Some exciting finds this month.
We started off at a place in North Dayton called the Dollar Book Swap. It is a giant warehouse in an old industrial area. Though they do take in trade from walk-ins the bulk of their inventory is bought by the semi-truck load from across the country. I’m assuming the leftover books from library sales and book fairs. There is a lot of shit to sift through and the odds of finding anything incredible are thin. BUT if you have that book buying itch and need a cheap scratch this place is it. Bonus: they had too many paperbacks and were on sale for .75. I started throwing anything in the bag that looked mildly interesting.
I grabbed a grip of crime/mystery books. Pretty stoked on that Mexican Connection, The John D MacDonald and I absolutely love the cover art on that Ngaio Marsh.
Some cool sci-fi and fantasy. Most notable is Edgar Rice Burroughs, Land of Terror. How cool looking is that thing?! I grabbed the Dreams of Dawn because the cover made me laugh. What is going on there? The look on her face and her posture looks like a failed 80’s sitcom. Wacky crab boyfriend. Also, I love me some lady sword and sorcery and those Ravens look fun. Got a pretty cool fat DAW- Jalav- Amazon Warrior. Oh, and the novelization of The Last Star Fighter which is the first movie I ever remember seeing. We saw it in a drive in. One of my very first memories.
Horror is few and far between at this place but we did manage to find some interesting books. ORCA of course being the coolest. We don’t collect a lot of Steven King as; A: my wife doesn’t really like him and B: I read most of them when I was a kid. But I’d never seen that Thinner book and coincidentally we had just watched the movie a couple days before so I guess it was meant to be. She grabbed some Goosebumps and a three volume box set of Carlos Castaneda which she explained to me was an occult fiction writer. And also she grabbed that hilarious romance anthology of love stories involving ghosts. Just look at ghost Fabio on the cover! That shit is amazing.
Next up we swung by the local Half Priced Books and holy snikeys, someone must have sold their old horror magazine and book collection because there was a bunch of rare classics. They had all these HP Lovecraft editions we had never seen. Australian and British editions. Everything was pricey though so we had to pick and choose. There was a ton we had to leave behind.
Speaking of which, I’m super cheap when it comes to books. The most I’ll pay is usually $15 and that’s rare. But I could not pass up that Devil’s Rain novel. I’ve been wanting that thing since I learned it existed. We love that movie! It was $30. Oof. Better than an online price but still. Also, my wife found a rare occult hard cover, Exorcism Through the Ages. That one was also not a cheap book.
And then to make matters worse I pulled myself away from the expensive rare horror books and went into the crime/mystery section where I knew the prices would be more my speed and what did I find but multiple UK Pan editions of James Bond. Fuuuck! I grabbed them all. Not the original original ones with the yellow box but still. That cover of The Spy Who Loved Me is so weird. We have a passed-out lady and a bald guy in a pink undershirt holding a gun on her. It has to be one of the most unappealing covers I’ve ever seen. It’s laughably bad. But it is a UK Pan so in the cart it went! Baba ba baaa ba bom bom.
On the cheap I found a few. Grabbed a copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep with Blade Runner cover art for a buck. A Max Allan Collins comic-book paperback! And two 80’s Avon thrillers that I’d never heard of but thought looked intriguing.
Third stop of the month was to Bonnets. After the HPB shenanigans we decided to only pull cheapies. I absolutely loved that Little Brother serial killer thriller book I got from Bonnets last time so I wanted to see if I could find any more off the beaten path 80’s thrillers. I pulled Facemaker, And Down Will Come Baby and Hit and Run which is a blackmail thriller with a baseball setting. Unrelated genre wise I got Grail which is a end of days apocalyptic horror.
I wanted to get an early Travis McGee series so I picked up Nightmare in Pink. A cheap spy book, Carter Brown, a trashy looking 80’s crime book called APB and my wife picked out that fantasy book with the lady and all the animals. Looks 70’s af.
Lastly we stumbled into a local comic store called Bell, Book and Comic, that I hadn’t been to in over twenty years and was pleasantly surprised to find a small room full of obscure and cheaply priced paperbacks. This shit was mind blowing. First off, everything was an early edition. Second, everything was priced to move. Most being $1-2. There was wantlist finds in here that had me jumping up and down waving the books around. I can only imagine what they were thinking if they had been watching the camera.
First and foremost I finally got a copy of Black Canaan the horror stories of Robert E Howard. Tears to my eyes. Also by Howard, The Sword Woman. That Frazetta painted cover for Michael Moorcock’s Silver Warriors! I’ve owned that poster for years. Bad fucking ass.
They had a bunch of Lasers. I grabbed three of the earliest numbers. Some sci-fi horror and Xuan which is some kind of sleezy sci-fi insanity.
I finally found a 50’s racing pulp novel. And number 2 in the Rat Bastard series.
Horror galore with The World Grabbers, a novel based off of an Outer Limits episode. The Dark Mill, a gothic by John Messman under the name Claudette Nicole. I really enjoyed The Haunting of Drumroe, another gothic he wrote under the Nicole name. The Burning reminded me of Re-Animator.
Part one and part two of William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land with blurb quotes from Clark Ashton Smith AND HP Lovecraft. Whaaat! I found my first Corgi- The Twilight of the Serpent, two 80’s horrors- Blood Autumn and Red Dreams and a catastrophe novel, After the Rain.
Lastly, they had very few crime books which is insane considering most of the books in the room were from the 50’s 60’s era. I grabbed pretty much every one they had. A Gold Medal- Hell Bent for Danger, a Mike Shayne, A female spy book- The Chinese Factor and some sleezy looking crime book called The Promotor. Also, a novelization of the Rod Serling penned boxing movie, Requiem for a Heavyweight.
There was so much cool shit and it was so cheap. Our plan is to hit them up again as our first stop in July.
I’m not a big buyer of books online but I picked up this John Dickson Carr early story anthology compiled by Dan Napolitano. There is an introduction that is an 80 page book unto itself about the background. I don’t know about you guys, but I always read the book first and then the introductions. I don’t know why but I’ve always done it that way. Anyway, I’m looking forward to diving in.
That’s it for this month! Thanks for reading!
Book haul by Nick Anderson
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