Second! Hand! Bookshop! Bargain! Binge! Woooo!

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

So people are always going on on ILM about their CD-buying binges. This is where you talk about book-buying binges.

And feel free to go on at length about your favourite bookshops, second hand or otherwise. (Because I'm a big fan of the kind of bookshops where they just have big cardboard boxes of books all thrown in together higgledy piggledy for a pound each that you can spend all day rooting through.)

And what was the largest amount of books you ever bought at once? (Beginning of term sprees at college bookshops probably don't count.)

― kate (kate), Monday, 27 October 2003 09:22 (twenty-two years ago)

Kate -- you live in Cambridge?

Galloway & Porter = hey man there's a hole in my bookshelf where all the money goes.

But I don't live there any more so abebooks.co.uk = a horrible crackhouse I never want to leave.

― Enrique (Enrique), Monday, 27 October 2003 09:25 (twenty-two years ago)

We went to Greenwich yesterday. We got:

-Two books about the Roman invasion of Britain
-A big book of essays about the politics of gender and sexuality
-The Battle Of Britain: The role of the RAF in WWII
-Metropolitan Myths - middle class journalists take the piss out of middle class suburbs of London. (Though the chapter on BlacksteadHeath did have HSA and his mum LOL)
-J. Bronowksi's The Ascent of Man - I was raised on this book. HSA has never read it
-Oliver Sacks' Anthrologist On Mars - cause you can never have too much Oliver Sacks
-A Big Book Of Philosophy For Dummies.

The cheapest book was 30p, the most expensive £3. Hooray!

(This is not even counting HSA's binge on Philosophy Of Science books about lightning and the National Grid and other HSA type books in Hampstead the other day!)

― kate (kate), Monday, 27 October 2003 09:27 (twenty-two years ago)

(Enrique - no, we don't live in Cambridge! That was a joke! We live in Bloomsbury!)

Though nothing was ever quite as good as the day that I found an entire CRATE of books in someone's trash in Islington. Amazing stuff, I took away as much as I could carry.

― kate (kate), Monday, 27 October 2003 09:28 (twenty-two years ago)

People who throw out books baffle me.

― JS Williams (js williams), Monday, 27 October 2003 09:43 (twenty-two years ago)

It seemed to me to be someone who was leaving the country - i.e. back to Australia or something. That said, still, I mean, give them to charity or something.

― kate (kate), Monday, 27 October 2003 09:46 (twenty-two years ago)

11 Sweet Valley High books, 2 Cheerleaders books, one Sweet Dreams book and one copy of the rudiments and theory of music grades 1-8. Although recently I got a copy of THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS from alibris.com, and The Number Devil, The Merciful Women and The Knit Stitch from Amazon. Cannot buy any new books...

― Sarah (starry), Monday, 27 October 2003 10:03 (twenty-two years ago)

i bought 50-60 books in galloway and porter once. stupidly this after i had moved to london, so i had to lug them all back on the train.

i have been v restrained buying books this year, i think my experience of buying too many books in boston and having to sell/give them back cos i couldn't fit them in my luggage has taught me a lesson.

― toby (tsg20), Monday, 27 October 2003 10:11 (twenty-two years ago)

Starry: if that's one ten-word title, surely it must be the best book ever!

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Monday, 27 October 2003 10:30 (twenty-two years ago)

There was an amazing charity bookshop in Harpenden, though it was only open two days a week, during certain phases of the moon. No order of any kind whatsoever, everything in boxes on the floor, or stacked randomly in shelves, and paperbacks were, like, 5 for £1 or something. Haven't been there in ages, though. :-(

Though I must say that mostly I've been digging the Blackheath Oxfam for good books. There must be the highest proportion of retired scientists and university professors and writers and such anywhere in South London! (I can't actually afford Oxfams in Hampstead.) Funny thing is, it says in that book "Metropolitan Myths" that people in Blackheath sell their review copies not because they *need* to, but to prove that they *get* review copies. ;-)

― kate (kate), Monday, 27 October 2003 10:39 (twenty-two years ago)

I have stopped buying CDs (almost) and started buying books instead. My favourite recent purchase (not 2nd hand, but I'm sure you can find it in 2nd hand shops) is Stephen Jay Gould's final collection of natural history essays, I Have Landed. It's pretty fab, if you can put up with his puffy stylings (think his appearance in the fossilised angel ep of The Simpsons, but with longer words).

Also, Wordsworth Classics - 100 O Henry stories for just over a penny each! Vanity Fair at .2p a page!! Jane motherfuckin' Austen, yo!

― Mark C (Mark C), Monday, 27 October 2003 11:08 (twenty-two years ago)

The second hand bookshops on Charing Cross Road have the dank smell about them that only mouldy paperbacks can produce. Hay-on-Wye on the England / Wales border is a whole town of second hand bookshops and a browsing utopia.

