I recently picked up a book by a favorite author (Sheri Tepper) in a used bookstore. It turns out the book was the beginning of a trilogy – well, actually the beginning of three trilogies. Sigh. At least I got the first one first, eh?
I found a nice, relatively inexpensive one-volume version of the first trilogy, which I’m bopping along nicely with. That I found online. Delightfully enough, it turns out I’d bought the third trilogy at some point in the past and never read it, so I’ve got those three. The middle trilogy, though – both half dot com and amazon have it, but for $20 or so per volume, and no one-volume edition. The library doesn’t have it.
Are there any niche sites for buying science fiction and fantasy where I might be able to find this at a reasonable price?
I’ve been a member of the Science Fiction Book Club several times over my lifetime.
And the physical quality of the books have improved amazingly!
Back in the 70s, shoddy binding, badly-cut pages, crummy printing that was hard to read, & nasty cheap paper was the standard.
But today? :eek:
Nicely bound, near-perfect cutting, vastly better paper, & laser-sharp printing, all at low prices!
Their online store is well-worth visiting, for quality & variety as well as low price. Tip: make abundant use of the search engine to find things available, but not listed in “This Month’s Offerings”.
Day-um! Alibris’ prices always seem to be higher than anyone else’s. I bought from them for awhile, until somebody told me about ABE and Half and Amazon’s marketplace.
Good luck in your search! If you don’t mind sharing the title of what you’re looking for, I can ask some generous folks who I trade books with, see if they have one laying around.
Thanks! The one-volume version is called The Chronicles of Mavin Manyshaped – the individual volumes are The Song of MM, The Flight of MM, and The Search for MM.
I totally do not need to own these – I just want to read them – so if anyone has copies and would be willing to lend them to me, I’d not only cover postage but, I dunno, bake you some cookies or throw in a couple of other books or something.
Okay – put “Sheri Tepper” in the search, it came back with 128 hits – not one of the first 12 was a book by her (or even in the right genre, as far as I could tell – Mo’Nique? I don’t think so…), so I don’t think that’s the answer.
I always start a used book search with bookfinder.com, a metasearch site that searches ABEbooks, alibris, and a double dozen others all at once. They show a number of copies of The Chronicles of Mavin Manyshaped.
Weirdly, you can buy the individual titles of the trilogy there cheaper than you can buy them as a set.
Most libraries will have a form you can fill out so that another library will lend them the book. Your library might not have it, but someone else’s might (I hope so, as that’d be the cheap solution!)
It probably isn’t what you’re looking forward to, but I find there’s usually some seller at the Amazon marketplace that doesn’t research prices before posting a used book for sale. You might have to wait - I had to wait 4 months for that kind of seller to show up for the fourth book of an out-of-print series - but it was worth it. Copies were going for $50+ on the marketplace and Abebooks, but I held out and found someone selling it for paperback cover price.
Excellent resource – that’s been bookmarked! – and it looks like they came up with some better prices than I’d found. Thanks!
Re: interlibrary loan – it’s a possibility, but since these apparently came out in a single mass market paperback edition 20 years ago, I’m not sure there will be a lot of libraries will still have them. Most don’t hold on to ephemeral genre fiction like that. Worth a try, as you say.
I checked WorldCat (subscription database, your local library may have access) and found that it lists 5 libraries worldwide that have the one-volume version.
For the individual versions:
Song of MM - 98 libraries, including (in PA):
CITIZEN’S LIBR
DELAWARE CNTY LIBR SYST
TEMPLE UNIV
Flight of MM - 85. PA libraries are:
CITIZEN’S LIBR
Search for MM - 70 libraries. PA:
CITIZEN’S LIBR
Citizen’s Library looks like it’s in Washington, PA, and from what I can tell from their directions (not highly motivated to open Mapquest), that’s over on the West side of the state.
But it does look like there are enough libraries around that you should be able to get copies of the individual books through interlibrary loan.
One more resource to try is paperbackswap.com. They are up to nearly 600,000 titles available for trading(do you have a few books lying around you’d like to get rid of?) You never know, someone may be cleaning out their closets and you can have it for the cost of a swapped book and postage. =)
Those are particularly hard to find. It took me several years to get all of them. I’d offer to ship them to you but they’re in storage in the US right now. If you like those, you’d also like the True Game books (King’s Blood Four, Necromancer’s Nine, Wizard’s Eleven) which have been reprinted in an omnibus edition, or the Dervish Daughter books starting with Jinian Footseer, which had a larger print run than the earlier books. All of those are set in the same world and interlink, though each story set stands on its own just fine.
I’ve sometimes had luck with Powell’s Books, in addition to the other sources people have brought up already.
Thanks, Sleel. I just finished the Peter series this evening – and have the Jinian series already. Can I read that next while I wait for Mavin? It souds like that’s mostly backstory.
