In my 20 years of my bookshop I have once found a $1 note. And another time a very thoughtful customer brought a hardback secondhand book to the desk and said, “You might want to check what’s in that one. People used to keep their money hidden in these kinds of books.” (It was a religious book, rare for us because we don’t get too many in, but not a bible.) There was $500 in the back of it. This book had sat on our shelves for at least 15 years before anyone noticed this! Your bookshop sounds perfect. x
I am always looking for nineteenth-century urban and social history of the US, but also the regional history of Texas and the Galveston Bay region. But I look for urban history more generally, too.
Your bookshop sounds like a little slice of paradise. I always feel so lucky if a place we visit has a second-hand bookshop. I’m a librarian and am preparing for my PhD in English Literature, focussing on the ‘Queens of Crime’ so your Golden Age books would be what would draw my eye. I have a partially-complete collection of the Fontana editions of Christie so any of those would be top of my desire list! But I’d be hard pressed to pass up anything by those wonderful women.
Thank you. Your PhD sounds wonderful. I'd love to know more. Golden Age crime is my go to at times of stress and let's be honest - that's the world at the moment.
This is my neighborhood bookshop. The owner's interest is primarily LGBTQ+ and paganism, so it's obviously well-stocked for those titles, new and used.
Essentially, the store is organized by funny/quirky themes. She goes over the top (hilariously) with the label maker. Right when you walk in, there is a huge bookcase of "hot used titles" (I suspect hot for the store's clientele, plus the market's taste). But there's also categories like, "We're here, we're queer, deal with it" or "dated cookbooks that might be great or great for an ironic dinner party" or "A little magical". All the staff have their own little taste shelves.
I buy most of my books used (or get them from Little Free Libraries), but I don't tend to like used bookstores if they are organized by genre or topic. I tend to prefer more taste-based curation than typological/content-based curation. I will read a genre book, but not every single one.
For example, I loved loved loved this niche LGBTQ+ novel called "Darryl". One of the staff shelves always keeps a used copy of "Darryl" when they have it. I always look at the books there first, because that staff and I have the same taste.
With the entire world available in our pocket, I find that content-based curation isn't valuable to me. If I want a specific book, I'll just buy it or borrow it from the library.
I also find that making taste-based recommendations has become a lost art. Nobody who recommends me a book is actually paying attention to what I like, no matter how much I tell them. So many of them just recommend me books that THEY have liked, without any consideration of whether I would like it. I don't accept many recommendations from friends anymore - especially friends who are overly obsessed 1-2 genres (INCLUDING SCIFI) - because I end up finding their recommendations almost hurtful. Like, do you even know me? Why did you ever think you would like this book? There are many books I loved that I would never recommend to a friend.
PS: Scifi fans - especially those who think they have *exceptional* taste in scifi - are the worst about this, I find. They both have a blind spot about the universality of scifi as a genre, and they are the most unwilling to accept that others might not care for their genre (while they themselves are insanely rigid about reading outside of scifi; it's an infuriating hypocrisy.)
PPS: I'm the owner of a Little Free Library, so I see firsthand the role that LFLs play in absolving people's guilt about throwing away a book. It's the equivalent of how the existence of Goodwill serves to ameliorate guilt about overconsumption, even if Goodwill throws so much shit away. Same goes for books. I see part of owning a LFL as taking on everyone else's guilt about overconsumption by recycling all the crap in there that nobody actually wants. It sucks that thrift/free resources exist not to share resources between people but to soothe anxiety about overconsumption (without doing anything to curb that overconsumption).
What a terrific reply, thank you, and one that made me pause for a number of thoughts. Recommending books is an art, you are right - some recommendations are easy enough, for example, a new crime series when the customer has bought all their previous favourites from us. Others are more of a challenge - 'I want an uplifting read' is a question I often struggle with.
I love the website link—it is obviously a fabulous shop, and I am jealous of the space it has. We used to have a section in the shop titled 'Don't judge a book by its cover', but we realised that required us to put horrible covers out rather than the opposite—the jewels, in our opinion. It is a constant learning process! We are aiming to be an inclusive space, and reading this website offers ideas - it is certainly interesting to see the books they WON'T take as trade in.
Anyway, thank you so much - our website goes live in a few weeks and I'm sure it won't be half so interesting - at least to start with.
Nice piece. I'm a lifelong haunter of bookshops. Even wrote a book about my obsession. And lived in Suffolk for a while - East Bergholt - where, sadly, there were no bookshops. Bravo for preserving one of the great intellectual treasures of mankind.