I'm really tired today. And I had an odd dream about the band Squeeze.

― Mikey G (Mikey G), Monday, 27 October 2003 11:17 (twenty-two years ago)

Oh woe - people are still buying stuff.

Tell me about what you have sold.

The world is my library, I shall not own books.

― Pete (Pete), Monday, 27 October 2003 11:17 (twenty-two years ago)

For some reason, I just don't go in the second hand bookshops on Charing Cross Road. I just think they'll be overpriced, though I've never really looked closely enough to figure it out. Bloomsbury has some good ones - the one opposite the Great Ormond Street Hospital is fantastic! Apparently the bloke who runs it is a bit of a hobbyist, so things are never priced what they are actually worth.

The ones opposite the British Museum tend to be good, but verge on overpriced, though.

I don't sell books, I tend to give them away. I have a real problem letting go of books, though, I will carry them around with me forever. HSA and his mum and his grandfather all share(d) the same problem. Hence why I am now living in a flat which is so overrun with books that we can't actually use one of the bedrooms. Sigh.

― kate (kate), Monday, 27 October 2003 11:21 (twenty-two years ago)

On a similar note - do people ever go into the bookshops that have an adult section downstairs to buy ordinary non-pr0n books? I don't.

― Mark C (Mark C), Monday, 27 October 2003 11:24 (twenty-two years ago)

Judd Street books on the fringe of Bloomsbury is a decent one. Oh, aye.

I bought a Douglas Adams box set from the shop on Berwick Street that has the downstairs perv cellar.

― Mikey G (Mikey G), Monday, 27 October 2003 11:27 (twenty-two years ago)

I like Skoob, buy on Saturday, sell back on Wednesday. I just picked up a complete 1981 set of The Book of The New Sun to sate my curiosity for £8.

Kate is right about the place opposite Great ormond Street, v.v.difficult to walk past whenever I am on the way to the police station without buying owt.

― Pete (Pete), Monday, 27 October 2003 11:30 (twenty-two years ago)

Judd Street Books... is that the architectural bookshop at the top of Bloomsbury near St. Pancras, or am I confusing it with another shop?

Skoob is nice, but everything I've wanted to buy has been overpriced. :-( Though aparently, according to HSA they buy books at fair rates. So these two things are probably connected.

― kate (kate), Monday, 27 October 2003 11:31 (twenty-two years ago)

Judd Street Books has some books on architecture but also stocks lots of fiction. There is a specialised architecture bookshop in this area too. I don't know it's name, So I'll call it Duncan.

― Mikey G (Mikey G), Monday, 27 October 2003 11:35 (twenty-two years ago)

Nice thing about Skoob is that they give you a 20% off voucher when you buy something. So if you like lots of things, buy one of them and then go back ten minutes later and get the rest. But yes, its not exactly the home of the serendipitous random 50p book. But yeah, buying books price is really rather good (esp non fiction and film stuff). Ditto with video flogging, especially arthouse (what with the dormotory, I mean Renoir over the way they get plenty of middle class fools who will spend £6 on a old video of The Cook The Thief The Self Indulgent Director and The Oh Look - Its Helen Mirren Taking Her Kit Off Again..

― Pete (Pete), Monday, 27 October 2003 11:41 (twenty-two years ago)

serendipitous random 50p book.

See, this is my entire book-buying philosophy.

― kate (kate), Monday, 27 October 2003 11:42 (twenty-two years ago)

For some reason, I just don't go in the second hand bookshops on Charing Cross Road

I find these really underwhelming. Oxfam in Oxford (well there ar elots, but the one on St Giles) roxxor -- old New Left Reviews for 50p each... oh, glorious days...

― Enrique (Enrique), Monday, 27 October 2003 12:01 (twenty-two years ago)

Yet another reason that I really need to go to Oxford for the FAP! But then again, I don't fancy carrying home tons of books on the Big Red Bus.

― kate (kate), Monday, 27 October 2003 12:07 (twenty-two years ago)

Hmm, I can't eiver, cos I'm watching a film about the kidnapping of Aldo Moro.

― Enrique (Enrique), Monday, 27 October 2003 12:15 (twenty-two years ago)

Do people have daemons in Oxford? Or are the Philip Pulman books fiction?

― Mikey G (Mikey G), Monday, 27 October 2003 12:22 (twenty-two years ago)

People who throw out books baffle me.

I don't throw away but when I moved last sell I had to sell or donate a lot, there just wasn't the space. Good thing too, removed a lot of stuff I just wasn't going to miss.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 27 October 2003 12:52 (twenty-two years ago)

A few weeks ago I got Invisible Cities and Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino and Labyrinths by Borges at a yard sale for 25 cents each.

