My mother has an old favorite cookbook, the Molly Goldberg Jewish Cookbook. Her edition was paperback, but the binding had long ago fallen to dust, and she kept the book for reference as a bunch of brittle dark yellow pages held together with a rubber band.
I found a copy in decent condition–in hardback–for about $4 at Bookman’s Used Books in Tucson. The thing’s been out of print since the sixties, I’d guess. It’s worth about $4 (evidently) but it made my Mommy happy!
Just about two weeks ago, I was early to a movie and the ticketbooth hadn’t opened up yet so I ducked into a nearby used bookstore on a whim and found a copy of Dune Encyclopedia for $5.
I’m a huge Frank Herbert fan and have been on the lookout for this book for years. The feeling of finding a book I had been looking for, for years, was great!
Sort of a double pleasure of getting a great bargain on a used book and finally being able to finally read something for the first time.
Similarly, a couple years ago I finally found issue #8 of Watchmen, that I had been hunting for years, for only $2. I had read the issue before, but finally I completed my collection of the individual issues.
At my favorite bookstore in Nashville, a woman was browsing through the children’s books when she suddenly gave a sharp cry. She had found a book from her childhood with her name in it in her own handwriting. It had been abandoned in haste somewhere in Europe when she and her family fled the Nazis. (If this sounds familiar, it was written up in Victoria magazine a few years back.)
My personal best: A copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style in a “FREE” box outside a used bookstore in Maine.
The best book find I’ve ever had happened at Half Price Books, several years ago.
I was looking through the stacks, looking for some sci-fi, as was my girlfriend. She got rather excited, as she’d just found a copy of So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, by Douglas Adams. Hardbound. She’d never read it, so she decided that was what she wanted, but wanted to make sure I didn’t have it. I assured her that I didn’t… and so she opened it up to the first page to see how much they wanted for it.
“Oh my god, Lightnin’? Take a look at this…”
On the first page it said, “To Lightnin’, Best Wishes, Douglas Adams”. Holy crap- not only signed, but to ME.
That was my Christmas present that year. 
A few years later, Douglas Adams came to town to push the game he worked on, Starship Titanic. We went, of course, and took the book with us. When we got up to him, we put that book in front of him. He opened it up, and when he saw that he’d already signed it, he started to ask us what the deal was.
We explained how we’d found the book, and pretty much just wanted him to know how special it was to us.
He signed it below, “And Again, Douglas Adams”.
So, yeah, I’ve got a book not only personalized to me, but signed TWICE by the author.
Needless to say, we mourned his passing. Great guy.
yeah, the anti-Communist stuff emerged when some local industry apparently dissolved its library- I got tons of ARLINGTON HOUSE books (a lot of Ludwig Von Mises- Austrian libertarian economics stuff), some Conspiracy stuff, and Foundations of Economic Education texts.
Those showed up at a local American Association of University Women fundraising sale in the early 1980s.
The local library fundraising sale TWICE supplied me with original printings of J. Carroll Quigley’s TRAGEDY AND HOPE (not first eds but
eds from its originally being in print)- maybe $1 at most. Also found in the early 1980s.
A Nashville Indiana used Christian bookstore (HIS Bookstore) had for SEVEN DOLLARS a 1950s Fr Ronald Knox translation of the Catholic Bible (my gasp created a vacuum in the room L).
Local used bookstore- late 1970s- THE LIFE OF DWIGHT L. MOODY by his son.
I forget where- SOULS ON FIRE- stories of Hassidic Masters by Elie Wiesel- apparently autographed!
Lightnin’- that’s probably the COOLEST story here! Similar to the “First Edition Vonnegut… Signed” commercial that’s now on TV.
My fiancee picked up a hardcover James Clavell’s Whirlwind for me at a used book sale in front of my university, which has apparently been out of print for some time (so far I’d only seen one copy at a Borders, paperback, for over $15 and it was gone the next week anyway); at the sale it was $3. We had just been about to get it off ebay.
Now I finally have all of his books.
A first edition printing of William Burrough’s Naked Lunch in almost mint condition for a measly 5 dollars.
Good-condition hardcover editions of Nevil Shute’s On The Beach and Dalton Trumbo’s **Johnny Got His Gun ** for less than 5 dollars apiece.
A mint condition hardcover from the early 60’s, How Your Family Can Survive A Nuclear War, full of all kinds of goodish info, for 50 cents.
Our Father Thou Art In Hell, a hardcover biography of Jim Jones, out of print, for less than a dollar.
The Encyclopedia Of Witchcraft And Demonology, a fairly hefty and rare hardcover edition, for 10 dollars.
