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Category: Bookshop Memories

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Bookshop Memories – Heddrich’s, Williston, North Dakota

Heddrich's Basement Bookstore, where books are sold by the pound. The more you buy, the cheaper it gets.

Hedderich’s – Williston, ND

In 2010, I moved away from a metro filled with bookstores to a small town in northeast Montana. Oklahoma City, though not a mecca of bibliophiles, at least had some nice bookshops and was close enough to the Dallas-Ft. Worth area to go see great authors if they stopped there. Big-name authors almost never came to Oklahoma City, with Dallas being closer. Authors that did visit usually had some connection drawing them there, like they were originally from Oklahoma or had family there. 

 There was no bookstore in this small town in Montana of about five thousand souls, even though it is the biggest town around for nearly a hundred miles in any direction. There had been one little bookstore, but it closed. The county library, located there, had a small shelf of books for sale for dimes and quarters — cast-offs from the donation bin. Thank God for the library. Also, the museum where I worked had a gift shop that sold books by local authors and local history, which was nice but did not go far in feeding a bibliophile’s soul. But, just a short drive away, across the North Dakota state line, was a town large enough to have a movie theater: Williston. There were also bookstores in Williston. 

Hedderich’s was not a bookstore, but they had enough old books for sale to be a point of discussion when used books came up in conversation. At one time, the building for Hedderich’s was a large downtown department store building, from the heyday of downtown retail long before online shopping or even shopping malls. By the time I lived in the area, the once proud, huge store had been converted to a sort of antique mall, army surplus, model train store. And in the cavernous basement of this enormous place was books. Nothing but old books, almost entirely unsorted and sold by the pound. There were thousands and thousands of old books down there. I called it a book mine.

The book prices were quite reasonable, circa 2010. 📸 Benjamin L. Clark, the author.

What is a book mine? I don’t think I originated the phrase, but I don’t know if anyone has ever endeavored to define one. I’ve seen a few book mines, but I see them less often now. I find they are rarely advertised and don’t have websites beyond maybe a placeholder with hours — typically not updated since 2001. Book mines can have weird, irregular hours. A book mine is also usually huge. Cheap real estate helps, so they are usually in huge, rundown, leaky buildings in a part of town that’s seen better days. 

In the past, I’ve called author Larry McMurtry’s Booked Up in Archer City, Texas a book mine. It had almost no web presence and a huge inventory. One of the biggest book stores I’ve ever seen. You could easily spend days, not just hours, looking. Perhaps book mines tend to be in out-of-the-way places. Or, maybe I’m the one in out-of-the-way places. It seems even the ones in major cities are in parts of the city that meet these descriptions, too.

To be clear, Hedderich’s was *not* the Northern Plains version of Booked Up. The comparison disintegrates quickly when looking at almost any part of it. McMurtry’s store had top-quality stock, immaculate buildings, and shelving, and all of the books were knowledgeably sorted, organized, and priced. Even when I was actively selling online, I had a hard time finding books to resell to make up for the cost of my trip to Archer City the prices were so spot on. I was not a super-talented book scout, but I could usually cover the cost of books I wanted to keep, gas, and food when I went anywhere to buy old books. Sometimes, I could turn enough profit to feel good about doing it.  

Hedderich’s was the opposite of Booked Up. There were easily tens of thousands of books. But, the store’s basement, which was filled with books, was dirty. Only most of the fluorescent tube lights worked. Some flickered constantly. I could hear something dripping somewhere. Another version of the sign above announced these prices are NEW. The sign was also dated 1992. The books were barely sorted. Books seemed to be mainly from the 1940s-1980s, which was strange. Nothing very old. Nothing more recent. If you’re a Soviet/ Anti-Communist collector, this was the place for you. Do you collect self-help, pseudo-religion, or pseudo-health? Nurse-themed romance novels? This place would have scores for you. There were more Reader’s Digest Condensed Books than I’ve ever seen in one place. These can be worth selling to realtors and interior designer types by the yard if you have that kind of client, but there was not much worth bothering with for resale online. 

