Scamming bibliomaniacs

Back in 1989 Claudia and I fell for a book scam where you choose as many books as you like and pay only the postage which was advertised as being $4.95. We sort of went nuts. I don't remember the titles being much good but for some reason we were determined to place an order. I think it had something to do with being out in the world and wanting to begin our singlewomanoutintheworldfinallyanadult bookshelf. I ordered a few anthologies: Edgar Allen Poe, Fitzgerald and for some reason a History of the World, History of Art and 10,000 Quotable Quotes.I have never really liked books made up of nothing but quotes, something so frustrating about it but I thought it might help me in college. That book ended up in a Half-Priced Books stack years later along with several other quote books I managed to acquire over the years.

Two huge boxes arrived at the college post office. They were filled with our heavy paperbacks and we proudly carried them back to our dorm room. It had worked, we weren't scammed and they even threw in the tote promised in the ad. A few days later we received notices at our PO boxes to pick up packages. The clerk appeared with two more huge boxes from the book company. This time we were puzzled as we carried the heavy boxes of mystery books back to our dorm. We hoped we hadn't been naive and stupid enough to fall for a Columbia House scam. We were wise to those. Nothing in the brochure mentioned more books or joining a club. Opening the box we found titles we would never order like Zoya and Star-By Danielle Steele, Leadership Secrets of Atilla the Hun and The 8 Week Cholesterol Cure. These titles are embedded in my mind forever. We had received the exact same titles and a letter explaining that the book company thought we'd be interested in these selections based on our previous order. If we did not want to keep the books all we had to do was check the box and use the label enclosed to return them. If we decided to keep the books all we had to pay was $65 for the books and shipping and handling. So we packed up the books and trudged up the hill from the dorm and back to the post office.

We quickly felt 14 again when the clerk said postage would be $65. SHIT! Shipping for our first order had been $4.95. We had been scammed. We were cash poor. Our parents had set up accounts for us at the cafeteria and bookstore, all we had to do was walk up to the counter and the money was deducted from an account. This $65 business was rather shitty because all I had was $100 on me and that was my movie, music,outing fund. Hard to believe that 1989 was such a cheap time compared to today. We ended up paying using our meager entertainment funds and walked back to the dorm feeling stupid.

The brochure had no phone number so we wrote letters of cancellation and mailed them. We received another nightmare box of books but refused them at the post office. Soon after that we received a letter explaining that if we purchased three bestseller titles (every single one of them was $15) plus shipping that we could terminate our membership. We'd already lost $65. So we did and that's how I ended up with: The T-Factor Diet,The Closing of the American Mind and Wealth Without Risk. non-fiction seemed worth the money I had to cough up even though at the time my life was so far removed from anything these books had to offer. Later we discovered that if hadn't used their label we could have shipped via media mail for something under $5.