thing we’ve found in a book was a braided lock of hair, wrapped in an advertisement for a woman’s wig.
    Lulu’s stamp became an anomaly—and a cautionary tale—in the usual litany of “Sorry, it isn’t worth much,” but another important rule about running a bookstore was coming our way. Right after “learn to advertise” and “learn how to discern old books from beat-up ones,” was “learn that comeuppances never take long.”
    Jack’s knowledge about first edition and antique book valuing had been acquired on the fly, and of course fast expertise-building gives rise to overconfidence. (To test this theory, ask a college freshman about any historic period of Western civilization on which he’s just written a term paper.) Just as we were edging into condescension about all those grubby, falling-apart “rare” books, one special customer taught us to never take anything for