― NA (Nick A.), Monday, 27 October 2003 13:33 (twenty-two years ago)

That is possibly the most ILX post ever made!

― kate (kate), Monday, 27 October 2003 13:34 (twenty-two years ago)

(Getting back to what was discussed previously:)

http://deanna.ladyinterference.com/ilx/halfpricebookshuebneri10.jpg

I largely rely on second-hand bookstores for my books, much like how I largely rely on second-hand music stores for my CDs. Half-Price Books is my favorite place to go for books if I'm not going to be stopping by Barnes & Noble. The above picture is the best one I could take at the time of the Half-Price Books located on Huebner and I-10, in the Strand shopping center, which is one of the two Half-Price Books locations I go to frequently.

I figure the books being sold at Half-Price Books were books that the original owners just probably tired of, or didn't find interesting anymore, or maybe they were needing a few quick bucks and decided to sell off some of their books, or maybe they had duplicates of the same book and decided to sell one of them off, or something. I've sold some books before that didn't hold any interest for me anymore. You don't really get that much -- I think I maybe might've gotten a total of $10 for all the books I sold -- but it's worth it, vs. just throwing the books out or just letting them take up shelf space.

― Many Coloured Halo (Dee the Lurker), Monday, 27 October 2003 13:37 (twenty-two years ago)

That is a question. How much is a inch of your shelf space worth?

― Pete (Pete), Monday, 27 October 2003 13:40 (twenty-two years ago)

Depends on how small your flat is!

Hence why we have such a book problem.

― kate (kate), Monday, 27 October 2003 13:46 (twenty-two years ago)

Every time I see a 'rare' 'bargain' I buy it, then I invariably see the same fuckin' thing in the library a week later

― dave q, Monday, 27 October 2003 13:51 (twenty-two years ago)

I've bought more than 30 at a time several times. My most in one go would be over 50, I'm pretty sure. I'm still buying, even though with my eye troubles I'm hardly reading any - I just can't stop, and certainly don't want to act as if the eye problems are permanent.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Monday, 27 October 2003 13:52 (twenty-two years ago)

On a similar note - do people ever go into the bookshops that have an adult section downstairs to buy ordinary non-pr0n books? I don't.

yes, and i find they're the best remainder bookshops in london (not that that's saying much).

― toby (tsg20), Monday, 27 October 2003 15:44 (twenty-two years ago)

Cracking excuse to go in there, anyway.

― Mikey G (Mikey G), Monday, 27 October 2003 15:53 (twenty-two years ago)

This is a good thread, can we please keep it going?

When I was in Denver I found a couple of great 2nd hand bookshops and purchased, among other things, a book detailing the life of a 15th Century florentine merchant. I haven't read it yet - I'm a bit intimidated by it, to be honest - but I'm very grateful the world of books can present me with this kind of fascinating object I'd never have thought to look for in a million years.

― Mark C (Mark C), Monday, 27 October 2003 16:42 (twenty-two years ago)

i like to buy random books for $1.

dig the 'stacks only' rockism:
(this was a special sale, not the routine)

Antiquarian Books of Boston
BOOK WAREHOUSE SALE
10,000 cartons of mostly non-fiction good books
SAVE THRU END OF AUGUST
Over the years we have accumulated a warehouse backlog of about 300,000 books, plus additional old journals and magazines, from retired professors and old New England homes. We now wish to cut back on our inventory, so we are offering...

THE ENTIRE 10,000 BOXES FOR $90,000
or for
$15 PER BOX IN MINIMUM LOTS OF 30 BOXES

The boxes are stacked 8 feet high in a solid mass, so picking-and-choosing is not possible. The boxes are to be sold in blocks.

― kephm, Monday, 27 October 2003 16:51 (twenty-two years ago)

How many boxes do you think could fit in Bloomsbury?

I wonder if the British Museum will take some of our spare boxes of books if we buy the joblot?

― kate (kate), Monday, 27 October 2003 16:52 (twenty-two years ago)

BBC Big Read shortlist
In April 2003 the BBC asked the nation to nominate your best loved books.

The shortlist has been whittled down to the top 21, here is the list of your favourite books.

* Birdsong Sebastian Faulks
* Captain Corelli's Mandolin Louis de Bernieres.
* Catch 22 Joseph Heller.
* The Catcher in the rye JD Salinger.
* Great Expectations Charles Dickens.
* Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell.
* Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire JK Rowling.
* His Dark Materials Philip Pullman.
* Hitchikers guide to the galaxy Douglas Adams
* Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte.
* The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe CS Lewis.
* Little Women Louisa may Alcott
* The Lord of the Rings JRR Tolkein.
* Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell.
* To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee.
* Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen.
* Rebecca Daphne Du Maurier.
* War and Peace Leo Tolstoy
* The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame.
* Winnie the Pooh AA Milne.
* Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte.

