Metro Pulse/Cover/Summer Reading

Comment
on this story

Pre-Owned Books

Even in this age of mega-bookstores, the local used books store holds an appeal all its own.

by Matthew T. Everett

When I was a kid, one of my favorite Saturday afternoon excursions was a trip to the Book Rack, a small used book store in north Knoxville. The Book Rack specialized in broken-spine potboiler paperbacks, from pulp mysteries and bodice-ripper romances to vintage science-fiction and horror, with lurid cover illustrations and blurbs about "Shocking secrets!" and "Unspeakable mayhem!" A far cry from the tame fantasy worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, to be sure; I had a sense, even as an 10-year-old, that the store's clerks were somehow leading me into a strange black market underworld of forbidden knowledge.

The world of used books has taken many turns in the intervening years, but in many ways it's still the same. There are small stores all over town—like the Book Exchange on Cedar Lane, Book Traders on Clinton Highway, and Irene's Used Book Store on Central Avenue Pike—that still specialize in used paperbacks. What the Dickens! Bookseller on Kingston Pike provides a large selection of classic and contemporary books, and there are always plenty of other sources for cheap paperbacks and collectible books—antique stores, garage sales, campus book stores.

But Knoxville's best used book stores have grown up; they no longer specialize in sensational fantasies, and they even operate more like big business than like underground secret societies. But the same mystery that shrouded my first encounters with Edgar Rice Burroughs' series of novels about John Carter, the warlord of Mars, or H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulu mythology, can be found among the unpredictable stacks of local used book stores that now stand out from the two-for-one trade stores of my childhood.

Book Eddy, stuck in a decrepit old strip mall on Chapman Highway on the way out of town, is decidedly low-key in its marketing approach, and maintains the mystery of the Book Rack, albeit with even more esoteric tomes of hidden knowledge—like the 1980 Sourcebook on the Production of Electricity from Geothermal Energy. There's an underlying sense of order here—books are arranged in particular categories, but they're also stacked throughout the store, waiting to be shelved. There are expensive art books that cost several hundred dollars, rare books, collectibles, and first editions. Here's a random sample of the 100,000 books available at Book Eddy on a recent visit: a 1906 edition of the plays of Euripedes; a textbook titled Problems of Extra-Galactic Research; a $50 edition of The Memoirs of Pancho Villa; and a 1972 Greeneville city directory. There's a collection of Life magazines, classic underground pulp novels, the war journals of Gen. George Washington, medical textbooks, and a four-volume history of Minnesota, along with plenty of classic novels and non-fiction.

"People out there need these books," explains Becky Bolding, co-owner, along with John Coleman, of Book Eddy. "We're really selective about what we put on our shelves. We try to put out books that are still in demand. We want good quality books, scholarly books or things that are out-of-print, harder to find things. We don't have bestsellers, diet books, self-help books, romances."

But even this most old-fashioned of book stores has stepped into the digital age—9,000 of its books are available online through www.abebooks.com. And, despite its somewhat contrarian principles, Bolding and Coleman offer bargain books on a rack outside and a small selection of paperback bestsellers. "We don't want to be a snobby store," Bolding says. "We want to be the exception, but we also want to be accessible."

While McKay's Used Books and CDs in West Knoxville doesn't have the same mystery that Book Eddy has—paperback bestsellers are the most popular section of the store—McKay's is still a singular story among local used book stores, with 1 million books coming in every year. Anne Jacobson and her ex-husband founded the store in 1985 after building a similar, smaller business in North Carolina, and it's since become a used book superstore unlike any other. "There aren't any other stores like it," Jacobson says, speaking from the second McKay's store in Chattanooga. "My ex-husband and I pretty much made this up."

The growth of the store has been gradual—it's now in its third, and largest, location, just past Western Plaza on Kingston Pike—and is directly linked to the business lessons that Jacobson learned along the way. "Supply and demand is the secret," she says. "At first we were doing two-for-one trades, and then we realized that supply and demand is the secret. Our thing is to sell pretty quick. We just look at what goes in and comes out. If something's rare, it prices higher."

Even though its selection is broader than Book Eddy's, McKay's is nearly twice the size of the South Knoxville store and has substantial unmined gems of its own. Amid the Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel books are top-rate literary novels, children's books, an non-fiction. The classics are well-represented, as are contemporary writers, and more substantial bestsellers like Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes are available.

And underneath all the familiar stuff, there's always something unexpected, like Ranters & Crowd Pleasers, a collection of Greil Marcus's musings on punk rock, or The Best American Short Stories: 1994. You can probably find those at Borders or Barnes & Noble, but that's not why you go there. It is why you go to used book stores.