Books you never fail to see in charity shops.

books clogging up shelfspace in the near future :
lord of the rings
atkins diet
da vinci code

I guess most of the books in s/h shops have orig. been given as gifts, a la "Hey, this character reminds a bit me of X, I'll give it to them for their birthday", hence all the Br. Jones, Nick Hornby & their imitators. 20 or so years ago, these type of shops were full of Kingsley Amis etc for much the same reason I imagine.

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His other ones even more so, I think because they're worse so people just want to get rid of them out of their houses. Plus we had three copies in one week of a book that's being described in its blurb as the thinking person's DVC. One man brought it into the shop, put it on the counter and said "you can have this, it's RUBBISH!"

And good god, you could drown in Robert Jordans.

Less so nowadays, but hardbacks of The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade used to haunt every second-hand shop I'd go into, especially the 25p random table. Also, The Romany Rye and/or Lavengro by George Borrow.
In poetry sections, creaky editions of Sir Walter Scott's poems.
Some form of Dennis Wheatley, usu The Devil Rides Out, often a red hardback (see also: editions of Wheatley as ornamental books-by-the-yard in pubs).

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Lavrengo! I picked this up recently from a second-hand bookshop but aborted reading after about a page. No particular reason. I just couldn't be arsed, and it clearly wasn't going to be another The Bible in Spain.

Macaulay's History of England, usually in some uninvitingly cumbersome format.

Those red hardback Dennis Wheatley books were part of a Reader's Digest set, I think every house in the UK/Ireland had them in the '80's.

Probably a correlation with other books that appear on tthis list a RD offers.

Yes, suspect that RD are responsible for much of this. Looking at charity shop bookshelf of hardbacks from a distance, getting closer and realising they're all Readers Digest Condensed Books is always a gloomy experience.

Macaulay's History of England? You go to some classy charity shops.

"Breakfast at Tiffanys by Truman Capote - the small green edition that came free with some womens magazine"
I had this and never realised before, huh.

Classics of 19th-Century literature in TV/movie tie-in editions.

For the past couple of years: A Night Without Armor, poems by the briefly popular singer Jewel. Her moment of fame is so over.

tom wolfe's a man in full has been at every book sale ive ever been to

From Amazon.com:

A Night Without Armor, hardcover -- 662 used & new from $0.01

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816 Used & new from £0.01

"Less so nowadays, but hardbacks of The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade used to haunt every second-hand shop I'd go into, especially the 25p random table. Also, The Romany Rye and/or Lavengro by George Borrow.
In poetry sections, creaky editions of Sir Walter Scott's poems."

Ingoldsby Legends!

Agatha Christie's entire collection, always.

Also old Penguin versions of A Passage to India and Pride and Prejudice.

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the shipping news

saw that displayed prominently in a gallery bookshop yesterday for some reason

Karel Čapek - War With the Newts (There's a Norwegian bookclub edition from the 70s that's /everywhere/. Ditto their edition of One Day in the Life Of Ivan Mumblevich)

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alexander mccall smith is eeeeverywhere, in great volume.

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i had at least two copies of that by accident

why are there so many copies of it floating around? was it massively popular amongst penguin-reading autodidacts?

I guess? I suppose it was a bestseller in the day - mass culture dissolving working class tradition was a popular angst theme I imagine; plus it was probably on a lot of humanities and social science introductory reading lists. But i dunno, its multi-copy presence in every second hand shop in Britain is impressive. Maybe I should read it (it looks dull tho)

i remember it being p smart and honest; a lot of it is more in the way of a disguised memoir. but i never finished the second half, the mass culture half, or even got more than a few pages into it.

its one of the foundational texts of 20th century brit cultural studies along w/ culture and society by raymond williams, and i think it was also read widely outside academia, back in the day

its a pretty common bk - esp that edition - but i don't see it in that many charity shops in glasgow (when compared to hornby, potter etc etc)

http://books.google.com/books?id=SmXHxPavANkC&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&l=220

Kate Morton, The House At Riverton - has the same spine as another book I'd been looking for, every charity shop has piles of the things and none of whatever it was I was after

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The version of Running Dog with the awesome/trashy thriller cover

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And "Offshore" (although obvs it is vv good)

That Delillo cover is like the canine answer version to Alan Coren's Golfing For Cats

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Yikes! My thoughts went "Awww, a cat playing golf... cool sweater... er, swastika"

it's a collection of coren's never very funny columns in punch magazine, so named bcz he -- amusingly! -- noted that the topselling books of the time were abt either cats or golf or hitler, so proposed a title that somehow combined them all

This being Oregon, I never fail to see multiple copies of Krakauer's Into the Wild. Sometimes there will be a round dozen of them shelved side-by-side. They are more prevalent even than Wild, Cheryl Strayed, which rarely shows up in herds greater than five at once.

I still see some of the Bridget Jones series of novels, but they are fading away to obscurity after a period of ubiquity. Tom Clancy is finally sinking into the sunset, too.

Just dropped off a bunch of books (and some CDs) at Housing Works. Wondering whether I am going to that freeing feeling or an emotional hangover/backlash or both and in what order or in what intensity.

The past four or five years I've noticed that Nicholas Sparks' novels occupy at least two feet of shelf space in all the charity bookshops I frequent.

Entire shelves for James Patterson

entire warehouses filled with gently used Elegance of the Hedgehog trade paperbacks

This must be the #1 easiest to find book in my town.

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Around here the charity shops overflow with Alexander McCall Smith titles.