I’ve been yearning for this 4-volume set of Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology for ever so long, but I can’t afford $126 for books. (Someday I’ll win the lottery and I’m gonna buy out Barnes and Noble.) Futzing around www.abebooks.com the other day, I found volume 1 for one dollar! One single little dollar! I can afford a dollar! Yay!
Now I’ve just gotta keep an eye out for the other three volumes. What awesome deals have you gotten, from abebooks or anywhere else?
My best story by far was when I was really being aggressive about my book collecting - I have dialed it back a bit over the past year or so. I was testing out a new book search engine - heck I can’t even remember which one, only that it was bought by someone else and I can get the info through Bookfinder now anyway. I fired a bunch of titles of books I was trying to find into it. One was a first edition of Philip Barry’s play The Philadelphia Story - of course made into the movie with Kate Hepburn, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. The first has a beautiful full-length photo of Hepburn as Tracy Lord on it.
Anyway, fired off the search - and got a hit! For $35!!! This book is worth well over $1,000. I contacted the seller, asked a few specific questions and verified that it was, in fact, the true first. Bingo! So what did I do? Offered him $25!! We settled on $30 and I got the book,where it sits on the shelf with some of my favorites, since that movie is a personal fave…
I like to check abebooks for textbooks, since they can get quite expensive.
This time around, I found my Intro to Research textbook for around half of what the campus bookstore wanted. I get the book in the mail, and there was a note tucked inside. The book’s previous owner taught in my department about 20 years ago but now lives in Utah.
I ended up buying both required textbooks for less than the bookstore wanted for just the Intro to Research.
Robin
First, abebooks is my thang. I’d spent years trying to track down, one at a time, ANY of the titles by Jean-Henri Fabre, the father of modern entomology. He writes about bugs like a poet. Unfortunately, most of them haven’t been published since the 20s. Through perseverence, luck, Amazon-used, and eBay, I had exactly . . . one. (They’re downloadable at gutenberg, but I wanted the old dusty books.) Then I found out about abebooks, and nearly freaked entirely out: there were 7 or 8 copies of ALL of his titles, starting at like $5 a pop! Needless to say, my collection has grown.
Second, interesting coincidence: Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology is what I call my penis! Or, at least, what I will from now on . . .
I go to Half-Priced Books a lot.
Last summer, I found an advanced reading copy of a book I had been waiting for months to read, and was not due to be out for another few months.
Man, was I stoked! I snatched it and ran up to the register, even though I was not done shopping. Though I’ve bought ARCs there before, I was somehow afraid that the cashier would say, “No, sorry, we can’t sell this to you.”