This is an amazingly good used book store in an improbable location in danger of going out of business due to the road construction outside their door (let alone the Detroit economy). It has the biggest selection of westerns, crime, horror, fantasy and sci fi books I've seen in a long time. They literarlly have forty feet of western titles. And quality fiction, true crime, comics, kids' books, etc. Anyone who lives anywhere near this store, should give it a try. Unlike many used bookstores, this one is pristine and neatly arranged. I found books here by James Reasoner, Bill Crider, Ed Gorman, L. Washburn, Sandra Scoppettone, and Richard Wheeler has his own twelve shelves. And I didn't even check under pseudonyms.
For those who live in Detroit, stop in. And if you have a western or fantasy you've been looking for, give me the title, they probably have it.
Second Story Used Books
17920 E 10 Mile Rd, Eastpointe, MI
(586) 773-6440
17920 E 10 Mile Rd, Eastpointe, MI
(586) 773-6440
P.S. The guy didn't ask me to do this. Nor did he give me free books. Do I need to disclose that too?
33 comments:
Forty feet of Westerns??? I'm thinking Road Trip!
I'm thinking he must have bought out a western book store. He has more westerns than anything else practically. You got a bed here anytime you need one.
No, you don't have to disclose anything. As usual, the dying press managed to misreport that story, which, as is increasingly the case, was poorly announced by the current admin.
DC area unsurprisingly has a similarly impressive Second Story Books. One is tempted to be a second story person when faced with such bounty.
HA! But I fear it will disappear with the economy here and the road construction. That stimulus money is going only to roads here. And every road.
SF, Patti..."sci-fi" is an unintentional evil loosed on the world by the late Forrest J Ackerman. Even if Bill or his editor at MYSTERY SCENE might've used it in a recent column there.
Politicians know where their graft potential lies, certainly.
The best book stores are the used book stores (and the small independents, which are becoming harder and harder to find). So, step aside Borders, B&N, Books-a-Million, and the rest of the corporate giants because most discerning readers (include me in that group) prefer the splendors of the neighborhood book stores.
Soon, the used stores might be the only survivors as bookstores. The few publishers (mostly small and collectors' presses) still binding books as opposed to POD items might well deal primarily with the secondhand stores. Whether those will be largely branded, say, Amazon or Ingram remains to be seen. Perhaps Booksense will prevail...but it looks grim for the the Big Boxes.
I wonder if the route they took 20 years ago, building bigger stores with CDs and DVDS and all of that contributed to their demise.
I do use my local Borders as well as the indies, the secondhand and online. I try to spread it around, hoping they all will survive.
Don't get your panties in a twist, Todd, there's nothing wrong with sci-fi. Neither is there anything wrong with scentifiction, SF or "science fiction". A rose by any other name and all that. I know Steve D. and Gary F. and many others get all huffy about it, but really, it's just a name. I don't go quite that far with skiffy or syfy, but that's just a personal leaning, like yours for SF.
It depends on your age, orientation to the literature and what was the accepted and popular term you got used to, that's all.
This book store sounds like a winner!
I WISH I lived nearby!
We have a fairly good (read: serious) second-hand shop, but crime is not their strong point, and obviously most of them are in Danish.
As a former Bordron, the remarkably stupid management of that chain from the sale to K-Mart onward has helped the decline...when they decided that, well, golly, we don't need to really have all the selection we've been maintaining, do we? Our stores are so nice and big, and have espresso bars, after all. B&N was a bit more nimble, and never did try to match Borders selection, when they both tried to open stores with only slightly less alacrity than Starbucks did (and B&N, of course, turned their espresso bars over to Starbucks), which overextended them and made them weak when the crunch started to come, and kept coming...and Amazon, of course, has been a challenge to them, as have, as they whine, Walmart and Target and such deeply discounting bestsellers. Particularly when people started to note, about a decade back, how uimpressive the Borders and B&N selections were starting to get (particularly when one went past the newsstands...where, as with book selection, the Big Boxes have beneiftted from independent newsstands falling by the wayside). I haven't been within shouting distance of a Books-A-Million since leaving the DC area (they don't seem to have gotten much north of there yet, if they ever do), but suspect they're having all the same problems except perhaps the over-extension of store-opening debts.