When i hit 2nd hand shops, i look for classic fiction (Dickens et al). I particularly love hard back, illustrated. First editions are of course amazing, but to find simply well-loved editions from decades ago just feels like you are part of a community. Also hunt for local natural and demographic history.
Me, i prefer a library-style organisation. Time is often limited, so i want to go to a section of interest and browse from there.
Chris, my brother-in-law, with whom I run the shop, was a librarian for many years so library style comes naturally to him. We try and know what we've got and where but there's only ever one of us in the shop so sometimes we lose touch a bit!
Hi Suzie, wonderful post, thank you! What’s the name of your shop? I see a couple of second-hand bookshops in Framlingham if Apple Maps is to be trusted, hence the q.
Have been in a Rex Stout frame of mind for the last few weeks and also looking to pick up some stray Margery Allinghams and one last Dorothy L Sayers, so when you mentioned golden age crime…😂
Nero Wolfe? Stout loved a glamorous woman, didn't he? Either murderer or victim. He was a master or American crime. We don't have any of those at present, but we always try to keep a good selection of golden age crime. Sayers is a favourite of mine. I adore Harriet Vane.
I almost exclusively patronize used bookshops because I love finding marginalia and unique notes on the pages. I have a little list of books I’m sort of always on the hunt for—sentimental editions or interesting covers.
Great piece and interesting to hear how second hand bookshops operate. I love drifting into your type of bookshop with the anticipation I might find a book gem, something I have been looking for for a long time...older books, classics, authors not easily accessible in more commercial bookshops. I do like it when a bookshop has defined sections as it helps the focused book search. We have lots of second hand bookshops in Ireland and I often wonder how the owners make a living from them. I think people want the lowest price possible when they know it's second hand! Where is your shop?
We’re in Framlingham in Suffolk and you’re right- it’s hard to make money in just a shop and we sell a lot of higher priced books online. That’s not so much fun though 😀
I love golden age crime and old 60s/70s paperbacks, pony books, unusual children's hardbacks, vintage cookbooks (especially early vegetarian books from the 70s and anything pre-1900), penguin orange editions of novels from the 30s, old maps and anything generally weird and wonderful!
We could definitely help with some of those! We had the shivers when a snappily dressed young bloke came in and asked if he could take every old orange penguin we had (lots) because he wanted something that colour for his empty bookshelves 😱 He wasn’t even going to read them. It’s the only time we haven’t followed up on a potential sale…
Oh I hate that! I do love the way they look but I buy them because I want to read them... got a few from a nice second-hand bookshop in Buxton yesterday including Monica Dickens and John Wyndham which I can't wait to get stuck into. My dad used to get people in looking for leather-bound books by the yard to make their studies look posh - what a waste!
Thanks for this! I manage a Community owned second hand bookshop in the Peak District and can relate to every word. People are so generous with donations and I wish we could take everything but we know we can’t sell lots of lovely books that they have had in their family for a long time. It can be quite heartbreaking at times, to say thank you but no thank you.
What a lovely job you have. We get donations too, which is especially generous bearing in mind we are a business. We are finding that charity shops locally are taking fewer and fewer books and being more careful about the bags they take in. We are many people's last hope and as you say, it is hard to say no!
I love the Winnie-the-Pooh postcard! I really like finding nature/wildlife books that I otherwise wouldn’t hear about. I also love seeing a good row of PG Wodehouse books and am currently on the lookout for the rest of Ellis Peters’ Cadfael series to complete my collection.
That’s interesting- hardly anyone wants Cadfael at the moment- he’s due a renaissance I think. Wodehouse is endlessly popular thank goodness and it would be lovely to find some really old editions.
I only discovered the Cadfael series last year (got my first one from a little free library down the road from us) but I’m really enjoying them - and the TV series (borrowed from local library) is pretty good too. Glad to hear PGW is still popular - he’s definitely less so here in Canada but you can still find copies sometimes.
I look for golden age crime novels. E.C.R. Lorac is a current favorite. And Michael Innes.
ECR Lorac is one of my favourites too, along with George Bellairs. MacDonald and Littlejohn are two wonderful golden age detectives.
In my 20 years of my bookshop I have once found a $1 note. And another time a very thoughtful customer brought a hardback secondhand book to the desk and said, “You might want to check what’s in that one. People used to keep their money hidden in these kinds of books.” (It was a religious book, rare for us because we don’t get too many in, but not a bible.) There was $500 in the back of it. This book had sat on our shelves for at least 15 years before anyone noticed this! Your bookshop sounds perfect. x
Wow! We have a lot of religious books in. I’m going to start checking…
Pre 1950s science textbooks… especially on electricity and magnetism.