― Mikey G (Mikey G), Monday, 27 October 2003 16:57 (twenty-two years ago)

I had been ACTIVELY AVOIDING The Big Read because I knew that it would annoy me. I'm glad to see that I was right.

― kate (kate), Monday, 27 October 2003 16:59 (twenty-two years ago)

The other day I bought:
$2 Electronic Flash, Strobe by Edgerton (a MIT professor) This book is a totally in-depth book solely on strobe lights (mostly on their uses in photography and scientific reseach) This copy was autographed by him in 1986. It's a greeat book because it combines the art and engineering of the topic.
$3 Classics of Foreign Film by Tyler. This book had most of my favorite films featured in it so I had to buy it.
$1 Teaching English as a second language
$.50 Figure drawing in Charcoal (a large old book of faces and figures)
$3 three Japanese dictionaries
$2 book on etiquette from the 50s, It talks about how to set a table and tons of other stuff in laugh-out-loud amounts of detail.

Is that $11.50?, I spent $13, but I can't remember what else I got.

― A Nairn (moretap), Monday, 27 October 2003 17:02 (twenty-two years ago)

It creates discussion. Sales of the top 100 have increased mega bollocks fold over last year etc. It's on the whole a good thing. Obviously no-one will agree with the final 21 because books are pretty personal things.

Personally I always try and see what other people are reading (on tube, bus etc). This is the same thing, only magnified.

― Mikey G (Mikey G), Monday, 27 October 2003 17:06 (twenty-two years ago)

Its funny when Birdsong by S. Faulks = Boyzone Rekkids on Channel 4's best pop single ever award (ie recent book voted in by rabid fanbase...)

Nothing too surprising here. Quite a fun little list really. Prachett has split his own vote I note.

― Pete (Pete), Monday, 27 October 2003 17:12 (twenty-two years ago)

Only one book allowed per author in the top 21. Hence just outside are the other Harry Potter books. There were a few Pratchett books in the top 100, thankfully none made the cut.

― Mikey G (Mikey G), Monday, 27 October 2003 17:15 (twenty-two years ago)

i live quite close to the strand on broadway in nyc, so that's where i go when i'm feeling gluttonous. i think the most damage i've ever done there was one large plastic bag and one canvas tote bag full. i can't remember everything i bought, but i got a lot of old hardbacks about victorian england weirdness - i think a collector had just died/cleaned house.

― lauren (laurenp), Monday, 27 October 2003 17:17 (twenty-two years ago)

Tell more!

― Mikey G (Mikey G), Monday, 27 October 2003 17:21 (twenty-two years ago)

I enjoy giving away books more than I enjoy buying them. Queen's Road in Brighton used to have one (in fact it had spilled into two) of those chaotic shops of precariously wobbling structures made up of thousands of random books. I hated it.

― Archel (Archel), Monday, 27 October 2003 17:30 (twenty-two years ago)

Every Sunday, my local Episcopalian Church has a book sale. Hard cover for a $1, paperback for 50 cents, but usually if you bring a stack of books to the man in charge he gets flustered and says "oh, $5". And there's a free table, sp it usually works out to 25-30 cents a book.

Suff I've found there:
The First Rock and Roll Confidential Report
Christgau's Rock Albums of the 70s
Anastasia Krupnick (hardcover!)
The Age of Rock (1969 Vintage anthology of rock writing, it's all Beatles Beatles, Beatles)
Escape from With Mountain
Fiddler on the Roof
Flesh and the Word 4 proof
Two Ann-Margret biographies
Better Homes and Garden Decorating Book (from 1975)
Good Housekeeping Guide to Homemaking (most recent copyright = 1961)
Sex and Significant Americans: A study of sexual behavior among the affluent
Night Moves: Pop Music in the Late 70s
Sorority Sisters: I Think I'm in Love
Paul Fussell's Class
The Totally Awesome Val Guide
The Gay Metropolis
Elizabeth Takes Off (autobiography/diet book by Elizabeth Taylor)
Goodbye, Columbus
The Joys of Yiddish
Worn Again, Hallelujah! NYC's Thrift Stores
The Washington Guide Book (from 1965)
The Dialectic of Sex
1000 Homosexuals
Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back novelizations
Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter.
And three zillion mystery/crime novels to read on the PATH/subway

I also like the $1 and 5 for $2 carts at the Strand and Housing Works Cafe. The rest of those stores have good stuff too, and Housing Works is nice because you can sit there in a big easy chair for a few hours just reading books.

(Ha ha, I have seen Tom Verlaine looking at both the $1 carts outside the Strand AND the $1 record boxes at the WFMU Record Fair. How thrifty.)