A almost complete softcover collection of the poetry volumes of Charles Bukowski (missing only War All The Time and **Love Is A Dog From Hell **) for 4 dollars apiece. This huge stack was brought in and sold to the store about 5 minutes before I arrived, so I was able to purchase the entire lot before any other customers picked off individual titles.
The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh: The Films Of George A. Romero, very rare and out of print limited hardcover edition autographed and numbered by George Romero and author Paul Gagne that I picked up for 80 bucks (marked down from 200 bucks because, as the store owner admitted, it had sat on his shelf for 9 years with nary a glance from any customer).
If you ever feel like taking a road trip, head northeast on I-95 to the Goodwill in Perry Hall/White Marsh (northeast Baltimore County, about 15 minutes outside the city).
They have TONS of sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks. Not my cup of tea, but I browse though there a lot and always see a lot of that stuff.
The best huge used bookstore in the Baltimore-Washington area is Wonder Books in Frederick.
At a yard sale in Atlanta, I got a first edition of Robert Frost’s Mountain Interval for $5.
I later gave it to a friend as a wedding gift, thereby conclusively establishing what a moron I am. They got divorced about six months later (after my friend confessed to me that neither of them was much of a Frost fan), and I didn’t have the cojones to ask if I could have the book back.
A copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, translated into Russian (which I can’t read, but looks cool) by Vladimir Nabokov.
The same Encyclopedia Of Witchcraft And Demonology that Keith Barry mentions above, also hardcover, for about the same price.
An old copy (1931, I’m thinking) of Salome by Oscar Wilde with hand-painted art deco illustrations and every pair of pages joined at the top.
My biggest misses? an old 24 volume leather hardbound set of the Complete Works of H. Rider Haggard for $85. When my paycheck came in, I went to get them but they were gone. 
I also found a really huge (10"x12"x3" and about ten pounds heavy) book whose title I cannot recall, but it claimed to be about the brothers and sisters of Tetragrammaton (the God of the Bible), who evidently had a large family…It was printed around the turn of the century by some Theosophical-type folks and was all in very, very tiny print.
I knew I’d regret not picking that one up.
But I’ve got the Simon Necronomicon in hardcover, bound in huma-…cow skin…yeah, that’s it…cow…
Today I bought an old book called Sword and Gown. The author’s name does not seem to appear anywhere on or in the book, but because it says it’s by the author of Guy Livingston I was able to find that it’s George Alfred Lawrence on Barnes and Nobles’ out of print books site. There is no copyright date, instead it says “author’s edition.” Is this worth anything?
first edition keroauc for 3 bucks…
Where would I find some old children’s music books? These werepublished in the 1950’s, for children in Grades 1-6, mostly by Houghton-Mifflin and Silver Burdette. I seem to remember that they were titled “THE WORLD OF MUSIC”.
Just a nostalgia thing-where shouldI look?
**ralph124c, ** I’ve been meaning to ask you, you’re a Gernsback fan aren’t you?
The first volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th ed. This was the book I had for my one of my “death march through English Literature” courses in college and I loved it. Lots of great stories in there. Unfortunately, I was stupid and broke at the end of that semester so I sold it back. I must have paid about $80 for it at the student bookstore. Next semester, I realized how dumb I was and went back to find it. The university had switched to a different publisher. Foo.
Couple of weeks ago, I was in the used bookstore in Salisbury and there it was. $2. Woo!
Ian Kershaw’s Hitler Bio Volume 1
.75 cents and some beaver pelts up here in mooseland
almost soiled me longjohns
I found a little bookstore the other day, which seemed strange because I must have walked past that block three hundred times and I could have sworn that it was just a blank brick wall.
I went in and browsed for a while, but it was mostly the old standards (The Aegrisomnia, Liber Damnum, Cultes des Ghoules, The Books of Eibon, De Vermis Mysteriis, the Penguin paperback Pnakotic Manuscripts and all those cheap Prinn translations of the Necronomicon that seem to pile up in every used bookstore I’ve ever been in). They did have a copy of “What I Did On My Summer Vacation”, and a rather tattered “On the Summoning of Dragons”, but I already have those.
I went over to the proprietor and said “Look, buddy, I’m not some tourist, so don’t waste my time, what have you got in your real stock”?
Five minutes later I walked out with a first edition, in Very Fine, of “Naked Came the Stranger”.
NOW I can get down to some serious evil.
This is absolutely hilarious and should be the proscribed title for all Eng Lit 101 classes. 
Thank you, thank you, but I can’t take credit for it. That was what my university supervisor called the university requirements. Junior and senior year high school English were the Death March Through American and British Literature respectively.