Books

Novels, school readers and the books with a shelf of their own:

fiction and reading for school make up most of what people pass on, and they sit together. A few kinds of book are easier to find under a narrower heading. Recipe books, from home cooking to cake decorating, go in cookbooks, and bird guides share animal books with picture books about animals. Mandala pads and a toddler’s first crayon book both belong in coloring books, trail guides in outdoor books, and pregnancy and child-rearing titles in parenting books.

The Popol Vuh, Asturias and other Guatemalan editions:

the country’s own literature is where the edition matters most. The Popol Vuh, the K’iche’ book of creation whose oldest surviving text was copied in Chichicastenango, is read in more than one Spanish version. Adrián Recinos’s translation is the long-established one, Luis Enrique Sam Colop’s Popol Wuj is a later translation by a K’iche’ scholar, and there are bilingual and retold editions besides. They are not interchangeable, so check which one a course or a reading group works from before you buy. Losada in Buenos Aires was Miguel Ángel Asturias’s publisher for decades, and its older printings still turn up in family libraries. The colophon at the back says which printing a copy is, and a first edition of Men of Maize is a collector’s book to be priced as one, not as a reading copy. Rodríguez Macal’s tales of the animals of the Petén jungle, set reading in many schools, and José Milla’s sketches of colonial life are printed locally and easy to replace, so with those the condition counts for more than the edition.

Imported novels against local paperbacks:

a novel printed abroad, from a Penguin classic to a new thriller out of Spain, costs about Q150 to Q300 new, while most locally printed Guatemalan classics stay under Q100. That gap shapes the used trade. A clean second-hand copy of an imported novel saves its next reader a real sum, so those find buyers one at a time. A used local paperback saves far less, which is why they move best as a bundle or a complete school list.

Pirated bestsellers, mould and broken spines:

popular novels are the titles most often copied, and a pirated one is not always sold as such. Look for soft or slightly blurred type, grey photos, a cover whose colours are off or whose finish is flat where the original is matt or embossed, and paper thin enough to read the next page through. A glued block that cracks in one piece when the book is opened flat is another sign. Then the ordinary wear. A spine creased deep enough to split the glue, loose sections when you fan the pages, and brown spots with a musty smell, which is mould and spreads to whatever is shelved beside it. Underlining and a pupil’s name inside are fine in a school reader and pull down the value of anything else.

Listing a book, a box or a whole family library:

photograph the front cover, the spine and the copyright page, which shows the publisher, the edition and the printing. Name the translator for the Popol Vuh and anything else in translation, and say whether a Spanish translation is a Spain edition or a Latin American one, because readers of long fantasy and romance series care which they get. State any underlining, names or torn pages plainly. A series sells better complete, with any missing volume named, and school readers sell best listed with the grade they were set for. When a whole library is being cleared, list the older Losada printings on their own and the paperbacks by the box, and tell a buyer driving up from Cuilapa how many boxes there are and whether a car boot will take them.