To a collector, there was a lot of crap. But at these prices, who wouldn’t be tempted to at least dig a little? I found a gorgeous 1930s booklet from Zion National Park … but someone had cut a few of the photos out of it, but found another for Glacier National Park from the 1920s, which was pristine. There was a pile of old phone books, which helped fill gaps in the county archive, which was exciting for historical research purposes, but that’s a different kind of thrill. It was that kind of place. All was not lost, however. I did find a few books for myself, but mostly roamed and tried to figure out where everything was, my brain trying to impose order or find the order that led someone to bring all the books there. 

Writing this essay several years after my last visit, I looked online to see if it was still open. The Hedderich’s building burned in 2017. Photos from local news sources show the multi-story building’s roof collapsed. Days later, the wreckage caught fire again, and eventually, all of whatever remained collapsed into the basement. Maybe the total loss of those tens of thousands of books won’t be missed, but the loss of the experience of searching, mining, and discovering will be something any book lover would love to find in a dream.

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

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Bookshop Memories – Archives Books, Edmond, Oklahoma

The front of the Archives Books store in Edmond Oklahoma in 2009.

Archives Books – Edmond, Oklahoma

The front of the Archives Books store in Edmond Oklahoma in 2009.
Archives Books in Edmond, Oklahoma in 2009. Photo by Benjamin L. Clark

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.

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Bookshop Memories – 30 Penn Books, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

30 Penn Books – Oklahoma City, OK

Photo by the author, February 2009

This was a nice used bookshop. Good books, a nice selection that was well organized. A little higher priced than some of the other used bookshops in town, but still good stuff. I specifically remember being on the lookout for good niche local, state, and regional history books here. This shop was close to a place I liked to get BBQ — a little shack two brothers ran out of the parking lot of a nearby grocery store. I had gotten to know one of them well in my time in Oklahoma City, so I always called it Crain Bros. BBQ, but I think I was the only one to bother giving their smoke shacks a name. This younger brother, working on a Ph.D. in philosophy, ran this one near 23rd Street and Penn. They had a very nice lady who ran the till for them and packed up the orders inside the grocery store. The other brother ran other smoke shacks with other helpers at a couple of other locations. It was more his empire than the philosophical younger brother’s, who was helping out. The younger brother finished his PhD and is now a philosophy professor in the area.  

The smoke shack made a nice stop on a Friday when I felt like I could get away with a little extra long lunch break and could have a little drive. From the Oklahoma Historical Society, where I worked, down 23rd Street, I would grab some sliced brisket and sliced hot link and maybe a bag of chips and a bottle of ice cold Red Diamond iced tea from the grocery store — definitely not the cole slaw from the grocery store’s deli, which tasted like it had been soaked in fishy lake water. It was safer to stick to the pre-packaged stuff. 

I took co-workers to the BBQ stand on some Fridays, and being bookminded people, no one would protest if we also made a stop at this bookshop. One of my only distinct memories here was in the parking lot and one of my coworkers describing working with homeless patients with tuburculosis when he was an ambulance driver.

I wish I remembered more about this place, besides the parking on the south side of the building and the hum of the air conditioner that couldn’t keep up with the heat of Oklahoma’s summer workdays. I only vaguely recall the owner of this shop as helpful and alert, which was an anomaly for used booksellers in Oklahoma City in the early 2000s. I wish I had an anecdote of his generosity, kindness, and intelligence, but I don’t. Sadly, the owner was murdered in 2017, and his killer tried to cover his crime by torching his bookshop. I hope the owner’s family has found a measure of peace in time.  

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

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Bookshop Memories – Michael’s Old Books, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Michael’s Old Books – Oklahoma City, OK

Michael’s Old Books, February 2009, photo by author

This is how I remember it: A sagging roof, peeling paint, cracked windows, maybe a missing pane replaced with a bit of cardboard. But there’s a sign that reads simply: BOOKSTORE. The hardened bibliophile will recognize the urge, this compulsion, to dive into what you are sure is a rodent-infested fire-trap, because, well, you never know. “Anything can be anywhere,” the old saying repeatedly proves. Perhaps it is more the domain of the true bibliomaniac to ignore potential and obvious hazards alike, to shrug away discomforts, and “just stop and look for a minute.” All of us who love books perhaps a little too much understand the impulse.

