Two bought at Half Price Books, two at a small used bookstore in South Austin called Good Buy Books.
Posts Tagged ‘Half Price Books’
Library Additions: Four Paperbacks (Brunner, Pournelle, Powers)
Monday, October 21st, 2019Library Addition: Signed/Limited Edition of Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue
Tuesday, October 8th, 2019Another Chabon I was missing:
Chabon, Michael. Telegraph Avenue. Harper, 2012. First edition hardback, a Near Fine copy with a bump at head and a pinhead red remainder mark at heel, in a Fine- dust jacket with wrinkling along that bump, with Chabon’s signature sheet bound in. ISBN is the same as the trade edition. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a presigned edition remaindered by a major publisher before. Maybe it got mixed in with the regular titles, or maybe it was due to the bump. Bought from Half Price Books for $12 (marked down from $15).
Library Addition: Signed, Limited Edition of Andy Duncan’s The Pottawatomie Giant
Friday, August 2nd, 2019Another Half Price Book find:
Duncan, Andy. The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories. PS Publishing, 2012. First edition hardback, #80 of 200 signed, numbered copies, with an additional inscription by Duncan (“To/David –/Welcome/to the party!/Andy Duncan [with snake doodle]/NCSU/9/12/12.”) on the title page, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket and decorated boards. Supplements a trade edition copy. Bought for $7.99; list is £39.99.
Library Addition: Signed Limited Edition of Andre Norton’s Grand Master’s Choice
Wednesday, July 31st, 2019I don’t collect Andre Norton, but I do sort of half-assedly collect NESFA Press, and this was a good chance to pick up a signed, limited Norton cheap:
Norton, Andre, editor. Grand Master’s Choice. NESFA Press, 1989. First edition hardback, #44 of 275 signed, numbered copies, a Fine- copy with deep groove across top of half title page, title page and table of contents (I’m guessing a manufacturing process flaw), in a Fine- dust jacket with slight non-breaking crease along bottom inside flap. Anthology where Nebula Grandmaster winners Robert A. Heinlein, Jack Williamson, Clifford Simak, L. Sprague de Camp, Fritz Leiber, Andre Norton and Isaac Asimov pick their personal favorites of their stories. Bought for $15 from Half Price Books, marked down from $30 during their most recent coupon sale.
Library Addition: Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind
Friday, July 19th, 2019Another Half Price Books find:
Rothfuss, Patrick. The Name of the Wind. DAW, 2007. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine- dust jacket with the barest trace bend at points and a trace of haze-rubbing. Bought at Half Price Books for $14.99. Popular fantasy that seems to go in the $300-400 range these days.
Library Additions: Half Price Books Finds
Tuesday, June 18th, 2019No particular theme, just various books I picked up at Half Price Books over the last few months that I didn’t feel like breaking out into separate posts.
Amazing Book Find: Ballantine Hardback of Chad Oliver’s Shadows in the Sun
Monday, August 3rd, 2015I’d been having a dry spell searching the local Half Price Books locations. I wasn’t find much terribly interesting in their stacks (a few signed paperbacks here and there), and I either had everything I wanted in their collectable shelves, or they were asking too much money for marginal works.
Saturday’s find made up for many, many years of dry spells, and is hands-down the best find I’ve ever made at Half Price Books:
Oliver, Chad. Shadows in the Sun. Ballantine Books, 1954. First edition hardback (Currey state A, tan cloth lettered in black, no priority), a Near Fine+ copy with slight bumping at head and heel and usual age-darkening to pages), in a Near Fine- dust jacket with a 1 1/2″ closed tear to rear dust jacket flap, slight spotting to top of white rear cover, and a few small rubs. Hall, Hal W., The Work of Chad Oliver: An Annotated Bibliography & Guide, A2. Currey (1979), page 397. Locke, Spectrum of Fantasy, page 169 (an ex-library copy; his description of the dust jacket matches (down to the H-91 code on the front flap), but his description of the book itself as “gray cloth in dark blue lettering” doesn’t match either this copy or the Currey B state (blue cloth lettered in black); Locke’s copy was possibly a library rebind or another binding variant). Barron, Anatomy of Wonder 4, 3-138. Bought for $3 from the Half Price Books in Cedar Park.
Since Google image search brings up no copies of the hardback dust jacket (only the paperback edition, which has a different cover, as they frequently did), I’ve done several scans of it.
Chad Oliver was the Grand Old Man of Austin science fiction writers. In addition to writing important works of anthropological SF in the 1950s, he was Dean of the University of Texas’ anthropology school for a while, and was an all-around swell guy. I knew him, but he was really more of a mentor to my mentors (Howard Waldrop, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, etc.), and had stopped going to the Turkey City Writer’s workshop by the time I started attending. He died in 1993.
Ballantine Books was one of the first mainstream publishers to move into science fiction in the 1950s. They published a prestigious SF line that came out in two formats: A paperback edition for readers, and a hardback edition, scarcely larger than the paperbacks, primarily for the library market. The paperbacks had print runs in the hundreds of thousands, while I’ve heard 600 as a typical print run for the hardbacks. Among the most desirable titles are Fahrenheit 451 (including the asbestos-bound state, which is insanely expensive), Childhood’s End (which I have an Ex-Library of), Hal Clement’s Cycle of Fire, and Green Odyssey, Philip Jose Farmer’s first published book. I’ve seen multiple copies of all those (even the asbestos Fahrenheit 451) offered up for sale or auction, but never Shadows in the Sun (Heritage offered up a jacketless copy a few years back). I don’t think seen a jacketed copy for sale or auction anywhere in the last 20 years.
Hell, as far as I can tell, Texas A&M’s Cushing library, to which Chad donated his books and papers, doesn’t even have a copy of the hardback listed among the donated material.
A conservative estimate of value is probably $2,000…