The Disabled American Veterans Thrift Store – Lubbock, TX
Not a bookshop, but the book room of this thrift store was easily the most magical book place in Lubbock in the early 2000s. And, the prices were good too. I don’t recall exactly how what they were, but it could have been as cheap as a dime for paperbacks, a quarter for hardbacks. Maybe a quarter for paperbacks and fifty cents for hardbacks. All in all, very cheap, even back then.
This thrift store was on the tougher side of town in what had once been a service garage of some kind. They knocked a hole through one of the brick walls into another room and stacked it high with shelves, hung some big old dining room lights that a generous person would call chandeliers, and wired in some music. Usually, the local classical music/ jazz station played. Random art and posters were hung on any blank spots of the walls and rotated through regularly since they were priced cheaply. There was still crumbly brick in the doorway. It wasn’t finished or polished in any way. They always had interesting, strange things. One example that I still remember was a vintage diploma (or license, maybe?) for a Texas undertaker that I bought for under $1, surely, that sold well on ebay.
I loved browsing there for books for my own shelves and buying books for resale online. They had a steady stream of old copies of Modern Library books, which I collected. They always had far older stuff than the other thrift stores, and always had a lot to sift through. It was also here that I built the bulk of my collection of bookseller labels and bookbinder tickets. The older books that had these little treasures were often in such bad shape they could barely be called books still.
I was a regular, but I didn’t get to know any of the people working there beyond nodding acquaintance. No one seemed to work there very long. They didn’t care much about the books. The books were never sorted, and only rarely tidied up. A door to the outside was at one end of the book room, allowing outside air, and lots of dust, to come in through the rusty security gate that was always locked shut. I found some real treasures there, including a book I sold to a history of computing archive that paid my rent that month. They also kept very nice ephemera. I found some wonderful old travel booklets there from the later 1940s and early 1950s with early airlines and bygone passenger train photos.
My greatest find there however was probably the three or four years’ worth of back issues of a magazine called Firsts. If you’re not already familiar, Firsts started in the early 1990s and has survived the waves of change in the magazine publishing industry and is still published today. Their focus is entirely on collecting, and sharing detailed articles about collectible books. It’s essential reading and reference for collectors of modern fiction. This stack of knowledge was incredibly helpful to me, and I’m grateful instead of tossing them as pointless niche magazines, someone at the thrift store put them out because, “hey, you never know.” To my regret, I was very hard up and sold a few issues that I didn’t think would be as helpful. Back issues were already commanding premiums then.
There was another thrift store nearby that I always stopped in but almost never had anything good. They had good furniture, which I would occasionally flip or buy for myself, but for books — nearly nothing. I think someone sorted them in a rusty barrel with a rake, judging by condition. Freshly torn covers, a crazy high percentage with loose spines, and torn pages. I think I did score a big stack of the huge Walter Foster art instructions books there once, but that was it. Big lots of those used to sell on ebay, but you had to offer a lot of them.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.