 |
| 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?
Sadly not. Book shops and even charity shops now refer to ebay and use the vastly inflated prices that some opportunistic sellers hope someone silly enough will pay them as their guide. Modern Beano Annuals priced at £30 simple because a volunteer saw a 1940s one had a price tag of £60. When you point out the absurdity of such a price, you get hit with "Our workers are trained in how to price items." That training only consists of "Check ebay to see what similar items are selling for." Every place seems to be trying to get as much as they can, regardless of an item's true worth. I'm not saying that places you describe don't exist in Scotland, but I've never seen them. Having said that, some items slip through the net and the (very) occasional bargain can sometimes be found.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like the rise of the charity shop in the UK has completely removed the second-hand book shop as I knew them in my childhood and teenage years. A green shame.
Delete