[Buddha-l] Loving your object of study

[Richard Hayes]

On Thu, 2007-11-22 at 23:09 -0500, Stuart Lachs wrote:

> "Tracing Back the Radiance" is an abridged version of  "The Collected Works 
> of Chinul." It is my
> favorite Buddhist book. It may be much for most undergrads. Amazon has  no 
> new copies and
> only one used copy for $299.95.

Fortunately, I bought a copy of The Collected Works when it first came
it. It has a lot of very good material in it that I use for my own
preparation. The Zen course I teach is an upper level undergraduate
course with a prerequisite of at least one previous course in Buddhism,
and the students always love Chinul.

Speaking of book prices, I find myself astonished on many levels. My
library has outgrown my bookshelves, so I have been trying to sell books
I no longer use. The last few boxes I have taken to used book stores
have contained some excellent books, but no one is interested in buying
them. I sold one fairly uninteresting book for $5, but the dealer
wouldn't even take the others as a gift. He said there were hundreds of
copies of most of my books for sale on the Internet, often with the
first two dozen or so selling for less than $1. In an Internet-driven
market, he said, many books sell for less than the cost of the postage
to mail them, while others become collector's items worth hundreds of
dollars, and none of the pricing has any bearing on the literary or
scholarly value of the book. This used book dealer is first rate, a real
bibliophile and great fun to talk to. He has been in business for
decades, but he fears the Internet may put him out of business in
another couple of years. This must be going on everywhere. What an
impoverishment of the world it will be when all these wonderfully
eccentric book dealers have all gone out of business. 

-- 
Richard Hayes <rhayes at unm.edu>
University of New Mexico