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For the past 5 years my wife and I have been travelling the western states. We avoid cities but do stop into smaller towns to provision and explore. It has been heartening to see so many small to mid sized towns still have good used book stores. They are not hip or ironic or kitschy just a decent store stocked with old books at good prices. Often they will have a section devoted to local history. Las Cruces NW for instance has an enormous used book store that looks prosperous. We always go in and stock up on inexpensive reading material.One secondhand bookseller friend has kept her one remaining store (she had four at one time) post-bankruptcy, and from the sounds of it that remaining place is hanging on by a thread.
Another friend shut down his retail store before the Great Bookstore Collapse of a decade or so ago and went 100 percent online.
I miss what most others miss about used bookstores — leaving the store with a book you didn’t know existed when you came in, or, at least something you hadn’t thought to look for. I was introduced to much of my favorite literature that way.
As to old periodicals and the prices they’re fetching (or asking, anyway) ...
I have a couple of boxes full of LIFE and Collier’s and a few editions of Look and Sunset and some others, mostly dating from the 1940s, some from the ’30s, and quite a few from the ’50s into the ’60s. I bought dozens, scores, maybe a hundred or more, for 15 bucks (as I recall) at a yard sale. The others I rarely paid more than a buck apiece for.
Having seen numerous online listings for old print advertisements I’m left thinking that that is part of what’s fueling this price escalation. Sellers are apparently buying up these old rags and cutting ’em up to sell the ads.