The proprietor of this establishment had no interest in actually selling anything, though. Michael’s Old Books was a horrid old house converted by someone, I assume, named Michael, but maybe the original Michael was long gone, into a book hoarder stash. If it could broadly be called a book, it was fair inventory for Michael’s. Pamphlets, wrinkled brochures, rain-stained phone books, obsolete test study guides, industrial directories of interest to nearly no one. The truly “old” books were either long gone, or long buried. Here we find merely the out-of-date, out-of-style, out-of-touch. The building was not air-conditioned, which could make visiting on sweltering days completely out of the question. Not as much because of the heat, but because of the smell.

It was also never open. A big, grubby, grouchy man perched on a stool near the back door. My recollections of him are so vague I cannot remember anything more specific, only the memory of his presence. I also vaguely recall an old electric box fan stirring the fetid air inside this building, but that would have meant he had electricity turned on in this place, and I don’t think that’s possible. I have no specific memory of even bookshelves here, but just massive piles everywhere. And the sense that, yes, perhaps it was once a bookshop, or someone many years earlier had started to set it up but gave up.

On one website, I once left this review: “Bring cash. This is a store for those seeking serendipity. Including when it may be open. The owner does not observe the posted hours. Dusty and disorganized. Again, bring cash and dress down. He settles on his opening price by how you’re dressed, how eager you seem, and how much of a nuisance you’ve made yourself.” It reminds me that I stopped there one day after observing some activity — I drove by there almost daily to and from work at the Oklahoma Historical Society. So, I was dressed for the office, and the proprietor had said something about how I was dressed when it came time to negotiate the price — which was always negotiated since none of the merchandise was marked in the customary fashion of used bookshops. 

As I wrote about bringing cash, and with the vaguest recollection along those lines, I must have bought something there once, but cannot remember what it could have been. I may have bought some bit of ephemera to donate to the archives at work — something I knew they would need, but was otherwise not that useful to me. 

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

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Bookshop Memories — Half Price Books, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Half Price Books – Oklahoma City, OK

Half Price Books with the new sign going up in OKC, March 2009. Photo by the author

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.

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Bookshop Memories — Full Circle Books, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Full Circle Books – Oklahoma City, OK

Photo by Kakakikikuku

Full Circle Books is on the street level of the towering glass building at 50 Penn Place in Oklahoma City. 50 Penn Place is essentially a mall with a high-rise office tower added on top. It was a very high-end place to shop during the oil boom of the 1980s, but I believe there was some connection with a banking scandal not long after it opened. It was still nice in the early 2000s but perhaps no longer carried the clout the address once did. Full Circle is one of the few bookstores for new books I’ve included in this collection of essays. Bookstores dedicated to selling new books can feel cookie-cutter, sadly, without soul. Full Circle is simply better than nearly every other bookshop, including independent bookshops.

Despite, effectively, being in a mall filled with polished tile and dated chrome fixtures, this bookstore has a very charming atmosphere that feels apart. Antique shelves, rolling ladders, lots of wood, other vintage fixtures, worn rugs over hardwood floors, and plenty of comfortable seating. It all adds up to a welcome place in a bibliophile’s heart. The warm fireplaces, a cafe with wicker chairs, and strategically placed air-pots of complimentary house-blend coffee certainly don’t hurt either. At least, that’s how it was when I haunted this bookshop in the early 2000s. I was always sure to bring a travel mug along since everyone was welcome to help themselves and even encouraged to keep drinking their free coffee. It was wonderful.

