Archives Books – Edmond, Oklahoma
When I first visited Archives Books, it was very small, in the end unit of a nondescript commercial strip not far from the interstate in Oklahoma City’s northern suburb of Edmond. Apparently, the owner, Wayne, had a bookshop earlier and had a giant reset as things moved online. My first visit would have been in 2005, shortly after moving to the OKC metro. Chatting with Wayne, I gathered he closed the earlier shop to transition to going fully online, retool his business model a bit, and then realized a little walk-in traffic in a room full of unsorted dreck could still make enough money to cover the rent and be a place for walk-ins to sell him a houseful of old books when a bookish relative died.
There were several thousand books. He had a couple of shelves up front for “better books,” individually priced but still not very expensive. Everything else was $1 per book: six books for $5, fifteen books for $10. You might buy the store for a very modest sum at some point in the scale. It was a great place to rummage around for the joy of the hunt and because there were treasures to be found.
It was like panning for gold. Most of it was crap — damaged books missing dust jackets, book club edition fiction from the 1970s, partial sets of dentistry yearbooks, 1980s self-help, pyramid schemes, political memoirs of candidates long forgotten, microwave cookbooks, that kind of thing. According to the staff, these were the leftovers that had been swiftly sorted for selling online — the duds. But, the staff seemed to know little about books. I suspected they used devices to scan barcodes and ISBNs to compare prices online since much of what was in those dollar shelves was too old to have an ISBN.
Condition was a problem, and the books were completely unsorted, except to be put onto shelves generally upright with the spine out. Generally. It wasn’t as bad as one thrift store I remember from my days in Lubbock, Texas, where I once observed that they must sort their books with a hay rake, given the horrific condition of everything.
It was the kind of jumble where you didn’t feel bad about buying books to harvest bookplates or bookseller labels. The books had broken hinges, detached text blocks, or were otherwise irredeemable specimens. A touch of mold wasn’t out of the question. It was a wonderful place to hunt because anything can be found anywhere.
In grad school, I picked up selling books and ephemera online for extra cash. And, though now out of school and gainfully employed, I still sold books and ephemera online. Also, sometimes, I would sell to dealers if I found something good that I couldn’t sell myself and get a good price. Dealers can sometimes pay better than a random buyer on eBay because the dealer has a client looking for that specific thing, and they understand the value better. For example, I could sell a $1 find online for $30, but a dealer may offer $50, because they have a client for $100 waiting. It’s a hard habit to break.
I’ve had some nice finds over the years and even sold some really nice things for pleasing sums, but funny enough, I don’t think I ever had one of those big finds at this shop. Nothing that paid the rent that month or anything with a single sale. But it was steady enough to go regularly, even just to add to my collection of bookseller labels and bookplates.
I did find a few issues of the first Star Trek fan zine, Spockanalia, in wonderful condition. Although I am not a die-hard fan of the show, I recognized that the zines would be of interest to someone else and probably worth more than the dollar or two it cost me to take them home. They earned me a little money and were fun to look through while I had them.
The shop also didn’t value old museum exhibition catalogs. I found some great references for the work I was doing at the time for the Oklahoma Historical Society and for my own interest. Once I was done with them, they were also worth a bit online.
Sometimes, there were notebooks or loose papers mixed in with the books. Usually, someone’s long-lost homework or lecture notes. In those early days at the bookshop, there was often a large garbage can in one of the aisles to throw away any garbage you found. However, once I did find a small pocket notebook. From the outside, it looked old. Being a little familiar with old stuff, I was excited and opened it, fully expecting it to be a farmer’s running tally of planting wheat or something similar. But, no, it was a diary. It was not just some anonymous thing, but a diary where the young woman wrote her full name, location, and date of birth on some of the earliest pages, including when she began the diary — 1886.
I put the little diary in my pile of books for the day and headed up front to the checkout counter. I thought Wayne would see the diary and tell me there had been a mistake in shelving it in the back. He meant to put it up front or even in the battered glass case he used as a counter. He never did that before, but you can never tell. “I wondered who would find that,” was all he said. I didn’t have the nerve to ask what he remembered about where it had come from. I wish I had.
Other things could be reliably found there and sold online for a small profit, keeping my other book collecting funded. These included the little Golden Guide books edited by Howard S. Zim, some more esoteric Time-Life series books, Random House’s Landmark series, older Loeb Classical Library volumes, and many more.
As time passed, the shop expanded into neighboring storefronts and became more organized. It was no longer nearly all unsorted dollar books, but sorted sections. Prices, of course, went up. The last time I went was several years ago, and they still had a small section in the back dedicated to the unsorted dollar books that stole my heart all those years ago. I hope they keep it forever, and some book lover is still finding treasures.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.