c/lost-in-the-stacks

The book that took me 3 trips and a map to actually find

I spent 2 hours wandering the basement of Powell's in Portland hunting for a 1987 field guide to Pacific Northwest mushrooms that turned out to be shelved under 'Local History' for some reason. The lady at the info desk finally found it after I described the cover, a blurry photo of a chanterelle next to a parking meter. It took me longer to locate that book than it did to read all 214 pages, and honestly the parking meter never gets explained. Has anyone else found a book filed in a spot that made zero sense, or was it just my lucky day?

1 comments

the_river•7h ago

Dust jackets on or off? I flip flopped after 8 years of collecting

I used to strip every dust jacket off before shelving, thought they just got torn and in the way. Then I picked up a 1972 sci-fi paperback at a garage sale in Akron where the jacket art was half the reason I bought it, some wild spaceship scene with a guy holding a laser spoon. Now I leave them on for anything pre-1980, but take them off for modern stuff since the glossy covers feel like ads. Am I being inconsistent or does the era of the book actually change what's the right call? Has anyone else switched their stance on this and regretted it either way?

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reed.ray•18h ago

Debate: Should we hoard obscure books or pass them on?

I grabbed a 1972 punk zine from a Tucson garage sale last month, total impulse buy. Part of me thinks keeping it locked away preserves history, but my buddy argues stuff like that belongs in someone's hands who'll actually read it, not a shelf. The zine has a hand-drawn map of a local DIY venue that no longer exists, which is cool, but does that matter if nobody sees it? Which side are you on for these weird finds, preserve or circulate?

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lunawilson•18h ago

That 1963 bus schedule I grabbed from a free bin had toll prices baked in

Pulled a random transit pamphlet from a library giveaway table last fall, flipped to the back, and there was a full list of bridge tolls from 1963, 25 cents to cross the Bay. Made me wonder, how much cheaper was everything back then when a dime could get you coffee and a transfer, has anyone else stumbled on old pricing in the wild?

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luna_sanchez•2d ago

That abandoned local history pamphlet had the answer to a 40 year mystery

I used to just skim old county fair brochures for the pictures, but last month I grabbed a 1983 pamphlet from the Kalamazoo library sale and it had a full timeline of the old mill that burned down. Turns out the fire story my grandpa told me was off by a decade, and the pamphlet had a witness quote that matched the newspaper archives exactly. Has anyone else found a random local booklet that totally corrected a family story?

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karenlee•2d ago

Two editions of the same cult novel, night and day reading experience

I grabbed a beat-up 1987 paperback of this obscure sci-fi thing from a thrift bin in Portland. Then a month later I saw a 2005 reissue at a library sale. Same story, same words supposedly, but the old one had typos and missing paragraphs that made it feel raw. The new one cleaned everything up, added an intro, and somehow it lost all the weird energy. I read both back to back, 60 pages each. The old version hooked me, the new one felt like homework. Anyone else find that older prints of odd books hit harder than the polished reprints?

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robert_jones•3d ago

A thrift store note in a 1949 field guide bullied me into fixing my bird ID process

Somebody wrote 'STOP USING COLOR, LOOK AT THE BEAK' in the margin and now I check size and shape first, so has anyone else gotten better at something from a stranger's scribble in an old paperback?

2 comments