In short, the diversifying was a good idea...the cutting the inventory generally was a stupid one, though perhaps in part driven by necessity by the even more stupid one of trying to beat each other to death by opening stores next to each other every other week for several years. And, in Borders's case, trying Real Hard to keep the Wobblies from unionizing them, which 1) got the attention of a "real" union, UCFW (which soon gave up given the low wages and resultant turnover for Bordrons) and 2) marked the Borders management on The Street as Amateur Hour.
wv: rehop
Our huge huge used bookstore did go out of business. :(
Rick, I'll by that argument when you start saying "my-fi" for mystery fiction, "hi-fi" for historical fiction (since no one refers to high fidelity equipment that way hardly any more), "mi-fi" for contemporary mimetic fiction, "guy-fi" for "men's adventure fiction," "sigh-fi" for romantic fiction. It's cutesy and has never had a particularly good use, and the dismissive use of it mostly of folks who don't know what they're talking about hasn't helped its usefulness except as an insult...such people very much including the former Skiffy, now SyFyllis Channel folks.
What I really miss are brick-and-mortar music stores. There used to be a Tower Records nearby, and I could go and handle the CDs, see the contents on the back, get a feel for it, browse to discover things I like but didn't know had been released. Now it's iTunes, Amazon or their ilk, all on-line. No physical music stores in sight.
And what's wrong with "scientifiction" is that it's remarkably difficult to say (and "stef" for its abbreviation stf isn't much more helpful). But thanks for the concern for my posited gender-inappropriate undergarments. I appreciate that sort of condescension, which is comparable to that of most folks who use "sci-fi" earnestly.
Yikes. Don't make me pull a post about books!
Well, Rick, if Borders management has been bad, Tower's was miserable. (Tower Books was briefly a mildly-big-box chain, too.) But there are kiosks at the surviving B&N cd sections that will let one hear fragments...which is, alas, not too much more than what one can do online with CD Now or Amazon or their competitors online...particularly when one turns to the relatively restricted collections that B&Ns offer.
That's nice to see a used book store with that kind of inventory. Actually, I have had some trouble getting some titles recently, even here in L.A. - I may take you up on your offer, Patti.
I might be less twisted had "sci-fi" not been so integral as a term in the kind of hostility to serious work in the field that has led to much of that serious work being neglected, the authors of that serious work unrewarded (or, frequently, "discovered" after they are dead)--ambitious, innovative sf often has been rejected both by the audience for other sorts of serious fiction because it's "merely" "sci-fi" and rejected by the audience comfortable with that term because what those folks want is Only flashy fun. Art need not apply, unless it can be taken as unchallenging. 'Cause anything called "sci-fi" has just got to be bubblegum, no?
How very cool. Road trip sounds really good right now...
Migawd, maybe I'll buy a mess of them. I've got holes in my inventory. On the other hand, I'm always aware that used books are rejects. Shelves and shelves of rejects. They are not anyone's keepers.
Yes, but people can be awfully foolish about what they choose to rid themselves of...and then there are those things that had to be cashed in (I've been that hard up, not too often) and those that are passed along to the secondhand shops by the previous owners' survivors.
And then there are the remainders and such that secondhand dealers sometimes pick up...
Richard-These were not remaindered books. They had clearly been read.
Sounds like heaven!!
Todd, the same argument can be made about mystery fiction. Some is more legitimate these days, I guess because some authors have crossed over or made the NYBS list or whatever. Yet most of it is dismissed because it's genre fiction. There is a lot of pulp fiction out there which is dismissed out of hand, but some of it -- not a lot but some -- is solid mystery fiction. The literature snobs won't like anything, unless perhaps it carries some special label THEY made up. The term "literature" scares off just as many readers as any other.
I don't like any labels, really, but they are necessary to differentiate between one thing and another. I've heard fans of romance fiction don't like that name for it, saying it's dismissed as all bodice-ripper stuff.
As for the opening underwear comment, it was just to get your attention. No animosity was intended.
