Used
bookstores are great. Garage sales have their value. You can even find some
good books poking around in people’s trash. But thrift-store bookshelves
contain some of the best literary discoveries.
Like garage sales, there’s a
certain core library that all thrift stores seem to stock: the requisite three
copies of The Godfather, a few
Danielle Steele opuses, National
Geographic, Harlequin, Silhouette, and Tom Clancy romances. I’ve yet to
figure it out, but Henry Roth’s Call it
Sleep (reissued in paperback in 1964) seems to end up in every thrift store
with even a 2-foot shelf of books.
There are times when a certain
despair overtakes me while searching the heaps of broken-spined paperbacks. It
feels like this is where books go after they die. But these are better than
dismal remainder shelves; at least most of the books in the resale shops have
been read before being given away.
My collection contains some
specialties. For instance, I have the largest number of Big Hand books in the
known universe. These are paperbacks with the cover art showing a hand
disproportionately larger than the other figures. The best ones show a scantily
clad woman lounging in the gigantic male palm. I also hunt for severed-head
covers, King James Bibles, anything by Philip K. Dick, Little Golden Guides,
and, of course, deep-discount remainders of books I’ve actually written.
Prices have gone up in the
last few years. Twenty-five cents is the magic number, as far as I’m concerned.
It’s got to be a pretty amazing find for me to spend top (as in: one) dollar
for a dog-eared paperback.
Here’s a random sample of some
of the best literary tomes I’ve dredged up in the last few years.
• Suburbia, Jungle of Sex — “To Candy Williams, life in the
country meant money, liquor, and lust.”
• Torture Love Cage — “Think you can take it, mister? Don’t
say YES until you’ve read this book! Ex-Intelligence man Matt Raven thought so
too — until he was lured into a subversive heaven-hell chamber of sex and
torture no man ever dared imagine!”
• Raptured — By televangelist Ernest Angley. He was working this
turf 30 years before Left Behind.
“Heal! Heal!”
• Parade to Glory — “The Shriners and their Caravan to
Destiny” (maximum fez action here).
• I Killed Stalin — “Through terror, torture, and perversity
with a US secret agent.”
• Boy George Fashion and Make-up Book — complete with cut-out
patterns and mascara diagrams.
• Sin Eater — “Who was the 6-foot 6-inch fiend that set out to
rape every woman in an entire town?”
• Dancing Madness — knocked-off quickly by the editors of Rolling
Stone in 1976, to exploit Disco mania. Best chapter: “Hi, I’m Karen Lustgarten
and I’m going to teach you the LA Hustle.”
• Brutal Ecstasy — “She murdered many men — most of them
with her magnificent body!”
• Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses — “Moses’ magical
spirit-art, known as the Wonderful Arts of the old, wise Hebrews, taken from
the Mosaic books of the Cabala and the Talmud for the good of Mankind.”
• I Prowl by Night — “A bold new look at the causes of
perverse desire — the frenzy that drives a man to the windows of unsuspecting
women!”
• Michael Jackson’s Dancing the Dream — 150 pages of deathless
poetry (“Children of the world, we’ll do it”), glossy photographs,
pen-and-ink drawings of baby seals, ruminations on God and other cosmic stuff,
and pictures of people who’ve yet to reach puberty.
• The Love Machine — “You’ll gasp as the BIG MAN reproduces
human sex drives to the shocking extremes of ecstasy and horror!!!”
This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2002.
