Monday, December 05, 2005

Used book bonanza

I went to my favorite books store this weekend. I wasn't expecting much, as I didn't have a lot of money, but they were having a 50 percent off sale so I picked up a few things:


  • The War Against the Rull: All my talk about A.E. Van Vogt recently made me pick up this Pocket Books paperback from 1962. It's one of Van Vogt's books I know nothing about.

  • New Dimensions 1: Edited by Robert Silverberg, this was one of the great anthology series during the New Wave era. It has stories by Gardner Dozois, Ursula K. LeGuin, Harlan Ellison, R.A. Lafferty, Barry Malzberg and Thomas Disch. Great stuff. Unfortunately, I got home and realized I had bought the same book in hardcover at the store years earlier.

  • The Ninth Galaxy Reader: Edited by Frederik Pohl, this collects "the cream of the short stories from Galaxy Magazine." Among the authors included are R.A. Lafferty, Roger Zelazny, Brian Aldiss, Larry Niven and John Brunner. It only cost me a quarter!

  • Doc Savage: The Sargasso Ogre: I've been buying the Doc Savage paperbacks as long as I can remember. I've only read a few and I enjoy them. I try and collect as many of the pulp characters as I can. I have paperbacks that feature the Shadow, the Spider and Operator #5.

  • Attack from Atlantis: This Lester Del Rey novel features an atomic submarine battling Atlanteans. "An American atom sub vanishes and plunges the world into a new Cold War crisis. A startling science -fiction adventure as timely as today's headlines" reads the cover. The cover also features someone riding some kind of fish with a submarine lassoed behind it. How could I not pick this one up?

  • The Power and the Glory: I read Graham Greene's "The End of the Affair" a year or two ago and loved it. Since then, I've read a few of his short stories. Now I've got this one. I'm excited about it.

  • Interfaces: Another science fiction anthology, this one edited by Ursula K. LeGuin. It features authors like Vonda McIntyre, John Crowley, Michael Bishop, Gene Wolfe and James Tiptree Jr.

  • Beasts: A novel by John Crowley. I saw it in hardcover and figured I should pick it up. I've had "Little, Big" weighing down a shelf for years now and figured maybe something shorter like this would be a better place to start with Crowley.

It's a pretty good haul I think. If you're interested in the used book store, Books by the Falls now has a Web site. They do auctions online and off. Here's their eBay seller page.
I don't know when I'll get around to reading these books, I've got a ton on the To Be Read file already. I'm currently reading Jeffrey Ford's "Cosmology of the Wider World" and loving it.

1 comment:

Brian said...

There were at least two copies of that same Del Rey book at the store. It's a used book store in Connecticut. I've always found great finds there. None of these were mint condition first editions or anything, just good copies of out of print books.