Street Talk: Mrs. Morgan's Crowded Garage

D Magazine, Aug 01, 2001 by Bowden, Jeff

WHEN JILL MORGAN SAW THE price of Mr. Pine's Purple House hit $300 on eBay, she knew she had to do something. A former software engineer at Motorola, she'd been buying and selling books for years at garage sales, flea markets, and online, all the while watching the prices of out-of-print children's classics soar. Leonard Kessler's book, about a man who paints his house purple in order to set it apart from the other houses on his street, cost only 59 cents when it was first published in 1965. Fifty nine cents in 1965 would be $3.22 today. That means that Mr. Kessler's little book was selling on the Internet at nearly 100 times its original value.

Morgan lives in Keller, in a two-story, redbrick house on a street lined with two-story, redbrick houses, every one with a redbrick mailboxbasically, Mr. Pine country. She met me on her walkway in bare feet and with a runny nose. She looked like she needed to curt up with The Wizard of OZ and a box of Kleenex, but she was smiling. "I think I caught a cold last night," she said.

She welcomed me into her house, which was swept clean of toys, shoes, backpacks, and voices. It was a school day. Morgan is the mother of three young children. "Mr. Pine's Purple House was one of my favorite books as a child," Morgan explained as we made our way through the kitchen to the garage. "My dad read it to me when I was 3."

During Internet searches of children's books, Morgan began to notice that the online identification numbers of certain buyers and sellers kept popping up. "People were hoarding the market for outof-print children's books," she said. "A handful of buyers were buying up A the books and selling them in ones and twos. The people who tried to comer the market saw an opportunity. And I saw an opportunity based on what they were doing."

Morgan had a hunch that the regular customers who were bidding against each other for their childhood favorites on eBay and ABE-a web site with 7,300 dealers and more than 25 million books for sale weren't interested in expensive first editions. She assumed they only wanted the books to read to their children and were being forced by savvy book boarders to pay inflated prices. She got the idea to republish the most sought after out-of-print books and sell them at new book prices.

"I wrote a letter to Mr. Kessler and told him that I wanted to republish his book," Morgan said. "He thought about it for a day. Then he called me and said, 'Jill, I'm going to give you the book. It's great that a fan wants to bring it back."' Morgan asked Kessler if she could call her new venture Purple House Press. Kessler not only agreed, but he also designed Morgan's logo, a purple turtle with a green head and glasses, reading a book. For now. the business operates out of Morgan's house.

She pushed open the door to the garage. I wanted to see her inventory. We were greeted by her dog. He's a barker. And a sniffer. He circled me for a few minutes before resuming his patrol. Pallets of books have crowded out the cars. The bicycles are the next to go. To get a hammer from the workshop in the corner requires squeezing between boxes stamped "Printed in Malaysia. ... I've got four shipments of books coming," Morgan said. "We are going to have to get a place to store them somewhere."

INCLUDING MR. PINE'S PURPLE HOUSE, Morgan has 11 titles in her catalog, five of which are available online at Amazon and at Barnes and Noble, and locally, at The Enchanted Forest. The others will be published over the, course of the coming year. Her current list includes: The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek, by Evelyn Sibley Lampman; David and the Phoenix, by Edward Ormondroyd; Tal, His Marvelous Adventures, written by the great-grandson of James Fenimore Cooper; and Mr Bear Squash-You-All-Flat, by Morrell Gibson, the price of which got as high as $800 on the Internet. In the fall, Morgan will bring out another Mr. Pine book, Mr Pine's MixedUp Signs. Author Leonard Kessler is so excited about Morgan's venture that he's promising a brand-new Mr. Pine book.

"Jill's remarkable," Kessler later told me over the phone from his home in Sarasota. He's the author of more than 200 books and is emblematic of Morgan's growing stable of authors: they are generally retired and eager to see their books return to print. "Mr. Pine was getting harder and harder to find," he explained. "I got a letter the other day about a grandmother who used to read the book to her grandkids. When she died, the grandkids decided to give the book to the youngest grandchild. When it came out in print again, they each got a copy."

Kessler did most of his writing and illustrating in Rockland County, N.Y., 50 miles northwest of New York City. He had a studio in his house. Neighborhood kids wandered in and out. One day a kid wandered in and said to him, "Mr. Kessler. you need to get a job or come out and play with us." Kessler laughs at the memory of it. He told the boy that he was making books. The boy shrugged and said, "Well, I guess that's a job."