I've been to a number of bookstores in my area (I don't have a car so it's pretty much whenever someone wants to stop by one for an hour or so) and, while each of them had a philosophy section, each an entire bookcase even, the selection was very poor. Halfprice Books probably had the best, with some twentieth-century classics, a few on Plato and Aristotle, and even Aquinas's Treatise on Law, if I remember correctly. Even that one was crowded out by New Agey nonsense, shelves and shelves of material on the "paranormal" and "the unexplained." I prefer to think the reason these crowd bookstores is because everyone else is holding onto the really good stuff.

I would recommend second hand bookshops. I find you are more likely to get more interesting works, especially if you are like me and most interested in cassics.

iwpoe wrote:

Everybody can come to my house. My library is ridiculous. I get everything on Amazon.

I'm guessing your library is also living proof of the declining taste of university libraries all across the English speaking world?

(Going by the check-out slips and book-plates it looks as if a large portion of Cambridge has crash-landed in my living room.)
 

DanielCC wrote:

iwpoe wrote:

Everybody can come to my house. My library is ridiculous. I get everything on Amazon.

I'm guessing your library is also living proof of the declining taste of university libraries all across the English speaking world?

(Going by the check-out slips and book-plates it looks as if a large portion of Cambridge has crash-landed in my living room.)
 

Well, I get a fair amount of ex-library content, but limited to books that are at least 25 or 30 years old. I think they should hold on to as many things as they can, particularly when they're not available digitally, but I also understand that many university libraries don't have indefinite archive space. I've been very lucky to live right next to the University of Tennessee, whose library is actually excellent, but I'm well aware that the libraries of many even very nice universities like Vanderbilt in my state are quite small. They have to make room for expensive bullshit luxurious dormitories to keep that tuition money coming in, so it's hard for me to demand that the library simply build a new wing to accommodate old books.

I've only used them a couple of times for some very expensive items like Sommer's An Invitation to Formal Reasoning, but otherwise the price differential between Amazon and elsewhere is usually so small as to be insignificant. Plus I have Amazon Prime, so I often get a lot of free shipping even on used items.

Last edited by iwpoe (7/26/2015 7:16 pm)