That, the chance to happen upon something you didn't know you wanted, is what adds to the charm of second-hand bookshops.
A few weeks ago I picked up Umberto Eco's Misreadings in the second-hand section of our local bookshop. It's a collection of short stories from the mid twentieth century translated in English in the nineties. I grabbed it for a closer look because the author was known to me (The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum), and because the back of the book introduced one of the stories therein as a pastiche of Nabokov's Lolita, wherein a certain Umberto Umberto (heh) pines for an elderly lady referred to as 'Granita' (incidentally, 'Nonita' in the Italian original).
That story was a delight to read and totally worth it.¹
I also would never have found, never mind purchased that book online. My biggest source of books is a yearly book-fair (in Deventer) where I will gladly spend hours trawling through banana boxes for cheap paperbacks and random chance finds. (Except this year due to bloody you-know-what.) So hurray for the serendipity of second-hand bookshops!
I think this very much depends on where you are. In england, culture has always been a dirty word, so second hand bookshops have the kind of books english people read, which are dismal. In germany, I've had much better luck - packed shelves of reclam-edition books, for instance.
A few weeks ago I picked up Umberto Eco's Misreadings in the second-hand section of our local bookshop. It's a collection of short stories from the mid twentieth century translated in English in the nineties. I grabbed it for a closer look because the author was known to me (The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum), and because the back of the book introduced one of the stories therein as a pastiche of Nabokov's Lolita, wherein a certain Umberto Umberto (heh) pines for an elderly lady referred to as 'Granita' (incidentally, 'Nonita' in the Italian original).
That story was a delight to read and totally worth it.¹
I also would never have found, never mind purchased that book online. My biggest source of books is a yearly book-fair (in Deventer) where I will gladly spend hours trawling through banana boxes for cheap paperbacks and random chance finds. (Except this year due to bloody you-know-what.) So hurray for the serendipity of second-hand bookshops!
1: Anyone who has read and enjoyed Lolita ought to read this short Umberto Eco story: https://thefloatinglibrary.com/2008/08/24/granita/