― tokyo rosemary (rosemary), Monday, 27 October 2003 17:32 (twenty-two years ago)

I also like the half price university press/academic publisher table at the Strand: That's where I got Generation Ecstasy, ha ha.

Other cheap Strand finds include Cherie Currie's Neon Angel for $2.50 and Jaques Attali's Noise for $3.50 (insert mark s saying "that's $3.50 too much" here). Oh and a book of literary criticism on the works of.... VC Andrews!!!

― tokyo rosemary (rosemary), Monday, 27 October 2003 17:37 (twenty-two years ago)

anastasia krupnik! possibly my favorite youth series ever! last time i went home to see my parents, i reread one of them (anastasia has the answers) and it was still grr-eat. if i have ever have a girlchild, she will be raised on those books.

― lauren (laurenp), Monday, 27 October 2003 17:37 (twenty-two years ago)

Skipping 30 messages at this point... Click here if you want to load them all.

Which were?

― kate (kate), Wednesday, 29 October 2003 11:19 (twenty-two years ago)

Sara Wheeler's biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Stories I Stole by Wendell Stevenson (travel book about Georgia) and Unless by Carol Shields.

― Mikey G (Mikey G), Wednesday, 29 October 2003 11:22 (twenty-two years ago)

Goodness! Is keeping a spreadsheet and giving marks out of ten a prerequisite of joining your book club? I feel so incapable, I just read books and throw them on the big "put away in boxes at some point unless HSA deigns to let me have a bookshelf" pile.

― kate (kate), Wednesday, 29 October 2003 11:24 (twenty-two years ago)

that won't be a pre-requisite, that's just G being G.

― chris (chris), Wednesday, 29 October 2003 11:28 (twenty-two years ago)

My girlfriend thinks I'm off my knockers. Spreadsheets are for geeks. I know this, yet still I do it.

So, Kate, top three books read this year?

― Mikey G (Mikey G), Wednesday, 29 October 2003 11:29 (twenty-two years ago)

Off the top of my head...

Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
Margaret Atwood - Cats Eye
Pigs, Cows, Wars and Witches: The Puzzle of Human Culture (I cannot for the life of me remember who wrote it.)

First time that it's been mainly non fiction!

― kate (kate), Wednesday, 29 October 2003 11:32 (twenty-two years ago)

We did Perfume by Patrick Suskind for last night's wine soaked meeting. It was not universally popular. The one before was Holes by Louis Sachar and that was well received.

― Mikey G (Mikey G), Wednesday, 29 October 2003 11:38 (twenty-two years ago)

Recently read and enjoyed by a creature of the opposite sex = Zelda Fitzgerald - _Save Me the Waltz_ & Willa Cather - _My Antonia_ & Djuna Barnes _Nightwood_ (speed-read, but will go back to it). Books by girls RoXor.

― alext (alext), Wednesday, 29 October 2003 12:46 (twenty-two years ago)

''Anyone want to join my bookclub? We meet in Bloomsbury and we're doing the Wasp Factory next. Hard drinking is involved and pretentious comments are dealt with by means of a stick.''

since I work next door from the bloomsbury theater and always wanted to join a book club I might want to. details? when is the next meeting?

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Wednesday, 29 October 2003 13:02 (twenty-two years ago)

I think the next meeting is on Sunday 16th November. It may be an afternoon meet rather than an evening one due to reasons that escape me at the moment.

We hired out the room above the Lamb in Lamb's Conduit Street last night. Cheap and it's called the London Empire Theatre or something similar and very Victorian. Might be same venue again.

I will start a bookclub thread at some point for anyone interested..

― Mikey G (Mikey G), Wednesday, 29 October 2003 13:50 (twenty-two years ago)

ok.

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Wednesday, 29 October 2003 13:51 (twenty-two years ago)

two weeks pass...

Revive!!!

My haul this week included:

1) Secrets Of The Freemasons. I'm quite excited about this, of course. It's a post-80s scandals "expose" of Freemasonry. I wonder if it will be any different from 19th Century or Nazi "exposes" of Freemasonry.
2) The Year 1000. Anglo Saxons and Danelaw and Normans, oh my! This book is excellent, I'm already nearly finished with it, and it has told me all sorts of obscure things like Saxons could pay their taxes in honey. Mmmm, honey.
3) The Story Of The Alphabet. Very interesting book about the history of our 26 letters, bringing in both typography and linguistics and history. Hopefully this will resolve my C/K/Q/X quandary.
4) The Children Of Green Knowe! I haven't seen this book since I was a kid. Hooray!

