Cantabrigian Hustle: Behind the Honor System Book Table

The total comes out to $4.78 for 13 books. On balance, a “good haul” for Richard Scarbrough, proprietor of Harvard Square’s honor system book table.

Today’s take skews chick-lit (“most of my customers are girls”) but also includes some less mainstream gems (“An Illustrated Guide to Cacti” and “Chinese Cooking: the Food and the Lifestyle” among them). All in all, Scarbrough estimates the expedition will net him 50 bucks.

We’ve just finished the check-out process at a factory outlet associated with a well-known chain of national thrift shops. If something doesn’t sell at the thrift store, it gets moved to the outlet. If, after about a day, nobody buys, then the item moves on to landfill. It’s mid-morning on a Thursday, but there are easily over 50 people here intently rummaging through bins of clothing, furniture, DVD’s, Cassette tapes, and VHS’s.

But Scarbrough is really only interested in the four small dumpsters brimming with books. Turning them over in his hands for only a split second, Scarbrough either adds books to his bag or tosses them into a different tub. Occasionally, he stops to explain why he’s made a certain decision.

“So this book right here sells really fast because it’s about Massachusetts, by a popular writer. He wrote a book about Belmont,” Scarbrough says of Sebastien Junger’s “The Perfect Storm,” before ultimately pitching the too-tattered volume into the discard bin.

Unlike his book table in patrician Cambridge, which sits just opposite an expensive chocolatier and a pricey Italian clothing shop, the outlet is located in an economically depressed neighborhood, inside the yawning abyss of what clearly used to be a factory floor. Under the lazy, scalloped blades of industrial ceiling fans, customers mill about in an area about half the size of a regulation basketball court.

There are a few things Scarbrough keeps an eye out for: books that have recently become movies, books that have won any sort of prize, Oprah book club books, and Library bindings (which, unbeknownst to me, are hardcovers that have the covers printed on even below the book jacket).

Dressed in jeans, a black sweater-turtleneck hybrid, and a tartan scarf, Scarbrough cuts an odd figure alongside his fellow customers. Unlike most patrons, he is white, male, and (college journalist tag-along notwithstanding) alone. Only a couple other people poke around the book barrels, and most of them mechanically scan bar codes with their smartphones to check if the book is worth anything on Amazon. More often than not, it’s worth just one cent.

According to Scarbrough, most shoppers are here, like him, to find things they can quickly flip for a profit.

“This is the stuff that they’re throwing out at the Goodwill stores,” Storey says. “This is like the last gasp. But sometimes there’s real treasure in here.”

This last bottleneck before the landfill is nothing unique for a city. Scarbrough compares outlet shoppers like him to the Zabbaleen in Cairo, a group of mostly Coptic Christians. The city’s informal trash collectors, they make their living by sorting and reselling garbage.

“They collect all the trash, but then they also go through it and make a good living from that,” Scarbrough, who lists a pistol and a solid bar of silver among his best outlet finds, explains.

It’s either a sign of our culture’s stunning wealth or its immense wastefulness (probably both) that our scavenger/reseller class is sifting through books rather than discarded rubber or landfill.

But books are just the tip of the iceberg for Scarbrough, who says he broadly defines his profession as “arbitrage,” buying goods in one market and selling them for more in a different market (books, currency, furniture, and sometimes, but not so much recently, bitcoin).

“You know, you might as well act like you’re in prison and just always have a hustle. Always make some money on the side somehow,” Scarbrough says. “I’m involved in a million things. Not just books, but I trade all kinds of things.”

In Cambridge, as in similarly upscale urban areas, “hustlers” like Scarbrough are easy to ignore in the face of more noticeable extremes: the pregnant panhandler in front of the perennially-overpriced foodie coffee shop, homeless folks queuing up for a chance at a shelter bed yards from a store selling $7 ice-cream cones.

It’s harder to see people like Scarbrough, by his own description “semi-homeless” and often sleeping in his car to avoid the long drive to his tiny Western Mass. bookstore/apartment. But Scarbrough prefers it that way.

“I’m like sort of a solitary person,” he says. “I do my work.”