New Purchases

I finally found a great used bookstore in Atlanta! Well, it's actually in Decatur, but it is still only a 10 minute drive from our condo and it is certainly worth a visit. The store is called Books Again, and I discovered in a way that could only happen in the Internet age.

I was browsing the listings at Abebooks for some volumes from the Oxford Illustrated Dickens, and saw numerous listings from Books Again (Decatur, GA). So I clicked on the home page, but that failed to give any indication whether it was a real bookstore, or one of the many home-based booksellers that populate Abebooks (and from whom I've purchased many quality books). So I went to Google, and found the Biblio page which had this blurb:

We are an open book store with 30,000, mostly hardcover books in stock. Our hours are 10-6 EST and we are located in downtown Decatur, Georgia which is 6 miles east of Atlanta.

Once I stopped drooling at the thought of 30,000 mostly hardcover books, I went to Mapquest, got directions, and made plans for a weekend visit. On Saturday, my wife and I headed out to Decatur for the first time since we moved to Atlanta. What we found was a delightful bookstore hiding on a small side street, just the sort of tucked away shop that seduces the used book addict. It was clean and well-lit, but still had a touch of that used book musk. The owner was friendly, knowledgeable, and had just the right amount of curmudgeonly distaste for the rise of the Internet. He also had a skinny white cat named Octavo who spent a half-hour laying on my wife's lap as she finished Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha while I shopped.

And shop I did, though I was able in the end to restrain myself and buy for quality rather than quantity. At long last I obtained a copy of Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift in trade hardcover with its original cover price ($10) still intact. It's a second printing, so I did not have to pay a fortune, and it completes my Bellow-buying for the foreseeable future. There was also a copy of Pete Dexter's Paris Trout on sale for $2, so I thought I'd give the 1988 National Book Award Winner a try.

But the catch of the day was a first American edition of Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot in absolutely pristine condition with its original cover price ($5.95) intact. I could hardly believe I had found this 45-year old book in such great condition and at a rather reasonable price of $25. I've been so spoiled by my bargain hunting that I hesitated for a few minutes before dropping $25 on a single book, but then I remembered that thousands of people walk into bookstores and drop $25 on the latest Ann Coulter or Nora Roberts without batting an eye. A first edition of Patrick White for $25 seems an absurd bargain in comparison.

This week I also used my free Amazon Prime trial to get Howard Bahr's new Civil War novel, The Judas Field. I have read and enjoyed his first two novels, and expect more of the same. He is particularly skilled at making his characters understandable to a modern reader without making them anachronistically modern in their behavior or mentality.