Used books

Every town should have one of these.

I honestly feel bad for towns that don't have a nice, little, indipendently owned book store.

John K King books in Detroit

This place has 750,000+ books; it's four stories tall and packed with antique shelves. Customers pick up a genre/subject map on the way in.

The first floor has a dozen or so taxidermy birds hidden throughout the racks.

I don't even like mushrooms but that's a genuinely brilliant title.

If I reach 40 and get very little out of my attempts to become a screenwriter, I wish to open up a small indie bookshop where you can buy pre-owned or new books and I've thought about also accepting books from people for a cash evaluation (similar to how you would trade games into places like GameStop or CEX).

Used bookstores generally buy their books in bulk from estate sales. For example, if you die and your wife wants to clear away your library so she has more room to store the casts she makes of her lover's massive penises she'll go to a bookseller who'll see if there are any he wants, and in breaks between her eating his ass he'll offer her a bit of cash for lots of them at once.

It really says a lot about the U.S when it manages to look seedier than large parts of Africa.

>large parts of Africa
What did he mean by this?
Appearances are often deceiving; midtown Detroit is actually really nice.

Just go to a used book store, see if you find something. It's like a suprise treasure hunt

Did you manage to buy anything?

I picked up a few Indian classics, and some serendipitous finds. The pulp sci-fi racks are impressive.

In a bookstore in my town, if you buy a book from them you can sell it back to them for half the price you bought it at, kind of pay as you go library, although I've always kept mine.

We have a charity library here that allows you to make a small donation and take up to three books at a time, I managed to get three of them for 60p, my friend paid just 20p for two.

>tfw our independent bookstore closed down last year

Before they went out of business, I got a bunch of cool "local interest" books from them, though. The one I best remember is about the history of a local church.

Hey OP, great post. This is the kind of shit this board needs.

I picked up Son's and Lovers on a whim and I had heard little to nothing of D.H.L. I read it in like two days, it could not explain why I found it so gripping but I was so immersed. Fantastic novel IMO.

Another one for me which is more obscure (for bonus points) was Monkey Grip by Helen Garner (Australian). Very powerful, immersive, and well written novella. Nice to see some decent prose in an Australian context also.

I found book related at a used book store, and others like it. I love finding strange books on mysteries, conspiracies, esotericism and the like in used stores, because I would never think to buy them otherwise.

That sounds too awesome.

im going to buy some leatherbound book on nazis with a swastika and no title and ask my local bookbinder if he can make it into a my diary desu

Winter's Tale. I didn't know anything about it. Never even heard of it. Didn't even know what it was about, because the blurb on the back is utter bullshit. Only bought it because it was two bucks and I was jonesing to buy a book. It fell in love with it, and the weird, au New York. Too bad the movie's shit.

off topic but i bought Alices in Wonderland from Oxfam and it had a bunch of drawings of naked women on the blank pages, they were shitty drawings tho

if you're out there, thanks for the laughs

I picked up a biography of Isabelle Eberhardt at a bookstore.. can't recall the exact title, doesn't seem to come up in googling, but the description of her life was attractive and I wanted something a bit lighter to take a break from Being and Time with.

>Got this rareish Hesse&Jung influences book for 5bucks.
Was it Hermann Hesse and C.G. Jung, a record of two friendships?

>bump

na what you do is send an employee to buy up all the good books from goodwill to sell in your store for profit

I found Piers Anthony's Xanth books at a used store and thought it looked like a fun nonsensical read to interior the monotony of life. I think the first was Breanna of The Black Wave. Its very punny. I got bored with the series quickly.

I also found Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil at a used store and I LOVED it!

I try to only buy used books. Its like holding a story within a story. Somebody else held it and loved it. They dog eared the pages and left a few thumb prints. It makes me feel like I'm part of a long chain of people that adored this one copy of this book. I got one used online once that smelled like herbs. I contacted the seller and asked why. She was a Wiccan and stored her books near where she moxed herbs. I love that.

Ryszard Kapucinski's travel books. I've read two of them now, they're great. My favourite is Imperium, where he traveled to the Soviet Union in the early 1990s to document the social fallout of the collapse.

The Islandman by Tomas O'Crohan is another, a very comfy memoir by an Irish farmer.

More recently, Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson. Another travel book, a very lit French guy spends six months in the Siberian wilderness, reading, working and meditating. He makes some really interesting observations about how your body and mind react to climate and inactivity. It's great.

And lastly probably Men in Prison by Victor Serge. I'd never heard of him but that was a great terse read.

I have really good memory recognition so I basically scan books for titles and authors I recognize and buy based on that.

bump for cool thread

The first 5 or 7 Xanth books are the best after that he's just churning out shit for the vapid fans who want more.

