Thriftin'....

I haven't mentioned that my wife and I are thrift store addicts. We generally go at least once a week. I check out books, my wife is into various vintage items [btw, in case you don't know, the rule is that if something is less than a hundred years old, it's vintage. Antiques have to be at least 100 years old. No joke, I think you can get in trouble if you have an ad for antiques that aren't actually old enough to be considered such.]

Anyway, over the years it's funny to see what pops up over and over in thrift store book sections, there are titles and authors that are almost always there, and you can definitely tell when a popular title is beginning to wane based on when it makes its debut at Salvation Army, Goodwill, etc. I see a lot of Dan Brown these days, and the occasional Harry Potter book.

Stephen King: Thrift store mainstay, usually his titles from the Nineties and later. His appearance certainly doesn't mean a decline in popularity, I think in his case it means the opposite, that the average household that has books to donate probably has at least one King title. I don't know if I've ever been to a thrift store that didn't have at least one King book. The earlier King is not as prevalent, but can still be found.

Garrison Keilor: Almost as prevalent as King, although for different reasons.
I think people get his books as gifts. Also, by now it's a cycle where people buy his books from thrift stores and then donate them later. I actually like his books, usually. I guess they don't lend themselves to long-term reading, and thus take up residence in the donation pile. Maybe NPR-demographic households are more likely to donate to thrift stores. Someone should do a study.

Rush Limbaugh: Sort of the book equivalent of a pet rock [and about as intelligent], his books are almost always there too. I guess it's hard to get excited about Nineties-era conservative talking points these days. Look out Anne Coulter, I've been seeing your books quite a bit over the past year, which may mean your time is up, probably for the same reason--no one cares about ranting from decades past. Wouldn't be surprised to see Glenn Beck here in a few years. I guess anything topical is doomed for the thrift store, along with copies of FUTURE SHOCK and THE POPULATION BOMB, and the Nineties books about how the Dow was going to hit 30,000.

Tom Clancy: Same as King, I guess. Probably when old military guys [or those who pretended to be such] take off for the Big Casino, their survivors dump a ton of these off onto the thrift stores.

When I lived in the Bay Area I'd find much better books at the thrifts. Those stores were more like going to a library or regular bookstore as far as the variety of titles available. But the old standbys like the ones on this list were always there too.

Generally, the better finds I have where I'm at now [city that is much more working/lower class, lower education level on average] are non-fiction, the fiction all tends to be the same stuff.