Books you never fail to see in charity shops.

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).

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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

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

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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