Alternatively, Russian science textbooks.
Not seen many of the latter...
I look for Puffins from the 60s-80s, poetry (sometimes) and for graphic novels (which don't turn up often).
We hardly ever get graphic novels in. Give it a couple of years!
I am always looking for nineteenth-century urban and social history of the US, but also the regional history of Texas and the Galveston Bay region. But I look for urban history more generally, too.
That’s something we would have online I think. Www.framlinghambooks.co.uk
Your bookshop sounds like a little slice of paradise. I always feel so lucky if a place we visit has a second-hand bookshop. I’m a librarian and am preparing for my PhD in English Literature, focussing on the ‘Queens of Crime’ so your Golden Age books would be what would draw my eye. I have a partially-complete collection of the Fontana editions of Christie so any of those would be top of my desire list! But I’d be hard pressed to pass up anything by those wonderful women.
Thank you. Your PhD sounds wonderful. I'd love to know more. Golden Age crime is my go to at times of stress and let's be honest - that's the world at the moment.
Loved this! Funny, warm and full of bookshop charm.
https://irrevbooks.com/
This is my neighborhood bookshop. The owner's interest is primarily LGBTQ+ and paganism, so it's obviously well-stocked for those titles, new and used.
Essentially, the store is organized by funny/quirky themes. She goes over the top (hilariously) with the label maker. Right when you walk in, there is a huge bookcase of "hot used titles" (I suspect hot for the store's clientele, plus the market's taste). But there's also categories like, "We're here, we're queer, deal with it" or "dated cookbooks that might be great or great for an ironic dinner party" or "A little magical". All the staff have their own little taste shelves.
I buy most of my books used (or get them from Little Free Libraries), but I don't tend to like used bookstores if they are organized by genre or topic. I tend to prefer more taste-based curation than typological/content-based curation. I will read a genre book, but not every single one.
For example, I loved loved loved this niche LGBTQ+ novel called "Darryl". One of the staff shelves always keeps a used copy of "Darryl" when they have it. I always look at the books there first, because that staff and I have the same taste.
With the entire world available in our pocket, I find that content-based curation isn't valuable to me. If I want a specific book, I'll just buy it or borrow it from the library.
I also find that making taste-based recommendations has become a lost art. Nobody who recommends me a book is actually paying attention to what I like, no matter how much I tell them. So many of them just recommend me books that THEY have liked, without any consideration of whether I would like it. I don't accept many recommendations from friends anymore - especially friends who are overly obsessed 1-2 genres (INCLUDING SCIFI) - because I end up finding their recommendations almost hurtful. Like, do you even know me? Why did you ever think you would like this book? There are many books I loved that I would never recommend to a friend.
PS: Scifi fans - especially those who think they have *exceptional* taste in scifi - are the worst about this, I find. They both have a blind spot about the universality of scifi as a genre, and they are the most unwilling to accept that others might not care for their genre (while they themselves are insanely rigid about reading outside of scifi; it's an infuriating hypocrisy.)
PPS: I'm the owner of a Little Free Library, so I see firsthand the role that LFLs play in absolving people's guilt about throwing away a book. It's the equivalent of how the existence of Goodwill serves to ameliorate guilt about overconsumption, even if Goodwill throws so much shit away. Same goes for books. I see part of owning a LFL as taking on everyone else's guilt about overconsumption by recycling all the crap in there that nobody actually wants. It sucks that thrift/free resources exist not to share resources between people but to soothe anxiety about overconsumption (without doing anything to curb that overconsumption).
What a terrific reply, thank you, and one that made me pause for a number of thoughts. Recommending books is an art, you are right - some recommendations are easy enough, for example, a new crime series when the customer has bought all their previous favourites from us. Others are more of a challenge - 'I want an uplifting read' is a question I often struggle with.
I love the website link—it is obviously a fabulous shop, and I am jealous of the space it has. We used to have a section in the shop titled 'Don't judge a book by its cover', but we realised that required us to put horrible covers out rather than the opposite—the jewels, in our opinion. It is a constant learning process! We are aiming to be an inclusive space, and reading this website offers ideas - it is certainly interesting to see the books they WON'T take as trade in.
Anyway, thank you so much - our website goes live in a few weeks and I'm sure it won't be half so interesting - at least to start with.
