Author: Benjamin L. Clark

Half Price Books – Oklahoma City, OK

This Texas chain was known to me, but I had never lived in a city to have one. I must have first visited one of these clean, bright stores with the big red signs in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area at some point when I lived in Lubbock and got to the big city for a visit. I was thrilled when HPB announced they would open their first store in Oklahoma City. I don’t think the bookshop owners felt that way, though. This first store was (and still is, I assume), at 63rd and May Ave.

Half Price Books is a very different kind of bookshop. It is mostly used books, but they also carry a sizeable percentage of remainders of otherwise new books from publishers. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, remainders are the printing over-runs, the returns, and the unsold stock publishers always have. Publishing is a highly speculative industry, and publishers often end up with too many books they need to deal with. Bibliophiles dream of having a high-quality, high-turnover shop nearby. They may not have the particular book you need, but they’ll often have something of interest at a decent price. Half Price Books is not the stop to make when looking for a missing link in your collection, though collectible books do show up there. 

What else is nice is that Half Price Books staffs a buyer’s counter in their stores to look up books in their database and make an offer. Yes, it’s pennies on the dollar, and no, they don’t put an offer on everything, but they will take everything and dispose of it. Frankly, when you have more books than you know what to do with or no time to deal with, is a lifesaver. 

At least, the buy counter was once my life-saver. While living in Oklahoma City (and working for the Oklahoma Historical Society), I went to an auction. It was a strange auction made up of huge lots of old clocks and watches, antique fishing gear, other antique outdoors equipment, and books. Tens of thousands of books, easily. A colleague at OHS alerted me to the sale, knowing my interest in old books. He was mostly going for the fishing and outdoors, but also out of curiosity.

One of my major finds from that auction was featured in the book Rare Books Uncovered by Rebecca Rego Barry, which tells the story of my discovery of a book that had once been part of the Vatican’s library, printed in 1536 in its contemporary binding. Good stuff. Another part of that story is what came with that one little book (seriously, it fits in a pocket) — over a thousand other books. It weighed down my SUV so badly I was worried about the brakes on the drive home. I had a difficult time getting one of the doors to stay latched so I could hit the power locks. 

Sorting that load of books into things I wanted to keep, fairly valuable books that needed to be sold via ebay to get a good result, and then a couple of small piles to send to specialists and put aside for friends. After that, there were still hundreds and hundreds of other good used books. These are what I took to Half Price Books. I had no time or storage space to sell all of that myself online. It takes a lot of work to sell books online, even for a single book, to photograph it well, write up a detailed description, answer questions, etc. So, a couple of safer car loads to Half Price Books, and I had enough cash to cover rent that month from book sales, making a sizeable profit over what I had spent at the auction. And I still had special books to sell online and a few lovely things to keep. 

Having a buyer at the ready, and able to buy at a scale most local shops cannot and needing enormous amounts of books in stock and keeping it constantly rotating with reasonable prices at their many stores — it seems an excellent addition to a local ecosystem of books and people who love them. I’ve always liked HPB, anyway. 

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

Aladdin Book Shoppe – Oklahoma City, OK

One of the oldest used bookshops in Oklahoma, and since closed, Aladdin had the air of an old bookshop, though I guess it had not been in that final location for several decades. Yet, it had been there for a while when I started shopping there in early 2005, not long after moving to Oklahoma City. 

I was fortunately hired at the Oklahoma Historical Society after graduate school to work at the newly opened Oklahoma History Center near the capitol building. Living on what was then the northwestern outskirts of Oklahoma City, I was excited to be decently employed, and have the means to occasionally buy books. Even collect books. I had been collecting for a few years by then, but now I could do so a little more seriously. I bought more bookshelves, and fortunately had space for them in my rented house (practically the intersection of 150th and Council Road).

Aladdin Books was a shop that took books seriously. Some used bookshops don’t take books all that seriously as objects. They are merely the commodity being sold. There may be a little romance tied up in them, but that just makes them more saleable. But at Aladdin, books were still special and a little magic. The staff were welcoming, had a good selection, and did not like me browsing into what I thought was just a section of Books About Books, but was their booksellers reference shelf. It wasn’t very clear where the store’s stock ended, and the reference shelf began, except it was near-ish the register, but not exactly blocked from public access and browsing. I do recall finding the first pirated Modern Library books I’ve ever seen in person. They were the big Decline And Fall of the Roman Empire two volume set by Gibbon. I never bought them, but I’d visit them from time to time. I think I let the Modern Library collectors list-serv know about them in case anyone wanted them, but there were no takers. 

I eventually found Aladdin’s back room, which felt off-limits but wasn’t. Unlike the front of the store, which was full but tidy, it felt more like things were being processed in this back space. There were piles of boxes filled with books and sometimes other ephemera. Old issues of AB Bookman and other old bookseller catalogs were fun to browse. They also had shelves of the really old and battered things I like to look at. A shelf of Tom Swift and his imitators in fraying covers, ripped spine Bobbsey Twin runs, chart-topping fiction of the 1920s now completely forgotten, that sort of thing. They also had bound newspapers and other periodicals with red leather spines rotting away to dust, ready to stain your clothes if you got too close. This back room was my favorite part of the shop and a wonderful place to have a little space in the oppressive quiet, which was the norm here. 

At the very front of the store was another smaller room. This was their “Rare Book Room” which had things that Kyle Hollingshead at Book Alley in Lubbock talked about — books that booksellers thought were rare for a long time, and then as more and, more of them moved online, discovered that a lot of them just weren’t that rare at all. I can’t remember looking in there much, or any specific things they had, but the glass cases were nice. I can vaguely recall some nice-to-look-at old children’s books.

I can’t recall any specific books that I bought from Aladdin, though I know I went there regularly in my time living in OKC. Their stock just didn’t move much, so I was less inclined to go very frequently. 

Toward the end of my time in Oklahoma, Half-Price Books opened a shop a short drive north along the same arterial street that Aladdin was essentially on. The arrival of the discount used book behemoth no doubt signaled the beginning of the end for Aladdin. 

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.