Back in the 90s I came across a "Book Barn" in the boonies of NJ when visiting friends. Some old guy retired and bought a farm but didn't want or need to work the land. He leased out the land and converted the huge barn into a used book store. He bought bulk books from estate sales, yard sales and such for his book barn. He apparently loved books. He'd travel and buy books and his wife ran the book barn when he wasn't there. It was only open Thursday through Sat. It was a huge selection and the prices were really reasonable.

Has anybody on Veeky Forums ever think about running their own little bookstore? I'd love to open one and in my country they seem to operate quite profitably. Unfortunately there are too many already in my little town, would have to move places to do one.
Speaking of which, there is one that also runs as a small publishing house, an open atellier with a coffeshop and free newspapers in the morning, and quite a large selection of intersting books. I'm there every weekend, reading a book they have and sometimes buying it. The last one I bought was an Italian Quran with fake (still pretty) gold embroidery, as I am learning italian

Got bored and annoyed with it half way through but someone here said how great it really was and after finishing it I agree.
Will definetly want to give it a reread sometime soon.

There's this used book store here that sells a big variety of old GDR nostalgia magazines and books.
I buy all my German translations of Russian works there. Most of the time they're still the best translations available because of the close ties between the GDR and Russia.

Agreed

HC Complete Marivaux (2 vol.) ~6$
HC Complete Racine/Molière/Corneille (12vol.) ~12$
HC Lassie Come-home (1st ed.) ~3$
Complete Mémoires d'outre-tombe (4 vol.) ~6$
And so much more, my parent's town is blessed with patrician used bookstores at cheap price for perfect quality..

lol what

I found a book called We've Had A Hundred Years Of Psychotherapy And The World Is Getting Worse, which I knew I had to buy based on the title, and it turned out to be one of the most interesting books I've read. It also has a recommendation by Pynchon on the jacket, which was cool. James Hillman is apparently a widely respected psychotherapist.

I found this at my local used book shop. Don't read Cyrillic so I'm not entirely sure what it is.

>Indian classics
Someone who shits on the floor without cleaning it up then proceeding to eat with their mucky hands has nothing worth saying yet alone writing

I'm working on opening one right now, actually. I'm cutting my bookselling teeth on online sales at the moment, just working on cutting a profit with book sales at the moment. I've consistently kept myself in the positive so far, which is a good sign. What I'm learning now is which books will sit forever and which ones aren't even worth buying because you can"t even sell them for the price of shipping. It isn't anywhere near as demanding or rewarding as the real thing, but it's valuable experience nontheless.

Native Speech by Petr Vayl and Alexander Genis

All it takes is one kid to jump and grab the mammoth to bring both shelves down.

I've found a 1st edition of The Exorcist and Grapes of Wrath once.

That's a Bison retard

I always leave this place disappointed in more ways than one.

I bought it so I might give it away to a potential neophyte.

A liberal tried to snark me and I told him I'd happily gift these books and why it's perfectly Objectivist to do so.

...

Is it Objectivist for him to burn your house down for disrespecting him artistically like Roark did

It's not like I redesigned the dude's facade. He was just some hipster scrub who's artistic exploits consist of macaroni crafts.

By the way, how offended do you have to be by someone else's property before you're allowed to destroy it?

Also, how self-confident does a woman have to be before it's Objectivist to rape her?

>tfw you buy a book and find a piece of paper with writing tucked in it
>the writing is mysterious, even ominous
this is the best.

>bump

never been OP

Why don't you read them and find out?

why don't you go shit on the floor if they are such a wonderful people?

I want to find a book that someone has written all the way through in the margins.

Finding this book at the local ubs was like finding treasure.

I once found a photo/non-fiction book which was basically a black and white /b/ rekt/gore thread. Someone had compiled all sorts of gore in black and white, with all sorts of situations ranging from genocide through to falling down stairs. There was no publisher's page in the front and the book was entirely black on the outside - bit spoopy.

Where did you find it? spoopy indeed

so whats the basic process for understanding the book trade? how have you been learning?

"I used to have a five year plan. I've done that so now I've got a 20 year plan. I want to open a bookshop. A tiny one. I want a business I can happily lose money on. I'm going to call it 'No Parking', sell only 100 books, T-shirts and two types of coffee. And you can only be in it for 20 minutes, once a day." ~ Sam Wills

That sounds amazing! That's the sort of place I could get lost in.

If someone gifted me that book I would immediately think less of him.

Nazis tried to exterminate the Jews, does that stop you from reading German philosophers?

>inb4 I'm so edgy Jews should die.

Not original poster but not sure what your obsession with Nazis is dude.

My local library sells some used books. It's mostly terrible 80's serial fiction and VHS tapes. I picked up The Door Through Space for 99 cents: a decision based on the cover art alone.

I guarantee you're both K-12 summerfags; get the FUCK off my board. This isn't books.