It may - or may not - be worth noting that when I started reading the stuff in the 1950s, "sci-fi" was the accepted name, in speech and writing, unless it was spoken or written in full as "science fiction".
Me too, Richard. Oh, brave new world.
That is one of the few bookstores in my regular rotation and the do always seem to have a hard to find title.
Independent bookstores sure have taken a hit from the big guys and from the economy. I love used bookstores: each book carries with it the story and he story of the person who brought it in.
Actually, Richard, among the people who took sf seriously, aside from Forrest J. Ackerman who coined the term (and whose career was always tied up with the least serious sort of sf as much as anything else), "sci-fi" has Never been accepted as a preferred or even usually a non-pejorative term.
Yes, there will probably always be idiots who think that no serious work can be written that isn't in contemporary mimetic fiction...or contemporary mimetic and historical fiction...or, perhaps most ludicrously, that any sf or mystery or what-have-you by such writers as Kurt Vonnegut or Marge Piercy or Margaret Atwood or Richard Brautigan is Inherently Good and Therefore Not sf or mystery, etc., or the only good examples of those modes. Or along with whatever else might be fashionable at the moment, as Philip Dick has been fashionable since about the time that he died. Hence my apparent crotchet when people speak of "genre and literary fiction" as if these were mutually exclusive or even particularly useful or descriptive terms. No fiction escapes genre, and all fiction is literary, of course, as I tend to mention; that this is a meaningful dichotomy is a perniciously ignorant mindset that has done more to retard the flourishing of good work all around than any other factor (I'd suggest it's helped to reduce the mass audience for serious fiction of all descriptions, as we were mourning earlier in the month, much more than television or other media could by themselves)--not least by encouraging the fragmentation of the audience for serious fiction, and thus the neglect of good writers in various modes (not all of them, but entirely too many of them).
No need to use rhetorical gimmicks to compell my attention, Rick...this (as I think is clear by now) is an important matter to me. And labels are useful in various ways...the problems come in when they are used as traps, or misconstrued and that miscontruction enforced.
Wow! Thanks for the kind words about our bookstore! We greatly appreciate the exposure you have given us on your blog.
I found out about this blog from a customer who just left here with a stack of books. He told me that he read about our store on this blog and gave me the web address so that I could read it for myself.
What a pleasant surprise!
The construction during the fall is something that 10 Mile Rd. has been much overdue for. The work that they did during November was just to get the road through the Winter time. While the construction workers are gone for the moment, they will be back in the Spring to resurface the entire stretch of 10 Mile from Kelly Rd. to Gratiot Ave. I suspect this project will last several months.
I'd like to thank those customers who braved the construction to visit our store during that difficult time and thank them in advance for their continuing visits during the upcoming construction season!
We have been in business in this neighborhood for 32 years now! We realize the importance that a business like this has on its surroundings and I can assure you that we will take whatever steps are necessary to make sure that we survive the upcoming road construction project, as well as the Detroit economy. (Who needs a paycheck anyway when you have a great job like this! ;-D )
As for our Forty feet of Westerns, multiple isles of Sci-Fi, Action/Adventure, Mysteries, Romance, General Fiction, History, etc., I can assure you that our inventory has been built up from several decades of interacting with book lovers of all kinds. We purchase much of our inventory and take it in as trade toward other books from customers who visit us each and every day as well as from people who just need a little extra cash in their pocket or need to make room for their latest reading treasures, as well as from numerous other sources!
Once again, I'd like to thank you pattinase (abbott) for your kind words. Next time your in the store, identify yourself to us so that we can thank you personally. If I can't give you a free book for mentioning us, then perhaps you'll at least take a 15% off coupon that will be good for the entire month of May when the construction workers return!
In fact, for all the readers of this blog, print out a copy of this reply and you'll receive 15% off your entire next purchase too!
Doug & Marshall
Well, I am so glad if I sent anyone in there. My blog partly exists to promote local businesses, books and especially independent bookstores like yours.
I hope you thrive in your location. In fact, I've stopped in since I wrote that entry with my daughter (who is a writer--Megan Abbott) and we picked up loads of great books.
I will try to mention it now and again. If you notice, Richard Wheeler was on here and thrilled to find himself so well represented on your shelves.
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