By SUSAN DOMINUS

By 9:15 most mornings, Thomas Germain, a ruddy-faced man in a yellow slicker, is pushing his oversize black wheeled suitcase down 12th Street in the direction of the Strand Bookstore on Broadway in Manhattan. Sometimes, the suitcase is stuffed full of books; sometimes the books fill a box or two or three that he balances on top of it .
By 9:30, he’s often sitting outside the Strand, waiting for the store to open, drinking a breakfast of beer with his friend Brian Martin, who’s pushed and pulled his own collection of books to the same destination in a large, teetering grocery cart.
The men are regulars at the Strand, book-scavenging semiprofessionals who help the city’s best-known usedbook store keep its shelves stocked. They have no fixed costs, no employees and no boss. They also have no home. What they have is experience, and a fitful sense of industry.
“Perseverance,” Mr. Germain said recently. “Other people fail at this because they don’t persevere.” 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. The two 50-ish men - Tommy Books and Leprechaun, they call themselves - are often the first people waiting on the Strand’s bookselling line .
Hundreds of men and a smaller number of women barely make 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 cash at the Strand.
When the store opened, 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 was successful selling the store a supply of children’s books .
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.
Mr. Harrison didn’t know the authors - Thackeray, Gibbon - but he knew enough to know that the books had value.
“Six hundred,” Mr. Winokur told him (he thought the store could sell the Thackeray volumes for between $1,000 and $1,500). When he heard the number, Mr. Harrison crossed himself, then whooped.
Book recycling in Manhattan is a perfectly efficient system: So many discarded books go from someone’s garbage to a scavenger to a bookseller and, often enough, end up in someone else’s home.
Tommy Books and Leprechaun would like a new home themselves, they said. Also, a van.