Market Wonders
 

Yesterday I went to Old Spittlefield Market. As the name suggests, in our Orwellian world, it is rather contemporary.

Regardless, I found a small book stall selling what appears to be brand new books for half the price. As a case in point, I bought this book, albeit with the hardback cover image (R.R.P. £8.99) for £4.

This stall has a number of little treasures and I was wondering, where do you go for the best bargins?

Re: Market Wonders
 

Stolen?

Re: Market Wonders
 

Did you create this thread to ask us where we get bargains from or to show us all you have bought a political book by Chomsky?

Re: Market Wonders
 

I just want to be clear so I don't go offtopic ya know

Re: Market Wonders
 

I'd hardly regarding reading Chomsky as showing off, or whatever you are implying. It's all relatively straight forward.

That is the kind of book I read. One might suspct it is my interest in such topics that made me decide to study politics. But, ya know... whatever!

If I was going to 'show off' I would have bought War and Peace for £3, made this thread and never read it. I did not do this.

The point was I nearly bought this book a few weeks ago and then I saw it for considerably less in a market. I wish to extend this experiance to many other aspects of my shopping 'life'.

Not everyone is desperate to be :alpha:

Re: Market Wonders
 

I've just bought ALL of the Flashman books

mostly because i'm slightly addicted to getting amazon packages at work but also because he's cool and r0x0rs

(oh and they woz cheap too - god bless deregulation of the book market!)

Re: Market Wonders
 

if you bought it with the hardback cover image i would suggest that it is probably a surplus book club edition - therefore £4 is about the right price for it tbh

Re: Market Wonders
 

Could you expand on that? I don't really understnad what you mean.

Re: Market Wonders
 

there are a lot of book clubs in this country, you know, the kind where you see their advert magazines fall out of your magazine and they advertise 5 books for 99p each!!! and other such offers. Quite often they have thier own editionspublished seperately from the main HB/PB editions of a book. They used to be characterised by being 3/4 sized HB books with different cover art, quite often with the publisher listed as BCA (book club of america iirc). If you bought a PB with the cover art from teh HB, rather than the correct cover art or whatever, i would suggest that its a book club edition, which are always significantly cheaper than the 'true' editions - although to the casual observer there is no difference.

EDIT: although even in the book clubs nowadays there is growing use of just the original PB editions, as apparently its just cheaper now

Re: Market Wonders
 

I see. It's possible. I should mention the copy I bought had the same cover as the one I saw in Waterstones bed weeks ago.

Re: Market Wonders
 

Spittlefields is possibly the least touristy market in london now, more used by londoners than sightseers, i guess it is more traditional, but stalls with books are becomming more common, you can get paperback pulp fiction 3 for £5 in my local market, they do tend towards light reading, but sometimes there are things that are not something the average reader uses for the commute .
It is ex-bookclub, overprints, bad prints, bad cutting etc, but they are still readable.

Library sell offs are still probably the best place though.

Re: Market Wonders
 

I got a second hand Steven King book from Hanley market for £2, read it, and returned it. The nice lady gives you half the price back, so I got Life of Pi (priced at 50p & in excellent condition!) and a shiny 50 pence piece for Wastelands.

The savings provide some compensation for being brought up close to the event horizon of Stoke-on-Trent.

Markets & charity shops are good. I also use eBay/GreenMetropolis for books and eBay/CeX for DVDs. I buy most of my stuff second hand, and often trade it in once I'm done with it. It's cheap.

I'm also waiting for download services to become cheaper.