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A new book resembles a new car. The first time that the buyer makes use of it, it loses much of its resale value. Because of this, people who acquire books in order to read them often prefer to buy used books. (This is particularly true of people, such as Your Humble Correspondent, who like to underline words, write notes in margins, read outdoors, and keep books in the car.)
The most enjoyable way to obtain a second-hand book begins with its discovery on a shelf (the dustier the better) in a used book store. Similar sources of serendipitous acquisition include library sales, yard sales, and thrift shops. If, however, you are looking for a particular title, you may have to resort to the internet.
Such searches may (but do not have to) begin with a visit to a library catalogue of the gargantuan persuasion. (If the book I seek is in English, my first choice for this is worldcat.org.) Searching on the author and title of the book in question will tell you a lot about the number of times the book was revised, retitled, or reprinted. (If these things happened a lot, it is a sign that your chances of finding a copy of the book at a decent price are pretty good.)
The next thing to do is to look up the book on either Thriftbooks or Biblio.com. If you find what you are looking for, you pay your money, pack some snacks, and camp out in front of your mail box.
If, however, neither Thriftbooks nor Biblio has what you seek, it’s time to go looking for an independent book dealer who carries a copy of that title. Paradoxically, the easiest way to do this is to use AbeBooks, a website owned by the very antithesis of an independent bookshop: the Evil Empire named for a very long river.
To be more specific, I recommend that you use the AbeBooks website to locate a bookseller offering the book you want, but not to purchase that book. Instead, once you have identified the seller, who is doubtless a very nice person with a cozy shop and a cat named Schrödinger, you should use the latter’s website to order the book.
Using this technique will save you a little bit of money. Better yet, it will preserve you from sending your hard-earned dollars to an organization run by graduates of the Simon Legree School of Human Relations.
Old books are better. Like old dogs without a home, they show up at our doors, tails wagging.
Am I a psycho if I like to crack the spine of a crisp, brand new book and write in the margins, as opposed to a shelf-weathered one? 🙃