…allow me to suggest Colorado Springs.  We were there recently on vacation.  I knew there were some good used bookstores in town, having visited some on previous trips.  So I planned time and money to be able to visit a few.  Over three days, I hit four.  Below are some of the treasures I found.

The first place I hit was Hooked on Books.  They have two locations.  The first is where I picked up the paperbacks.  They had an extensive selection, and there were some titles I left behind.  I had hoped to go back, because I forgot to look for some titles/authors.  Sadly, that have to be done on another trip.

As you can seen from the photos, they had a lot of pulp and pulp related titles for sale. I’ve got copies of about half of these already, but there are certain titles and authors I buy when I see them so I can pass them on to friends or upgrade my copies. Some of these are for a friend.

I was somewhat pressed for time, and I’m sure I missed some things.  They had some collectable books, but the ones I saw weren’t titles I was interested in.

That wasn’t the case for their downtown location.  The paperback selection was pretty thin, but the collectible hardcovers, that was a different story.  As you can see from the photo on the left, I scored big.  The A. Merritt omnibus alone was worth the trip.

The hardcovers were reasonably priced, but that doesn’t mean I could grab all I wanted.  Sadly, the Manly Wade Wellman novels were out of my price range.  They weren’t John the Balladeer titles, or I would have bit the bullet and gone on a peanut butter diet for the rest of the summer.  The Wellman titles were some early science fiction novels that Night Shade reprinted in the early 00’s that I already have.  It would have been nice to have the earlier editions, but not at those prices.  They were reasonable prices for the books.  They were in great condition, but they wouldn’t have been a wise purchase for me.  The same goes for some other anthologies they had.  Nice, but I already had copies of all the stories in other books.

The last time I was through Colorado Springs, I stopped a The Bookman.  Their selection was excellent.  They’ve moved to a different location, so I had to do a little hunting.  For some reason Google didn’t show them the first time I did a search.  But I found them.  I also found a John the Balladeer paperback, which I grabbed immediately.  What I didn’t find was Echoes of Valor III, which I’m looking for on a friend’s behalf.

After my post on Charles Sheffield a few weeks ago, I decided to reread some of the McAndrew stories.  That’s when I discovered those stories are no longer available electronically.  I’m not sure where my copy of The Compleat McAndrew is other than behind a couple of rows of books, so I thought I’d pick up a reading copy.  That was the one The Bookman was missing.  Otherwise they had nearly a complete set of Sheffield’s novels.

I liked The Bookman best.  They had a buy 3, get the 4th free sale going on.  There were plenty of other books I would have liked to take but money and my wife’s patience with my book buying were both running thin.

The last place I visited, the evening before we left, was called 2 Buck Books.  I’m glad I did.

The selection was good, especially since this store didn’t have as extensive a selection of fantasy and science fiction as the other stores did.  You can see I got some good titles.

But the jackpot is what you see on the right.  Yes, those are John D. MacDonald novels (and one James A. Moore that I’d never seen before).  And yes, eat your heart out, they were two bucks apiece. I bought every MacDonald they had except the Travis McGee titles.  I’ve already got a full set of those.  The only ones of these I already have are The Crossroads and Deadly Welcome. I thought I had Janice Gantry, but if I do, I’ve mis-shelved it.

This was a successful secondhand bookstore crawl.  I ended up with a lot more than I expected, even if I didn’t find everything I was looking for.  Some of these books are duplicates, and some are for friends, but I still have a lot of things to read.  I’m going to have to be a good boy for a while and not buy any more books until I get some of these read.

Now, to figure out where I’m going to put them….