bookshops in Lubbock Texas – Benjamin L. Clark, writer

6 September 20222 September 2022

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

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.

16 August 202216 August 2022

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.

5 August 20224 August 2022

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.

6 July 20226 July 2022

Bookshop Memories — Hester Books, Lubbock, Texas

Hester Books – Lubbock, TX

I moved to Lubbock, Texas for graduate school at Texas Tech University in 2003, and I was surprised by how many used bookshops there were. Not only paperback exchanges but a few real, excellent used bookshops too. Three of them in fact. All of them sprinkled along the same street. Two of them not too far from each other and the last just a bit further east.

Hester’s was perhaps the largest, and almost certainly the best known in Lubbock. Run for many years by Ross Hester, he was in his eighties, maybe even close to ninety in those days. His daughter, Renee, ran it day-to-day. Both were friendly and as chatty or quiet as you needed them to be. Mr. Hester didn’t do much at the store, but he would still come by regularly, shuffling to his desk near the center of the shop and telling great old stories about living in Lubbock and World War II. Still a nearly dry town, you could buy alcohol from taxi drivers back during the War, according to him.

Behind a bright blue door, Hester’s was bright and tiled. The shelves were white too. At least, that’s how I remember it. They had a good mix of books, dividing the large store about in half between fiction and non-fiction. There was also a long, low shelf that ran in from the entrance in the middle of the store of freebies you could help yourself to on your way out. These were the real odd-balls, the broken spine classics. It was a wonderful shop.

One thing I didn’t like was that though they went to the effort to put just about every book with a dust jacket in a plastic Brodart cover protector, they would sometimes touch up areas of color loss with magic markers. I’m sure for a general used bookshop, it helped the presentation for appearance-conscious buyers, but for collectors, it was more than a step in the wrong direction. I don’t remember that fact stopping me from buying anything in particular, but it was disappointing to see. At least they didn’t tape the dustjackets up to “fix” the tears, or tape the jackets to the books.

A charming thing, however, was that they may have been about the last bookshop in the U.S. to actively use a bookseller’s label. This custom goes back a very long way, but in the U.S. it seems to have had its heyday from the late 19th Century to the middle of the 20th, or so. You’ll sometimes still find these small, discrete labels placed inside the front or back cover of old books. They can be a simple typographic label with the name of a bookshop and city, maybe an address or location, like the Hester label, or they could be more elaborate labels, sometimes die-cut in the shape of an open book, or with a small logo. They are sometimes called a bookseller’s ticket, though “ticket” seems to be more associated with the tiny labels of bookbinders than booksellers, for some reason.

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