Showing posts with label Book shops. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book shops. Show all posts

Monday, July 19, 2021

A Summer Road Trip Interlude by Ian Baker

Part of the SF section - love those 1960s spines!

Do you ever get the feeling that something you find in an old bookstore has been waiting there all the time for you to turn up and buy it? That’s the feeling I had yesterday afternoon when we stopped briefly in the village in upstate NY on a whim, driving  through as part of our summer road trip in Mrs. B’s MINI Paceman, “The Grey Ghost”.


The Grey Ghost


We stumbled across an amazing, small second-hand bookshop with a huge and varied selection of books excellently ordered in custom-built shelves. Upon entering we were hit immediately with that unmistakable smell of old books. And there were two long boxes of comics, a very varied selection of comic-related hardbacks, paperbacks, fanzines and prozines from the 1970s. I picked up the haul below for $17 in total - the DC Showcase Jason's Quest for $2! The Bantam Doc Savage first editions for $2 each! The Tarzan paperback with the Adams cover for $3! The Astounding Stories SF pulp from 1954 for $3!


The $17 Haul


I was greatly heartened to see that book shops like this still exist in out of the way places, where gems can be found at real-life prices , not vastly inflated “collectors” prices.  What has been your experience? Do these places still exist in your neck of the woods?