The staff at Full Circle know their business, too. Professional booksellers who make excellent recommendations and charming selections to stock cannot be overpraised. The newsstand at Full Circle put the nearby Barnes & Noble to shame. Even the stationery selections were impressive. And you could always pick up a copy of the local alt-weekly, for better or worse. The one feature of the store that was already feeling unnecessary by the aughts was a sizeable selection of Lonely Planet and Frommer’s travel guides. A healthy travel section is a thing of beauty, but I would imagine the usefulness of these print guides was already waning by then.

Full Circle has a long history in the Oklahoma City area. I believe it started in Norman, home of the University of Oklahoma in OKC’s southern suburbs, but moved closer to the heart of the city in what was then fairly recent history. 

The cafe was home to several regular book clubs, and the location for author visits. One memorable one for me was Ace Atkins, a mystery and thriller writer whose books I enjoyed. There wasn’t exactly a throng of people at his event in 2010, so there was time to make small talk. He asked about my work. I told him I worked for the Historical Society. He was interested in that, signing his book to me, “Keep history alive…” which was nice. 

The cafe was also home to the regular meetings of my small writers’ group. By “my,” I mean the one in which I was the youngest, least experienced member. I was starting to write regularly for work, including educational materials and exhibition texts at the Oklahoma History Center, the flagship museum of the Oklahoma Historical Society, but I was just beginning to entertain the idea of writing for myself. The other four generous-hearted people in this group still mean a lot to me today, though I’ve neglected to keep up with everyone. And though it’s been over a decade since we met, I still wish we could. 

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

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Bookshop Memories — Aladdin Book Shoppe, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Aladdin Book Shoppe – Oklahoma City, OK

Aladdin Book Shoppe in March 2009, (c) Photo by Benjamin L. Clark

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.

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Bookshop Memories – Disabled American Veterans Thrift Store, Lubbock, Texas

The Disabled American Veterans Thrift Store – Lubbock, TX

Photo by usdanrcstexas

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.

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Bookshop Memories — The Book Inn, Lubbock, Texas

The Book Inn – Lubbock, TX

John Vachon, 1940, U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information [public domain]

The Book Inn was run and owned by Kyle Hollingshead, known perhaps to Western pulp collectors as the author of a handful of ACE paperbacks back in the day. I never knew that until writing this essay and searching online to see if The Book Inn was still open. I doubted it since when I was going there regularly in the very early 2000s, Mr. Hollingshead was talking about retiring. It closed a few years ago. 

The Book Inn was nice and as the name implies, homier, despite being located in one of Lubbock’s ubiquitous, soulless commercial strips. Inside, the shelves were double-stacked in every section, often with books stacked on top in each shelf as well. Books were piled on the floor, in the window, and on about any flat surface. It’s one of the “fullest” bookshops I’ve ever seen. Once you got into it, you walked delicately. “You’ll never know what you’ll find,” he’d say with genuine wonder in his voice.

It was almost always completely silent inside The Book Inn, minus the buzz of the fluorescent lights and the sound of traffic outside. The windows rattled when semi-trucks trundled down the street.

Of the general used book shops in Lubbock in the early 2000s, The Book Inn had the most serious theology-religion section, just inside the front door. Of course, Lubbock, Texas, is very Evangelical Christian. However, it was not a religious bookshop, nor did the owner come off as particularly religious. I think those were the books to be found, and those were the books to be sold. If he was religious, he never made me feel weird about it, which was nice. Lubbock is a hyper-evangelical community, so the general vibe can be off-putting.  

Hollingshead could be a little more prickly than some of the other owners, but once he warmed to you, he was very nice. It wasn’t too long until I confessed I was selling some of the books I bought there online. He started to give me the “trade” discount booksellers give to one another. He would refer to me as a book scout or “runner,” which I wore as a badge of honor. He had noticed I came pretty regularly and there seemed to be no real pattern to what I bought, so instead of playing coy, I admitted what I was doing: taking things he had underpriced and selling them online for a profit. I didn’t phrase it that way, exactly, but that was what I was largely doing, once I’d found things I could afford to add to my own collection. It was very generous of him.

