Tag: bookshops in Texas

The Book Inn – Lubbock, TX

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.

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.