For them, that means rising from their street-side slumber around 3 a.m. to start sifting through recycling bins outside people’s homes or in front of buildings. (For the record, paperbacks are recyclable; the city requires the covers to be removed from hardcovers before they can be recycled, a request that for booklovers is tantamount to asking 10-year-old girls to rip Barbie’s head off before discarding her in the trash.)

The two 50-ish men  Tommy Books and Leprechaun , they call themselves  are often the first people waiting on the Strand’s bookselling line, a queue also populated by N.Y.U. students, genteel booklovers moving to smaller apartments, frugal cleaner-outers, and a fair number of down-and-out fellow book scavengers, many of whom live on the street.

Hundreds of men and a smaller number of women eke out a living scavenging books in Manhattan, according to Mitchell Duneier, author of “Sidewalk,” a book about the subculture of sidewalk book scavengers and vendors. Some of them sell their books on the street; others, the less entrepreneurial, or the more impatient, go for the surefire cash at the Strand.

When the store opened that Monday morning, Tommy Books and Leprechaun each in turn emptied their boxes onto the counter, where Neil Winokur, a Strand employee, quickly sorted them into two piles. An incomplete encyclopedia got rejected, as did Donna Tartt’s “Secret History.” (Too many on the market.) An hour or two later, another scavenger scored a hit selling the store a supply of children’s books, but had no luck with Newt Gingrich’s “Winning the Future” (“No one buys him here,” said Mr. Winokur).

Around lunchtime, Neil Harrison, another regular who’s lived mostly on the street, showed up with a stash of leather-bound 19th-century books, their marbleized covers aswirl with greens and blues. He said that a building superintendent had allowed him to clear out a storage area used by a man who had died whose family did not want the books. Mr. Harrison didn’t know the authors  Thackeray, Gibbon  but he knew enough to know that the books had value.