Bookshop Memories — Half Price Books, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Half Price Books — Oklahoma City, OK
This Texas chain was known to me, but I had never lived in a city to have one. I must have first visited one of these clean, bright stores with the big red signs in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area at some point when I lived in Lubbock and got to the big city for a visit. I was thrilled when HPB announced they would open their first store in Oklahoma City. I don’t think the bookshop owners felt that way, though. This first store was (and still is, I assume), at 63rd and May Ave.
Half Price Books is a very different kind of bookshop. It is mostly used books, but they also carry a sizeable percentage of remainders of otherwise new books from publishers. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, remainders are the printing over-runs, the returns, and the unsold stock publishers always have. Publishing is a highly speculative industry, and publishers often end up with too many books they need to deal with. Bibliophiles dream of having a high-quality, high-turnover shop nearby. They may not have the particular book you need, but they’ll often have something of interest at a decent price. Half Price Books is not the stop to make when looking for a missing link in your collection, though collectible books do show up there.
