Bargains and book collections. The bargains can now be found on e-Bay. Sometimes someone will sell an old book not realizing that it's rare. But that doesn't happen too often since it's getting easier and easier to do the research, but some people don't like to do their homework.
Unfortunately, what has disappeared are the book towns. For example, Fourth Avenue used to be New York City's book town. There was row after row of book dealers with shelves out on the sidewalk. Those have disappeared from most places. I guess the world's biggest is now in Tokyo. There used to be more old book shops and used book shops in the world, but they have disappeared - often replaced by internet book shops. Electronic book dealers refer to those other shops as brick and mortar. They will ask, "Do you have a brick and mortar shop or an internet shop?"
As far as bargain book stores, in Tokyo publishers had a real lock on discount books. The publisher said if you are going to sell discount books I won't supply you with our books, so of course every one needed the big publishers so they didn't do it and then this Half came along and turn the world the upside down.
It's a real need to feel connected by looking at the book on the shelf. But now, the bargains can now be found on e-Bay. Sometimes someone will sell an old book not realizing that it's rare. But that doesn't happen too often since it's getting easier and easier to do the research, but some people don't like to do their homework.
When we talk about early Superman comic books and things like that we are talking hundreds of dollars and more - up to a $1000 for some of those rare comic books. Maybe even more, because the value is always changing and there doesn't seem to be a limit. I recently looked at some historic cartoon comic books and sure enough they were asking $100, $200, even $300 for the first copy because comic books like book jackets are very fragile throw away items right. Kids bought them in the old days, passed them onto their friends until they were ripped to shreds and then they threw them away so not very many survived.
Book collectors and comic book collectors are two different animals I would say. There is something different about comic books.
Readers Digest Books and detective book clubs, all those things - even with the beautiful bindings - are not considered collectable. Collectable is usually invariably something that was not made to be collected
