Today I visited a local used book shop that I hadn't been to yet called Second Chance Books and Comics. It has a very large science fiction section--actually two sections, one for hardcover books and one for paperbacks. It has even more books than the other store near my neighborhood that I usually visit. They also have the biggest collection of old pulp digest magazines that I've seen in a store: many, many issues of Galaxy, Worlds of If, Astounding, Analog, Amazing Stories, Asimov's and others, with issues going back to about 1950. Unfortunately for a cash-strapped reader like myself, they don't sell anything very cheaply. They appear to be experts on what they have and they price things accordingly. Sometimes I'll be tempted to rifle through the inevitable book section in an actual thrift store like St. Vincent DePaul because one just might turn up amid the heaps of discarded religious books, diet books, get-rich-now books, and romance novels a real gem. Like, for example, a hardback edition of Greg Bear's Blood Music for twenty-five cents. That's exactly how I got my copy of it. It would be so sweet to stumble upon some little-known decroded shop somewhere that has shelves upon shelves of sf novels all for twenty-five cents or five for a buck. Well, that's not what Second Chance is, anyway. It's a very nice store, not in the least decroded. I never can really remember what to even look for when I am in such a place, but I did come away with a couple of Delany paperbacks (Nova and Triton, in editions published during the Fred Pohl days at Bantam) for seven bucks. Not bad. Though if I could have gotten into a time machine and gone back to 1977, I could have had them for four. But they would have thought my new-style ten dollar bill was fake.
3 comments:
Chris,
Try Goodwill and The Salvation Army. I found lot's of good books there.
Dan
Yard sales, too. Like the thrift shops, most of what one would find is usually garbage, but once in a while there's something that makes it worth the look.
Is that the one out at 39th and MacArthur?
mmmm...yard sales...
If it looks like there are a few good titles, offer to buy the whole box for some dirty low price.
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