BROWSING and SURPRISES !

     I've had many conversations, in the last year or two, about the advent of electronic books like the Kindle or Nook and how that might impact the life of physical, as opposed to virtual, books. I've had lifetime readers tell me they reluctantly made the switch but have grown to like it. I shuddered but kept on listening and thinking. Recently I heard that it is now or soon will be possible to get the daily New York Times on one of these devices and then be able to "read" the whole paper but also be able to immediately access the videos and even, (gasp) do the crossword puzzle on the device and have it store your "in progress" puzzle. Now that's tempting - in fact if I had the time to read the paper, I think I'd bite.

    I can also imagine that those kinds of technologies may change what is possible in a "book," make it possible to combine other media with the printed word in new ways and I must admit that's exciting.

    However, I still am committed to the physical book - the heft of it, the feel of it, the smell of it, how it looks on the shelf, how it stacks on the floor. How could I be otherwise. I assume that there are many more like me.  I also think that, at least for now, I can still provide physical books more cheaply than most virtual books, so I think there are still economic arguments for the existence of used bookstores,  for at least a few more years.

     But it also occurs to me that, at least as far as I know, you can't browse for virtual books in the same way you can browse in my shop. You certainly can look for and find, on the internet, multiple copies of most books where you already know the author or title. This has been a wonderful boon to readers. But what about the book that you've never heard of? What about the book that "jumps out at you" when your scanning the shelves of a bookstore?  The serendipity of finding the unknown, the unexpected, - the thrill of that kind of hunt is still the exclusive purview of a book store. And I would posit that a good used book store is the most fertile hunting territory to be found. Here we have centuries of such books waiting to be discovered. I get that same thrill of finding the new and different every time I open a box of books that has come into the shop. I don't always choose a book just because I haven't seen it before. I'm selective and pick out books that might be of interest to a particular customer, or books that I find intriguing. And then I put them on the shelves for you, the hunter. These books may not be rare, they may not be expensive, they are just new and intriguing to me or you. 

       Sometimes my books are rare and they are expensive because bibliophiles who suffer from "that gentle madness" of book collecting have added other ingredients to their hunt - finding the most pristine copy of a book or  finding a first edition in a dust jacket of a book they love or finding all the works by a given author, etc. and this has caused more scarcity and thus prices have risen.  I have some of those books as well.

      I'd like to start sharing some of the books that are available, at least as of the present, in our shop that might be the type of book that would "jump out" at you. Books that you may not have heard of. Books that are pleasant surprises. If you're intrigued stop by or give us a call. If we don't still have it, we can help you search elsewhere. Come join and enjoy the hunt!

 Let's start with the "Grandaddy" of dictionaries, The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. This one still has the magnifying lens that makes using this dictionary possible. They took the multi-volume complete OED, as they say, and reduced the size of the print so it is unreadable without the magnifying lens. They put 8 pages of original text on 1. Ingenious. Absolutely outstanding dictionary when it comes to etymology. This set $100.

From the sublime to the ridiculous- several versions of Dr. Who. Paperbacks (we have quite a run of them,) at $2, to two different versions of comic books ($10-$15).

A first edition of Robots and Empires signed by the prolific and talented Isaac Asimov on the title page. This 1985 sequel to The Robots of Dawn weaves together three of Asimov's most famous series, Robot, Foundation and Empire.  This is a very nice copy with just a few chips along the edge of the bright dust jacket.  $150