Books you never fail to see in charity shops.

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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That Hoggart's still in print, it seems:

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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.
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Never seen one in a charity shop, though.

Reccently every bookshop I've been in has a copy (often more than one) of this.
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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).