― Citizen Kate (kate), Monday, 17 November 2003 09:21 (twenty-two years ago)

a minimal weekdn:

Henry Green: Loving -- but in a lovely big Harvill edition, mmmmm

― enrique (Enrique), Monday, 17 November 2003 09:31 (twenty-two years ago)

Murakami's Norweigan Wood in the two part red and green edition in a shiny box. Only £6.99 in a sale in the Stoke Newington bookshop. Plus photographic history of Hackney and JP Stephens Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan Vol 2 from Foyles. Mayan history, right up my street.

― Mikey G (Mikey G), Monday, 17 November 2003 09:43 (twenty-two years ago)

I found a book about the archeological history of Hackney, but I didn't have any money on me at the time, and it was expensive anyway.

― Citizen Kate (kate), Monday, 17 November 2003 09:44 (twenty-two years ago)

My girlfriend's mother brought over three issues of the BBC History magazine. And six bottles of wine. She knows how to keep me quiet.

― Mikey G (Mikey G), Monday, 17 November 2003 09:50 (twenty-two years ago)

Anyone ever been to the Red Cross Charity bookshop on Green Lanes in Palmers Green? You can get some amazing bargains there (although they have started professionally putting the prices up recently).
I used to frequent there a lot. My whole library is from there and you wouldn't believe some of the things i got hold of. They've always had such a wide range.

― Pete S, Monday, 17 November 2003 12:54 (twenty-two years ago)

What gems did you unearth in this musty smelling establishment?

― Mikey G (Mikey G), Monday, 17 November 2003 12:56 (twenty-two years ago)

I just paid about 20 quid for a collection of David Shrigley postcards that only came out last year. Only one bookseller on abebooks.com had one so I panicked.

They're great postcards though.

― N. (nickdastoor), Monday, 17 November 2003 13:07 (twenty-two years ago)

1st edition of Boswell's London Diary (50s), Walter Pater's Renaissance, Evelyn Underhill's 'Mysticism', 1st ed. of Centuries of Meditations by Thomas Traherne, lots of Jung, Alethea Hayter's Opium and the romantic imagination,(1st ed.) lots of Christopher Hill, a reprint of Hudibras from 1874,lots of John Cowper Powys (not 1st eds), lots of poetry in Oxford editions, and all for lower prices than you'd find in 2nd hand.

― Pete S, Monday, 17 November 2003 13:12 (twenty-two years ago)

I got a copy of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen in that Palmers Green shop. It had been marked up in pencil by a student - I'd see "irony!" about every twentieth time I came across some obvious irony.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Monday, 17 November 2003 18:27 (twenty-two years ago)

two months pass...

Greil Marcus - Double Trouble
Douglas Coupland - Polaroids from the Dead
Teenage Confidential: "An Illustrated History of the American Teen"
Richard Klein - Cigarettes Are Sublime
Emily Jenkins - Tongue First, Adventures in Physical Culture
Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (old textbook, I think)
Hatch Show Print - poster shop (hardcover)
Nan Goldin - The Ballad of Sexual Dependence
Aperture Masters of Photography - Henri Cartier-Bresson
" - Dorothea Lange
" - Man Ray
Andy Grundberg - Crisis of the Real, Writings on Photography
Edward Weston - The Flame of Recognition
Robert Adams - Why People Photograph
Robert Frank - Flamingo (Hasselblad Award)
Emerging Bodies - Nudes from the Polaroid Collection
Diane Arbus - Untitled
Robert Frank - The Lines of My Hand
Robert Frank - Moving Out
William Eggleston - The Democratic Forest
Robert Adams - Beauty in Photography

all for $100

I luv used bookstores.

― miloauckerman (miloauckerman), Monday, 16 February 2004 02:48 (twenty-two years ago)

Cool brb

― Silly Sailor (Andrew Thames), Monday, 16 February 2004 03:04 (twenty-two years ago)

Martin Amis "Other People", Jane Austen "Persuasion", Saul Bellow "The Actual", Brian Boyd "Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years", Mikhail Bulgakov "The Master and Margarita", William Burroughs "The Naked Lunch", Italo Calvino "If On a Winter's Night a Traveller", Elias Canetti "Crowds and Power", Truman Capote "The Grass Harp/A Tree of Night and Other Stories", "Music for Chameleons", Raymond Chandler "Trouble is My Business", Joseph Conrad "Chance", Philip K. Dick "The Game-Players of Titan", "Galactic Pot-Healer", Joan Didion "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", William Faulkner "As I Lay Dying", William Golding "To the Ends of the Earth; a Sea Trilogy", Edmund Gosse "Father and Son", Christopher Isherwood "Berlin Stories", Henry James "The Bostonians", James Joyce "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", C.S. Lewis "The Magician's Nephew", "The Silver Chair", "Of this World and Others", Norman Mailer "Miami and the Siege of Chicago", "Ancient Evenings", "Harlot's Ghost", Gabriel Garcia Marquez "The Autumn of the Patriarch", Friedrich Nietzsche "Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ", Sylvia Plath "The Bell Jar", James Purdy "Out with the Stars", Jean Rhys "Voyage in the Dark", Muriel Spark "Curriculum Vitae", Laurence Sterne "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy", Lytton Strachey "Queen Victoria", Mark Twain "Roughing It", Evelyn Waugh "Remote People", Edmund White "A Boy's Own Story", Tennessee Williams "A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays", Tom Wolfe "The Pump House Gang", "Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers". Aside from the bigger Capote and the Didion, all for $15 or so from a smalltown book sale. Woo! And now I've posted it like three places but it's unlikely to ever happen again, so why not.

