Bookstores & Book Sales

Bookstores. Our family loves to go to them. We used to have one in our small Northern New York town (for those of you non-NYers, that's even north-er than Upstate. Like, almost Canada north). It was a Borders, and even though ours was a profitable store (since they were the only one in the area), obviously, the chain went out of business. 

We do have a local used bookstore here, but its hours are so limited, it just doesn't work out most of the time. Although, I do love used book stores. It's sort of like a treasure hunt going in there, searching for things, and sometimes you find a real gem.

Now we have to travel a little over an hour to the nearest chain bookstore, a Barnes & Noble. We love this store too, it's just a little more difficult to get there. And, we don't have a lot of money, so by the time we pay for gas to get down there, it doesn't leave us much to spend on books. But that doesn't bring us down, these girls love that train table:

Fun in the B&N Kid's Section

So, in order to feed our book-reading and collecting addictions, we like to frequent library book sales, and in our area, they have some good ones! And typically, the young adult and children books are only 25 - 50 cents each, which means we can get quite a few for a small amount of money.

The best one in our area always happens one of the last Saturdays in October. We wake up early, get a travel mug of coffee, sometimes take the littlest kids to my parent's house, and go stand in line to wait for the doors to open at 9:00. It's usually cold and occasionally rainy, and the kids are asking every couple of minutes if it's time yet, and there we are with other bibliophiles, all bonding together in our mutual anticipation of getting some great deals.

One year, we got all the Harry Potter books in the series (most of them hardback) for $1.75. 

what a deal!

Then, the year my oldest was really into Magic Tree House books, she found about 10 of them for $2.50. And sometimes you can find hard-to-find or out-of-print books at used book sales... Take a look at these Tolkien books:

awesome.

My wife found those a few years ago at a Regent University library book sale where she used to work (where we went to grad school). They bought another school's entire library collection (the college was closing), and then had book sales while they were figuring out which books they wanted and which they didn't. Those were some some amazing book sales... anyone from Regent remember those? 

 Ah, book sales. That reminds me, actually, there's one next month! Something to look forward to...