I occasionally bring him bags of books from scouting endeavors where I had to buy a giant lot of books to get the handful I wanted to sell online. It just wasn’t worth the effort, or storage space for things that would sell online for under $10, but it was great inventory for him. He liked that I brought him good stuff to sell, helping me learn what I was already experiencing as an online seller at the time: it wasn’t hard to sell books; it was much harder to buy good books that sell with enough room in your costs to make a buck. His clientele was all in person, in his shop, and all of mine were online, so I guess he figured we weren’t really competing with one another. 

He kept an index card file for customers, I think to track stuff they were looking for, but mostly for those of us who brought in books and got in-store credit. That’s always what I did. He’d sometimes offer cash, usually about half of what he’d offer in credit. I think I had to take him up on it a few times, but not often. He’d let you use credit for up to half the purchase price, so there was usually something I could find to make it worth my while, but after the first few months, it was tough. He certainly knew his books, though he’d often say, “You can’t know everything.”

He tried selling online but only out of dire necessity. He hated it. I remember him saying that the brick-and-mortar rare book business was dying because of internet sales. How could he compete with booksellers with even lower overhead than he had, owning the building his shop was in and living a semi-retired life? This seemed to be the big lesson as a general used bookseller through the end of the mail-order era, and the beginning of online selling: hard-to-find books were no longer hard to find, and rare books weren’t that rare after all.  

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

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Bookshop Memories — Book Alley, Lubbock, Texas

Book Alley – Lubbock, TX

“Punch, Judy and their Child” by George Cruikshank, 1832 [public domain]

Only a few blocks down from Hester Books was Book Alley. The guy that ran this shop was an odd duck. If you frequent the places old books are heaped together and sold, you encounter some weirdos along the way, so it’s unsurprising. I don’t know how else to describe him. He didn’t want to talk to anyone, except to promote his Punch and Judy puppet shows for children’s parties. He seemed to have almost no interest at all in books, though to his credit, the shop was always very tidy. A single sheet poster at the front of the otherwise nicely appointed shop advertised his availability for puppet shows. A sickly sweet, off-putting smell often lingered in the shop. I think I eventually attributed the odor to a neighboring business in the commercial strip where this shop was located, but it could be powerful. The posted hours of business were also unreliable, perhaps due to his puppet show commitments. I never learned his name.

What I gathered second and third-hand was his father established the shop many years earlier and had a connection to Texas Tech University there in Lubbock. So many private libraries from retiring or dead professors came to the shop over the years. When he died, the shop passed to the son. The impressive books were in beautiful condition usually, and priced accordingly. I was also haunting the place to find severely underpriced books. No one can know everything, and many booksellers were still reluctant to sell online. A sharp-eyed booklover with a little extra time could still visit bookshops and find things to resell elsewhere and make a tidy profit. However, those days were dwindling.

I did find a signed first of Among the Gently Mad there, which felt like a find, though it was still a rather new book. Of course, I wanted it for myself. It was priced too high for me, and when I later came back with the money, of course, it was gone. That’s how that always goes. 

There were some nice collectible paperbacks here. The vintage Penguins and related early paperback books were incredible. I remember being shocked to see that some Penguins were issued with dustjackets.  It was the first place I saw Armed Services Editions. There was an enormous collection, perhaps complete, of the books of the food writer M.F.K. Fisher. Now that I live very close to her final home, I think back on that collection. I wonder what happened to it. 

There was also a wonderful shelf with pictorial publisher cloth bindings from around the turn of the 20th Century, with all kinds of amazing motifs present: Moose and lumberjacks in checked jackets, armored knights and castles, and flags galore. It made for a beautiful display. He also had some very nice bins of ephemera to browse. I recall seeing a lot of sheet music, but there was a lot more, though now I don’t remember what. I remember specifically going there in search of WWII-related ephemera to scan and use as filler in museum exhibitions, but not finding much to work with. Most of it was too old. And all of it was nice. I don’t remember anything more specific in the ephemera, except for some fruit crate labels. The ephemera stock did seem to freshen up periodically, so he must have restocked it, and I always held out hope of finding something cool. 

The shop has long since closed, I understand. 

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