― Silly Sailor (Andrew Thames), Monday, 16 February 2004 03:05 (twenty-two years ago)

Kids' Letters to President Kennedy
TWA Getaway Guide to San Francisco (from 1971)
Ayun Halliday No Touch Monkey
Chaim Potok' the Gift of Asher Lev
Christgau's Record Guide to the '70s
Sharon Fiffer Dead Guy's Stuff
Nathan Englander For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
Cara Black Murder in the Sentier
Marian Keyes Under the Duvet
Frank Marcus The Killing of Sister George
Zsa Zsa Gershick Gay Old Girls
Allegra Goodman Kaaterskill Falls
Felice Picano Like People in History
Robert Curran The Inspring Stories of the Kennedy Women
Kitty Kelley Jackie Oh!
Judy Blume Fudge-a-Mania
Shere Hite The Hite Report
Mordecai H Lewittes Highlights of Jewish History vol Four
New York Times Alamanac 2000
Martine (or Martin E., ha ha) Sexual Astrology

all for about $20

― tokyo rosemary (rosemary), Monday, 16 February 2004 03:07 (twenty-two years ago)

two months pass...

Revive!

I found some lovely books in Oxfams this weekend!

In St.Albans I found:
-a big book of London ghosts
-Another biography of the English language (not Melvyn Bragg or Bill Bryson but another more academic looking one
-Julie Burchill's autobiography (more bile than allowed by law! Hooray!)

In Blackheath I found:
-"The World Turned Upside Down" - a social history of the English Civil War and the Commonwealth focusing on all the weird sects and cults like Levellers, Diggers, Ranters and whathaveyou
-The Domesday Book To The Magna Carta - a history of the early Medieval Period in England.

(And I remembered that I got book tokens for my birthday that I still haven't spent. What should I get?)

― Super-Kate (kate), Monday, 26 April 2004 07:10 (twenty-one years ago)

(Yes, I know I should ask that on I Love Books, but this thread is here.)

― Super-Kate (kate), Monday, 26 April 2004 07:11 (twenty-one years ago)

victor hugo used bookshop in closing down in boston. :(

― kephm, Monday, 26 April 2004 14:41 (twenty-one years ago)

The World Turned Upside Down is, quite unsurprisingly, a Billy Bragg song.

I think you should buy some Damien Hirst porn, unless HSA bought you said tokens and it could cause a Saatchi Art Fite if you did.

― suzy (suzy), Monday, 26 April 2004 14:45 (twenty-one years ago)

The only Charing Cross bookstore I ever went in was Any Amount of Books. Within ten seconds I made a totally serendipitous discovery and immediately bought it because it made my life feel like some kind of beautiful narrative and then got the hell out of there sharpish because the atmosphere was absolutely oppressive and there was a creepy guy practically laying on my back who smelled like he had eaten shit.

I like McKay books in Knoxville, TN, and always leave with an armload. The Book Eddy is nice, and has cats running around, which is nice, but is sometimes a little pricey. Nicer stuff, though, usually.

― roxymuzak (roxymuzak), Monday, 26 April 2004 14:48 (twenty-one years ago)

I think I pretty much have most Damien Hirst stuff. When I unpacked that box of book, HSA leapt upon each book in turn and dragged it off to the bedroom, cackling with glee and exclaiming "That's RUBBISH! That's SHITE!! Ha ha ha ha ha!" every few seconds.

― Super-Kate (kate), Monday, 26 April 2004 14:49 (twenty-one years ago)

Clearly you guys can fancy him TOGETHER then. That's just...sexual.

― suzy (suzy), Monday, 26 April 2004 14:50 (twenty-one years ago)

Yes, possibly up there with the John/Nick slash.

― Super-Kate (kate), Monday, 26 April 2004 14:51 (twenty-one years ago)

No, I can't make them work as a couple as have not been able to remove the whole pipe-cleaners-in-congress image the fuck out of my head.

― suzy (suzy), Monday, 26 April 2004 14:55 (twenty-one years ago)

I just realised that I have a whole collection of John/Nick slash. But it's Duran-based! Hah!

Erm... I need to get my own thread back on topic.

