From Central California and Northern England, two aspiring writers natter and share a blog. We like to talk about our disparate but oh-so-similar lives, offer opinions on literature and movies... and endlessly reminisce about Bioware RPG's.


We hope you haven't had enough of our disingenuous assertions. If you have, please don't hit us.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Used Book Stores: An Endangered Species



When I was little, the library was this magical place that I tried to get to every chance I could. Can't tell you why, but it felt like an escape, with every book in that place an opportunity to get spirited away on some adventure - or to Hop on Pop, or what have you. And my first library card...I cherished the hell out of that thing. It was like an honest-to-goodness passport to me.

Then I lost one of the books I had checked out and racked up a fucking astronomical fee. Haven't been back there in a while...

I discovered book stores not too long after. If I remember correctly, we had three book shops here in town, and all of them were independent. One of them had been built into an old house, and the owner had painted each room to correspond with the genre it contained. Another was in a grocery store shopping center, and they would server butterbeer (no idea what it actually was) to kids when the new Harry Potter novels were released. The last was a science shop, but they had a ton of science-oriented books and I loved the hell out of that place.

It seemed to happen really fast, but all three of them shut down within a few years of each other. Barnes & Noble and Borders were doing some very aggressive expansion during that time, and a Borders opened up here in town when we really hadn't seen any major chains before. Yeah, it was a neat store, and had more books than I ever cared to dream about at the time. But there's just something about those big shops that just kills some of the experience of buying a book.

For nearly a decade, we went without an independent book store. I remember getting stupid-excited when I found that a local thrift store had converted their basement into an impromptu book shop, but that closed down too, eventually. I had almost forgotten the thrill those little book shops can supply, until I stumbled upon a place called Black Cat Books while on vacation in Manitou Springs, Colorado.

I'm seriously...that place is awesome. If you live in "The Springs" and haven't been there, do yourself a favor. At first it just looks like a quirky little shop when you walk in, and there's like...15 books on the shelf. But then you take a little staircase down to the basement, and there is a very decent selection down there, made even better by how the building hangs over the river that runs through the city. You can actually plant yourself next to the window and do a little reading with the sound of running water in your ears. There's no bathroom there.

That's all well and good for Manitou "We've got a COG railroad" Springs, but what about my town? Huh? Where's my used books store?

Fortunately, and more to the point of this entry, we just recently received one. I was on my way home from having lunch with my dad, when I saw the place out of the corner of my eye. Just about smashed my head into the windshield in excitement. My sister and I pull over and check the place out. I was seriously expecting to be disappointed; I thought it was going to be a repository for old Reader's Digests and Dean Koontz novels. Really glad I was wrong on that one.

Once I poked around a little bit, my excitement mounted until I started reacting like K'nuckles did when he saw the Colonel's backflip. The selection...is...amazing. There are comics, rare books, old books, new books. I've been trying to get a good copy of Darkwalker on Moonshae for a friggin month now, and they had two amazing copies just sitting there. The fantasy section alone made me want to pass out. They had every edition of Lord of the Rings, a ton of Star Wars and Star Trek books, practically every big series (Sword of Truth, Shannara, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Dragonlance, The Wheel of Time, A Song of Ice and Fire, Forgotten Realms, Elric, etc.).

I could have spent all day there...but I didn't. I had things to attend to, but I did end up buying four books for the not-so-bad-at-all price of fifteen wing-wangs:

* Darkwalker on Moonshae by Douglas Niles

* X-Wing: Rogue Squadron by Michael A. Stackpole

* Elric of Melnibone by Michael Moorcock

* A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Not a bad haul. Not a bad day. Now I gotta read all this stuff! That's the hard part! Gah!

No comments:

Post a Comment