Books to look out for at a garage sale
Most, if not all, good garage sales usually have books for sale, often at absolute rock-bottom prices. If you like a good read, going around the garage sales in your area can often be more rewarding than going around the bookshops – it’s certainly cheaper!
You never quite know what you’re going to find at a garage sale when it comes to books. An old gentleman of this writer’s acquaintance once managed to find a set of first-edition Charles Dickens novels at a tag sale – they might have looked old and “slightly foxed” as the book collectors call it, but they were worth much less than the 10c each that this old man paid for them. You may not be so lucky, but you can easily find some great deals.
One useful tip when combing through the books on offer at a garage sale is not to be put off by a dog-eared cover or even a missing cover. As long as the book itself is intact, it’s worth getting. Another tip is not to be afraid of just buying one of those “matched identical collections of classic titles that make your library look really impressive.” You don’t have to buy the lot if you see one of these collections at a garage sale – just pick the titles you want to buy.
Here are a few types of books that are always worth looking out for at garage sales:
Classic children’s books. They may not have glittery covers with computer graphics and holograms on the front, but the old stories are just as appealing today as they were yesterday. Anything by Enid Blyton is a must-have – this author is one of the most translated in the world and is enjoying something of a renaissance after falling out of favour during the 1980s and 1990s. The “Famous Five” and “Secret Seven” titles are evergreens. Other authors to look out for are Beatrix Potter, Dr Seuss, C.S. Lewis and Arthur Ransome. The old Golden Books and any early reading titles are also a good buy.
School text type books. Titles like To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye are widely studied in schools, as is anything by Shakespeare. If you need to buy texts for an English class, then garage sales are often a good place to get started. As an added bonus, you often get other people’s highlights and marginal notes as a free “study guide”.
Paperback romances. Keen readers often subscribe to three-books-a-month deals, read the books once or twice and then keep the titles sitting around for ages before putting them out for the garage sale. If you’re a keen reader who doesn’t subscribe to these deals, garage sales are great ways to pick up your favourite reads cheaply.
Classic adult’s titles. Titles by the Queens of Crime (Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sawyers and Ngaio Marsh) as well as some of their lesser known contemporaries are often found at garage sales.
Cookbooks and other DIY manuals. Good advice never goes out of date. In really old gardening manuals, you may have to ignore advice about giving garden pests a good blast of DDT (this writer has seen one). The same goes with old cookbooks that list lard or suet as ingredients: use oil instead.
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