I think I will buy some nice books about country house architecture or something like that. Mmmmmm. What bookshop is likely to be poncey enough to actually carry Mark Girouard books?

― Super-Kate (kate), Monday, 26 April 2004 14:58 (twenty-one years ago)

Probably one close to you, the Architectural Association bookshop on Bedford Square, in the school - I may have even taken you to the bar there for low-cost bouze. I don't know if remainder places take the tokens or not, though if you're into real I WANT!-style torture go to the RIBA shop in Portland Place.

― suzy (suzy), Monday, 26 April 2004 15:07 (twenty-one years ago)

No, Mark Girouard is a bit too National Trust to be sold in a proper architectural bookshop.

― Super-Kate (kate), Monday, 26 April 2004 15:24 (twenty-one years ago)

(At the HSA family picnic on Sunday, we nearly had National Trust vs. English Heritage: FITE!)

― Super-Kate (kate), Monday, 26 April 2004 15:24 (twenty-one years ago)

Go to those places anyway! The AA is in a Georgian terrace anyway and has loads of foreign students, so I think it's a goer. Also RIBA is like the Library of Congress of Arch. books, I promise it's not like Magma for architects...

― suzy (suzy), Monday, 26 April 2004 15:28 (twenty-one years ago)

has cats running around

It is my opinion that every bookstore should have at least one cat in residence. Although I do feel sorry for those who are allergic to cats. Still, Second Story Books in Bethesda hasn't been the same since they renovated and sent Mickey and Sylvia to a good, private home.

― j.lu (j.lu), Monday, 26 April 2004 15:46 (twenty-one years ago)

all 50 cent:

"How to become a ventriloquist" by Edgar Bergen
Lautreamont's "Maldoror"
An entire Japanese dictionary on idioms using "ki"
Huysmans' "Against Nature"
CDB D B E-Z B-Z B
and a book on Biblical Numerology

― A Nairn (moretap), Monday, 26 April 2004 16:00 (twenty-one years ago)

"How to become a ventriloquist" by Edgar Bergen

― roxymuzak (roxymuzak), Monday, 26 April 2004 16:18 (twenty-one years ago)

I was in Boston lsat week at a bookstore that was about to go out of business ... I bought a first draft copy of the screenplay for The Fly in a William Morris dust jacket with the following, included, items:

A red stamp warning : NO COPY

A few pencil marks toward the end revising the Fly's final moments.

A few pencil marks over the title , one of which says 'Jeff Goldblum is...?"

A booger between pages 64 and 65 (Cronenberg's!?)

It was seventeen bucks, but I think I'll do a few orders of magnitude more when I ebay it in a few weeks.

― The Second Drummer Drowned (Atila the Honeybun), Monday, 26 April 2004 21:10 (twenty-one years ago)

This is playing out in my mind similarly to when the male lead in Possession finds Randolph Henry Ash's love letter in the British Library's copy of Vico.

― roxymuzak (roxymuzak), Monday, 26 April 2004 21:32 (twenty-one years ago)

Jeremy!!! WAY to go!

― NUMBER 1 TERRY RILEY FAN (ex machina), Monday, 26 April 2004 21:35 (twenty-one years ago)

six months pass...

I found a 1946 hardbound illustrated version of Dos Passos' USA - 1919 (in almost perfect condition) for $7 at the used bookstore today.

― milozauckerman (miloaukerman), Monday, 22 November 2004 06:58 (twenty-one years ago)

haha, look! I was 'Second Drummer Drowned' upthread! As late as April! Why did I pick that name? I don't even like Pavement!

― Remy (x Jeremy), Monday, 22 November 2004 07:01 (twenty-one years ago)

Photos, milo!

― Remy (x Jeremy), Monday, 22 November 2004 07:01 (twenty-one years ago)

three years pass...

yes! I got paid! Bookshop binges ahoy!

My favourite second hand bookshop sells DVDs now! I just scored a triple box set of David Attenborough's The Living Planet, Life on Earth and the Secret Life of Plants! I need not leave the house again until Spring.

Also a biography of Madame Curie (or wait, no, that was a different bookbinge) and some rubbishy looking pop science books about 1) the psychology of happiness and 2) an archeologist's take on the prehistory of the mind. (Hopefully more entertaining than Roger Penrose?)

Bookshops, oh how I have missed you.

― The Lesser of Two Weevils (Masonic Boom), Saturday, 13 September 2008 20:38 (seventeen years ago)

-J. Bronowksi's The Ascent of Man - I was raised on this book. HSA has never read it

Damn, I KNEW I had this, though I've not seen it in years. I very nearly bought another copy today by mistake. Glad I didn't.

― The Lesser of Two Weevils (Masonic Boom), Saturday, 13 September 2008 20:40 (seventeen years ago)

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.