Back home over Thanksgiving, my mother and I talked about coming up with creative ideas for dealing with the collection of books I bought during high school that are still left at their house. The books include bo
th great literature and big coffee table art books. Quite honestly, we have no room for them at our house or any interest in lugging them back to Kansas City.
Beyond my books, there are also hundreds of old books my dad bought to fill the newly installed shelves of the remodeled home when we first moved in years ago.
My best creative thinking was to sell all of them together and hope to get $15 for the whole lot. It’s sad, especially given how much money I spent on them originally, but they are, after all, simply old, used books.
Obviously though, I wasn’t being very creative with my idea.
A few days later, Cyndi and I visited C.S. Post, an intriguing store located in downtown Hays, KS that you wouldn’t be surprised to find in NYC. Started more than 10 years ago in conjunction with a restoration of downtown Hays, its owner designs furniture featured in popular design magazines and sold around the world. Go figure that this creative vision springs from a small Northwest Kansas town.
Nonetheless, it’s clear the C.S. Post folks are very creative when it comes to boosting the price point on used books.
We discovered this bin in the store. As close as we could tell, it looked as if they took old books, cut them from their covers, and soaked them in some type of liquid (maybe starch?) to get the pages to curl and stick together. Each had a ribbon tied around it and a $6 price tag since they were now “Rustic Books.”
With that kind of creative approach, my parent’s books collection could be worth thousands of dollars. Talk about using creativity to add value to an asset…or at least making a bold attempt to do so!
I personally can’t wait to hit C.S. Post over Christmas and see if the Rustic Books are selling at a brisk pace.
Whether the books are selling or not though, the folks at C.S. Post have more than earned my respect for taking something worthless and using creativity to build value and a new cache around it! – Mike Brown
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