Why I Love: Used Book Stores

Youth makes for an awkward time and one should not be held to the trivial decisions made in that time. As a young nitwit, I only bought new books. I bought new and I horded them. Then, after years of persistence, my mother got me in the now defunct Book Rack in my hometown of Kingsport, Tennessee. Years of guilty and shame sluffed off me like the scales from the eyes of the dude in the Bible. Over the years, I have been in more used books stores than I care to count....in fact I tried to for this article and lost count. Besides bars and record stores, used books stores are maybe my most collected retail establishments. And I have been fortunate enough to live within reasonable driving distance from some very good ones, but that is another article all together. There are many reasons I plumb the depths of these proprieties of the secondhand, but here are just a few.

Like libraries, used books stores are a collection of all the books. Not just ones from the big names (that I don't read), the fluff that make some celebrity's reading list, or get hyped by the publishing industry. Sure, you will find a few copies of these, but the well trained eye of the shop owner is going to ditch these because they know everyone who is going to read those has already ready them, and their customers are not there for Fifty Shades Of Grey anyway. By a natural selection, the weak and unworthy have been weeded out. Gone is the drivel, the slag heap droppings and left is the stuff really worth getting your hands on. 

The thrill of the hunt tempts me like a siren calling from sharp rocks. Again youth is to be forgiven, but my first encounter in a used bookstore was awkward. I asked a clerk in Mr. Kay's of Knoxville if they had a particular book. He pointed to the back room and said "See all those books we haven't processed? There is no way we know what we have!" While a little rude, it taught me really quick most used bookstores have no sense of real order so the hunt was my own.  We brave few who venture into the wilds of a used bookstore are there for the rare trophy, not the big game easily captured on a trip to the grocery store. Finding that obscure book from your TO READ list for $4.99 is a rush! Didn't know you needed that Orson Scott Card Sci-Fi book you might never read? For $3.99 you know now! A wise man said "Chop your own wood and it warms you twice." I said "Venture into the used bookstore and escape twice,"

I could wax poetic about used bookstores for longer but I offer one more point for why I love these musty dens of joy. They have kept me afloat all too many times. More times than reasonable, I have parted with large swaths of my book (and record) collection to weigh down a wallet about to flutter away. Sure, you aren't getting back what you paid (unless you get store credit, which I would recommend) but making it to pay day is real, and I can't/won't sell blood. I am sure the next reader who got my dearly departed book loved it, but I need the jingle in my pocket more. And the kind hearted peddlers of the paper know when you need the bread, usually will give you a break on a few of the lesser sought after titles as well. So if you are looking at the bank account, and have to chose between parting with an unread James Patterson or tapping a vein, take the trip with a box of books. 

My youth was misspent buying new books and stuffing them into my bookshelves like I was a Vanderbilt, but I have since seen the error of my ways. I have nothing against a box store out there making a killing on the love of reading, but give me the humbled masses yearning to breathe free washed up on the shores of a good used bookstore any day. In these houses of the discarded, I have found the books I should be reading, and more than once left for the next person a book that might change their lives.