Books you never fail to see in charity shops.

Er, I mean, send to live on happy book farms with all the other books no-one wants to buy.

assorted titles by Erma Bombeck, Dave Barry, Leo Buscaglia

I'm already doing that with the CD singles that radio stations and record companies dump on us.

Sigh.

In Irish charity shops you get a lot of religious books as well. Priests be dyin', no new priests be comin' along.

Make Your Baby Fall Asleep

Etc.

It did remind me of another definite addition to this thread though: Coelho's Alchemist.
I'm tempted to add Gibran's The Prophet as well, though I didn't see that there. For some reason I've seen a "gift edition" of it everywhere as of late.

The books I saw most copies of:
Amalie Skram - Hellemyrsfolket (three copies)
Frederick Forsyth - Day of the jackal (five copies, mostly Norwegian translations)

I fear that The Da Vinci Code may finally have reached saturation point. I've had a copy in the window for two days and no-one's bought it. If no-one buys it this weekend, I'll know I can stop asking people I see reading it to donate it when they've finished.

Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus, Our Gang, and Portnoy's Complaint are always big thrift store staples. Same with Shogun.

Has anyone here ever (a) noticed that a book was constantly in the charity shops and (b) then decided to buy it just to see what it was all about (knowing full well how difficult it would be to see off afterwards)?

It's weird about 'Good Behaviour'. I really like this book but never would have known what to expect from it in advance - has it been really badly marketed over the years or something?

Umm, The God of Small Things. Or anything else with stickers about winning prestigious literary prizes that people buy to put on their coffee table and make them look smart.

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.

http://www.tomwolfe.com/images/covers/ManinFull.jpg

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).

alexander mccall smith is eeeeverywhere, in great volume.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51THS318YHL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

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

http://www.swordfishingcentral.com/images/store/400182188292.jpg

That Hoggart's still in print, it seems:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0141191589.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

was at a p large tent book sale today where i saw a volunteer file in an entire box full of 'me talk pretty one day', prob 20 copies plus there were already a bunch around that section & im sure elsewhere

When I used to volunteer in a charity shop we once received a massive hardback copy of the Karma Sutra, we used to sit it facing with the cover forward (as opposed to just the spine, like a normal bookshelf) and laugh at people trying not to pick it up/skim it/acknowledge it.

We also used to get Mills & Boon constantly and they would sell so fast, which I just don't understand - there seems to be about three different plots between the entire series.

Ah, I've bored people with how I was in an apartment in Berlin with just 25 Mills and Boon books and War and Peace. I got through about 12 of the M&B before finally succumbing. They were all pretty much bored suburban housewife with either unpleasant/dead/no husband meets in what all things considered must be really quite unlikely circumstances an uncontrollably rich arab stud farmer/american pilot entrepreneur/russian oligarch/unbuttoned English toff/sensitive Italian playboy. This man will be generally unusually liberal, loving, wealthy, sexually accomplished, and see things in the woman others haven't and in certain cases won't mind that the woman has children in fact be surprisingly good with them. In return the woman will educate them a little in aspects of life that their rude, uncontrollably masculine/wealthy upbringing hasn't educated them in, idk like buying a can of beans from the supermarket or getting the right settings on the washing machine. They will feel enlightened by this. There will be a couple of hiccups of some sort, one where the woman can't believe that this man is interested in them, and another where it looks like it's not going to work out, but incredibly and against the odds he is and it does.

I believe that chick lit has posed quite a few problems for the traditional Mills & Boon template, which is known to be exacting. Some female readers, it turns out, like to be seen to be more emancipated that the traditional Mills & Boon story had allowed them to be, and maybe even show glimpses of feisty humour and cynical indifference towards males. This was quite difficult to embrace for M&B, and I think what happened was that they started producing a different series, for the more emancipated urban style of woman. I haven't read any of these, so I don't how they work, but I imagine that although the flavour and expressions might be slightly different, the plot probably isn't. Maybe the male is a bit more flawed, maybe the woman has more agency in it all, but i can't believe it doesn't end with an unusually desirable man being netted. Or maybe it does, idk. There's probably no more literary merit, although to be fair to M&B, there's clearly not a word out of place, which while it means the reader knows what they are getting, also means there are no flights of fancy. Reading 10 in a row is rather gruelling is all I'm saying.

To change tack slightly, just going past Oxfam this morning, wtf is London Dialogues by 'Tiresias'. I keep getting Cyril Connolly in my head, but that could just be 'London' + 'myth ref'.

The Light in the Piazza- I see it at flea markets, church thrift stores, library book sales, garage sales, on shelves at estate sales, Savers, Goodwill, Salvation Army and it has been at every library I have ever worked in, of course. Book has been haunting me for 22 years.

Checked that London Dialogues book. self, published, Some boring-ass '80s Hampstead types talking about the state of the country. Nothing to see here.

Things I didn't know until I started working in a library: Mills & Boon used to put out introductory science books for schools in the 60s and 70s.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51AlUTXu39L._SL500_AA300_.jpg http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51kf5N0mFtL._SL500_AA300_.jpg http://www.amazon.co.uk/Religion-science-Science-society-Habgood/dp/B0000CM8JZ/ref=sr_1_149?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310912344&sr=1-149

Never seen one in a charity shop, though.

Reccently every bookshop I've been in has a copy (often more than one) of this.
http://applecrossantiques.co.uk/images/JamesHerriotsYorkshire%20(260x300).jpg
It's actually a rather nice book.

the satanic verses

Couplehood

seeing tons of updike esp the rabbit series @ book sales this season, prob means ppl who owned them have recently died :(

Just walked by neighborhood streetseller and they had a more interesting selection than usual, such as The Sound and The Fury, then I, the Jury then a copy of Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun with a SEXY PHOTOE of Lee Remick on the cover.

Sanctuary with Requiem for a Nun

Also The Portable Oscar Wilde, Three by Flannery O’Connor, The Threepenny Opera

Little Fauss and Big Halsy, Bonjour Tristesse, Elmer Gantry, The Hound of the Baskervilles, DO U SEE?

Cloud Atlas has been fairly common in the charity shops recently.

Cloud Atlas mittelbraus its way thru every charity shop in the world

Still no sign of Morrissey's Autobiography. I was sure it would be a straight-to-charity release.

I see it quite a lot, up here (Glasgow). Never see his novel, though (probably because it never sold any copies to begin with).

the 50 shades of grey and twilight series are ubiquitous ime

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/03/23/09/32732A7A00000578-3505687-image-a-30_1458726175497.jpg

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

https://www.jhbooks.com/pictures/medium/152271.jpg

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

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

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51P%2BJhTELDL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

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