When An Expensive, Out-of-print Baby Book Is Your Last Hope

December 5, 2007 5:46 PM

A good friend of ours is searching desperately for an out-of-print child-rearing book that has, apparently, become a hot commodity...

The book is "Wonder Weeks: How to Turn Your Baby's 8 Great Fussy Phases into Magical Leaps," by Plooij and Venderijt. The book never took off in the US, but since going out of print, it has acquired cult status, selling for upwards of $75 (and often in the mid $100s) online. She can't afford to pay that much for the book. So I figured if anyone would have a line on how to get an English-language version of the book cheaper, The Green would know. What do you suggest?

posted by yellowcandy to shopping (11 answers total)

Your profile says you're in NYC. The NYPL has four copies in the catalog, but three are missing
posted by winston at 5:49 PM on December 5, 2007

When my library owns a book, but none of the copies are available, we'll go ahead and do an interlibrary loan.
posted by box at 5:55 PM on December 5, 2007

Should have mentioned--the friend is in Boston. So no dice. She would also prefer to own a copy of the book, if possible.
posted by yellowcandy at 5:57 PM on December 5, 2007

Fucking shit. I gave mine to Goodwill. It wasn't that great but I sure could use the $100 right now.
posted by peep at 6:12 PM on December 5, 2007

With inter-library loan out of the picture, there's three ways that might turn up a cheaper copy buy they involve a bit of work.

The first would be to keep and ebay search for it going. There's the off chance you might be able to find a copy that's not attracting bidders. (it's worked for me before).

The next too are a bit more involved...
You could try to see if there's any bookstore anywhere that shows it as in stock. There's the off chance someone some where ordered one and has it sitting on a shelf. The only thing is, most stores would have returned their copies years ago.

You could try haunting used bookstores and thrift shops. At better used bookstores, they'll already know it's worth $75+ though, but harder to find books do slip through the cracks.
posted by drezdn at 6:13 PM on December 5, 2007

There are 2 on ebay for $31 and $25 right now.
posted by blaneyphoto at 6:45 PM on December 5, 2007

I know you said your friend is interested in owning the book, but if she wants to take a look at it before dropping lots of money on it, the Boston Public Library has two copies in their catalog. Might be worth seeing before buying, especially if it was recommended and she's not totally invested in spending lots of time (and possibly money) to get it.
posted by k8lin at 7:00 PM on December 5, 2007

Looking at completed auctions on eBay, they seem to be ending up at around $60.
posted by winston at 7:06 PM on December 5, 2007

drezdn is onto something--if you want to get it as cheaply as possible, keep haunting anything that isn't part of the abebooks/amazon/ebay sphere of influence. Garage sales, church rummage sales, that shelf of books at the Goodwill, et cetera et cetera et cetera.

Of course, at some point you might decide to consider the value of your time.

(And, while I'd never encourage anyone to do anything illegal that didn't involve smoking, I might point out that, once your friend has the library book, she probably knows where to find a Xerox machine.)
posted by box at 7:19 PM on December 5, 2007

Here's a pretty good synopsis. Also, looks like the authors wrote another (the same?) book called Why They Cry: Understanding Child Development in the First Year ISBN 0722531613.
posted by gatchaman at 1:14 PM on December 6, 2007

Not sure if you're still interested, but it has been Rereleased.
posted by drezdn at 10:09 AM on July 14, 2008