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Alibris-affiliated bookseller Ken Lopez has been in the book
business for over 20 years. He was one of the first collectors
of Vietnam War literature, an interest prompted by avoiding
the draft. Later, Ken became engaged by the work the War produced
in the late 70s, far before the genre took off in the mid-80s.
Ken also specializes in Modern First Editions, Sixties and
Native American Literature, signed/inscribed books and association
copies, and literary manuscripts and letters.
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| | | | | | How
did you get started?
I began my bookselling career working in retail (i.e. new) bookstores
in Vermont and Massachusetts in the mid-1970s, which is how
modern literature became my specialty. After leaving the retail
book trade, I worked in computers for several years, working
from home and telecommuting in the late '70s, before that became
common, and became a "book scout" on the side—finding interesting
and rare out-of-print books and selling them to dealers I'd
met who specialized in those areas. After scouting for several
years, I was left with a residue of unsold books, an inventory,
and decided to try issuing a catalog. When the computer company
I worked for was restructuring and I was going to have to go
back to a desk job, I decided to try bookselling as a full-time
career, issuing catalogs and going to book fairs to meet customers
and other dealers, and build a mailing list. Twenty years later,
and I'm still doing that—having issued 106 numbered catalogs,
20 or so "specialty" catalogs focused on a single subject or
single author, and a couple of dozen sale lists over the years.
And, in the last three years, we've put books online, built
a Web site, and conduct a fair amount of business over the Internet.
If you weren't selling books, what would you be doing?
I often wonder that: taxi driving? I would have liked to have
been a Mayan archeologist at one point—back before the
hieroglyphs had largely been deciphered—but never had enough
formal schooling in that area to participate in the academic
trips that comprise the bulk of archeological work in that
region.
What question do you get asked most often?
Probably "How do I find out how much this book I have is worth?"
Which is, these days, a pretty easy question to answer more
effectively than was possible just a few years ago. The simple
answer is, more or less, "Get on the Internet and take a look
around, and see how many other copies are out there and what
they're priced." This huge body of information that's available
on the Net simply wasn't there just a few years ago.
Contact Ken Lopez:
Ken Lopez, Bookseller
51 Huntington Road
Hadley, MA 01035
Phone: 413-584-4827
Fax: 413-584-2045
E-mail: klopez@well.com,
mail@lopezbooks.com
Specialties: Modern First Editions, Vietnam/Sixties, Native
American Literature. Signed/Inscribed books & Association
Copies, Literary manuscripts and letters.
| | | | | | | | | Collecting
Modern First Editions–As a bookseller, I get calls almost
every day asking me about the value of some "old books" that the caller
has, usually in Grandma's house or a trunk in the caller's attic.
The presumption is that "old" equals "valuable" and books that date
back into the 19th century are "old." This presumption is almost always
incorrect but what many people don't realize is that there is a category
of books that are not very old but can be worth a lot of money...
[More]
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Book Collecting by Allen and
Patricia Ahearn–(New edition just out from Putnam). Mostly a price
guide to authors' first books, with an emphasis on the literary, but
the introductory material on book collecting, which runs to 150 pages
or so, is the best introduction to many aspects of collecting that
I've ever seen in one volume.
Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone–A novel, my favorite
author, and the best book I've ever read to capture the intersection
of idealism and darkness in the 1960s, from Vietnam to the counterculture—an
era that had a tremendous impact on the directions that society
has taken since then.
Chaos by James
Gleick–I found this fascinating and accessible, a good introduction
to a branch of science that seems to be playing an increasingly
large role in helping us understand a wide variety of phenomena,
from bifurcation patterns in tree branches to swings in the stock
market.
Dispatches by Michael
Herr and
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien–The two
best books on the Vietnam war, because they both manage to convey
with immediacy the essential, unadorned realities of the war, yet
they also both manage to show—or imply—a larger context,
which attempts to wring some meaning from the experience of the
most divisive war this country experienced in modern times.
Anything by
John McPhee: whatever he writes about, he makes interesting.
His books are like windows onto a part of the world that, usually,
I wouldn't have even known existed. So every time I read one of
his books, I feel as though I have had my vision of the world expanded,
almost as though I'd been transported to a parallel universe—the
same world I used to live in, but one that is richer for the inclusion
of these people and subjects he writes about, who might as well
not have even existed in my old world, since I was completely ignorant
of them. |
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