Used Book Store: When Was the Most Recent Time?

[BAYLOR]

I just love bookshops like this.

Absolutely magnificent.

 

[Danny McG]

I was in my local one on Friday the 8th September this year (2 days ago)
I got a couple of 1980s crime thrillers.

'It's a family business' - Popular bookshop's lasting legacy

This week our trader is a shop that has been serving the people of Whitehaven for over fifty years.

www.newsandstar.co.uk

 

[BAYLOR]

I was in my local one on Friday the 8th September this year (2 days ago)
I got a couple of 1980s crime thrillers.

'It's a family business' - Popular bookshop's lasting legacy

This week our trader is a shop that has been serving the people of Whitehaven for over fifty years.

www.newsandstar.co.uk

If I were touring the town and I saw that place, i'd definite pay it a visit.

 

[Danny McG]

If I were touring the town and I saw that place, i'd definite pay it a visit.

Yeah, he moved (maybe a decade ago) to that store from a rambling old theatre building on a backstreet in town.
For some months, during and after that venue change, there were lots of reports of rare books being found during the stock moving.
He'd been well established long before computer cataloguing and originally had stacks of hand written ledgers to try and keep track.

I remember years ago when his son was (in the old building) taking over the SFF section, that was a glorious place of 3 linked rooms ... big stacks of dusty old Golden Age paperbacks with real treasures amongst them.

Great days, you could pop in for a quick 20 minutes browse and emerge blinking like 3 hours later with a tightly clutched brown paper bag!

 

[Danny McG]

The same bookshop has yesterday posted this on Facebook:-

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Yesterday.

 

[hitmouse]

My local Oxfam bookshop today.

 

[Extollager]

It had been six years since I'd been in a bookstore, but lately I have been in three, two in Fargo and one in West Fargo. As soon as I saw the spiffy appearance of the West Fargo one, and all the more when I smelled aromatic coffee, I doubted that it would be very interesting, and it wasn't. Not very many used books so far as I noticed. One of the Fargo ones was intriguingly titled Books at a Fifth -- the books are 1/5 of cover price. It seemed to be well organized, but was very small. I had only a few minutes to get an impression. But BDS (owner's initials) books near downtown: my kind of place. This sizeable store has high, packed shelves -- in some places with double-shelved books -- and the aisles are crowded with boxes of books. Books! Books! Many of them far past their first youth. I didn't attempt to do more than check two or three areas. I selected one book and my wife, who never buys books, chose two. I handed our finds to the proprietor and the following dialogue (not word for word) ensued:

Prop. What do you know about Zager and Evans?
Me: "In the Year 2525."
Prop. That's what you'll pay. Well, $25 will do.

I handed him a $20 bill and three $2 bills and he didn't blanch.

(For non-U.S. folk: The $2 bill is genuine, but you never see them. Cash register trays have no place for them. I get them from the bank and enjoy passing them into circulation.)

I could probably spend hours there.

By the way, not really relevant to any of the stores I just mentioned, but I thought a few weeks ago that, for a certain personality type, if he or she were looking through the classified section of the phone book and saw a listing for Tenement Used Books -- he or she would be drawn to the place!

 

[hitmouse]

My local Oxfam bookshop today. View attachment 112422

Turns out there is a good story attached to this.

The Turner Prize-nominated artist David Shrigley has pulped 6,000 copies of Dan Brown's best-seller The Da Vinci Code and republished them as George Orwell's novel 1984.
He hatched the plan back in 2017 when he heard that an Oxfam shop in Swansea had stopped accepting any more copies of the conspiracy thriller.
On Saturday 1,250 copies of Shrigley's 1984 edition will go on sale in the same Oxfam. Each is unique, costs £495 and comes complete with a signed and numbered print.

I know the manager of the shop quite well, but had not been in since before the event. He told me that they sold out of the new copies of 1984 that day. Not bad for a charity bookshop in Swansea.