Used Book Finds

My husband I and hit Better World Books yesterday. Have you heard of it? They take donated books and resell them, but that's really all I knew until I read the back-story to write this post. I knew they were located a stones throw from me but didn't realize it was started by two recent Notre Dame grads. You can read their story here.

From the site:

To date, we have raised millions of dollars for literacy, saved millions of books from landfills, created jobs for hundreds of people, and provided wonderful books to millions of readers worldwide. The rest of the story is still being written. We invite you to join us on our journey. It’s only going to get better.

Pretty darn cool. They have an outlet store located at their warehouse and it's filled with books on all subjects and all are less than about $4. It's the bomb. It feels like a really small elementary school library - not fancy at all - but it's a lot of fun to just wander through the shelves, seeing what they have.

In addition to the books right there on the shelves, you also have access to their entire warehouse. Well, not literally. You can't go in there and browse, but all you have to do is ask the wonderful people that work there to look up any title you want. If they have it, they'll put in a request to the warehouse and in less than 10 minutes, you've got your book. It's amazing and I'm still in awe that something this cool is in my backyard, so to speak.

So while we were browsing yesterday, I picked up some new finds. It's THE BEST place to find interesting papers for my art journal or any other mixed media work. Children's books galore (hello, fun illustrations), reference books (Dictionaries! Travel Guides!) as well as many old, amazingly cool hardbound books. I also discovered a new little shelf - foreign language books. SCORE!


Here are the two I picked up. They're both fairly small but full of possibilities.

I honestly don't know what language this is (if you do, please let me know in the comments!) but it's just gorgeous. I had to have it.


This Japanese Chinese book is filled with page after page of beautiful text and also has illustrations scattered throughout. Lovely!



The ultimate find, as far an I'm concerned, is this copy of Longfellow poems. It was from a library that marked it obsolete. Literally.





I was an English Lit major, so I know some of you might be horrified by this, but it's going to make the PERFECT art journal.



I mean, look as the reproductions of hand-written poems. All of the blank space. Every facing page to a page of the poem is blank and there are many completely blank pages at the beginning and end. AND the paper is really nice. *So happy.* It's a little over 7" x 10" and about 1/4" thick. I love it.

p.s. I'll be gathering some of these pages as well as going through all of my other papers to make some super awesome paper packs for my Etsy store, so be on the lookout for that! I always include some original art tags and other goodies in my paper packs.