Nice piece. I'm a lifelong haunter of bookshops. Even wrote a book about my obsession. And lived in Suffolk for a while - East Bergholt - where, sadly, there were no bookshops. Bravo for preserving one of the great intellectual treasures of mankind.
Thank you
When the last owner retired two years ago my brother in law saw something important might be lost and he could run online selling from the shop.
When i hit 2nd hand shops, i look for classic fiction (Dickens et al). I particularly love hard back, illustrated. First editions are of course amazing, but to find simply well-loved editions from decades ago just feels like you are part of a community. Also hunt for local natural and demographic history.
Me, i prefer a library-style organisation. Time is often limited, so i want to go to a section of interest and browse from there.
Well done with your efforts!
Chris, my brother-in-law, with whom I run the shop, was a librarian for many years so library style comes naturally to him. We try and know what we've got and where but there's only ever one of us in the shop so sometimes we lose touch a bit!
Hi Suzie, wonderful post, thank you! What’s the name of your shop? I see a couple of second-hand bookshops in Framlingham if Apple Maps is to be trusted, hence the q.
Have been in a Rex Stout frame of mind for the last few weeks and also looking to pick up some stray Margery Allinghams and one last Dorothy L Sayers, so when you mentioned golden age crime…😂
And we’re Framlingham Books on Market Square 😀
Nero Wolfe? Stout loved a glamorous woman, didn't he? Either murderer or victim. He was a master or American crime. We don't have any of those at present, but we always try to keep a good selection of golden age crime. Sayers is a favourite of mine. I adore Harriet Vane.
I almost exclusively patronize used bookshops because I love finding marginalia and unique notes on the pages. I have a little list of books I’m sort of always on the hunt for—sentimental editions or interesting covers.
It’s always fun to have customers like you. Someone coming in for the serendipity of a book almost waiting on the shelves for them.
Great piece and interesting to hear how second hand bookshops operate. I love drifting into your type of bookshop with the anticipation I might find a book gem, something I have been looking for for a long time...older books, classics, authors not easily accessible in more commercial bookshops. I do like it when a bookshop has defined sections as it helps the focused book search. We have lots of second hand bookshops in Ireland and I often wonder how the owners make a living from them. I think people want the lowest price possible when they know it's second hand! Where is your shop?
We’re in Framlingham in Suffolk and you’re right- it’s hard to make money in just a shop and we sell a lot of higher priced books online. That’s not so much fun though 😀
I love golden age crime and old 60s/70s paperbacks, pony books, unusual children's hardbacks, vintage cookbooks (especially early vegetarian books from the 70s and anything pre-1900), penguin orange editions of novels from the 30s, old maps and anything generally weird and wonderful!
We could definitely help with some of those! We had the shivers when a snappily dressed young bloke came in and asked if he could take every old orange penguin we had (lots) because he wanted something that colour for his empty bookshelves 😱 He wasn’t even going to read them. It’s the only time we haven’t followed up on a potential sale…
Oh I hate that! I do love the way they look but I buy them because I want to read them... got a few from a nice second-hand bookshop in Buxton yesterday including Monica Dickens and John Wyndham which I can't wait to get stuck into. My dad used to get people in looking for leather-bound books by the yard to make their studies look posh - what a waste!
We've had someone in for 'beige books', which seems to me about as bland and silly as it can get!
Thanks for this! I manage a Community owned second hand bookshop in the Peak District and can relate to every word. People are so generous with donations and I wish we could take everything but we know we can’t sell lots of lovely books that they have had in their family for a long time. It can be quite heartbreaking at times, to say thank you but no thank you.
What a lovely job you have. We get donations too, which is especially generous bearing in mind we are a business. We are finding that charity shops locally are taking fewer and fewer books and being more careful about the bags they take in. We are many people's last hope and as you say, it is hard to say no!
I love the Winnie-the-Pooh postcard! I really like finding nature/wildlife books that I otherwise wouldn’t hear about. I also love seeing a good row of PG Wodehouse books and am currently on the lookout for the rest of Ellis Peters’ Cadfael series to complete my collection.
That’s interesting- hardly anyone wants Cadfael at the moment- he’s due a renaissance I think. Wodehouse is endlessly popular thank goodness and it would be lovely to find some really old editions.
I only discovered the Cadfael series last year (got my first one from a little free library down the road from us) but I’m really enjoying them - and the TV series (borrowed from local library) is pretty good too. Glad to hear PGW is still popular - he’s definitely less so here in Canada but you can still find copies sometimes.