There was a little line at Acres of Books at 10 AM sharp today—people already ready to make the first picks from the two million books now set to sell (or else) as the landmark bookstore officially begins its slow but so far dignified death. As long as you didn’t look around and imagine the first bulldozers punching through those old walls sometime in the next few months, it wasn’t too sad, though there’s plenty of righteous anger among the customers. (Except the one who stuck his head in and asked, “Is this a used bookstore?”) I even met the man who put LOWENTHAL 451 on the back of Acres—he identified himself only as “Agent J” and slipped back into the stacks after I shook his hand. He may be there even now. I would like to share my buys today in the hopes others may head down there. I left a first-edition P.K. Dick biography, a bio of Little Richard, a Ring Lardner collection, some French foto-comic mags, bunch of SF paperbacks and more in a stack as big as the one I carried home. I asked one publisher I met today if there was any happy aspect to the demolition of Acres of Books, and he said: “For me the only bright side to this is that there was—and this will sound a little poetic—but there was an enchanted place like this that I could come to for over fifty years, and I still have the treasures I bought, and those treasures and the memories of where I got them will survive.” My most recent below:

(no title itals for speed listing)

Kingsley Amis (ed.) ‘Spectrum’ (first ed. pb 1961)
Isaac Asimov ‘Asimov’s Mysteries’ (first ed.? hb 1968?)
Isaac Asimov (ed.) ‘Where Do We Go From Here?’ (first ed. pb 1973)
Jerome Bixby ‘Space By The Tale’ (first ed. pb 1964)
Leigh Brackett ‘The Long Tomorrow’ (first ed. pb 1955)
John Brunner ‘Double Trouble’ (first ed. pb 1969)
John Brunner ‘The Long Result’ (first ed. pb 1966)
John Brunner ‘Out Of My Mind’ (first ed. pb 1967)
John Brunner ‘Stardroppers’ (first ed. pb 1972)
John Brunner ‘Web Of Everywhere’ (first ed. pb 1974)
John Brunner ‘The Whole Man’ (first ed. pb 1964)
Carleton Case ‘Case’s New Book of Conundrums and Riddles’ (first ed. 1927)
Thomas Disch ‘Echo Round His Bones’ (first ed. pb 1967)
F. Scott Fitzgerald ‘The Crack-Up’ (first ed. pb 1956?)
Peter Fonda et al. ‘Easy Rider’ (first ed. pb 1969)
H.L. Gold (ed.) Bodyguard (first ed. pb 1962)
Albert Goldman ‘Freakshow: Misadventures in the Counterculture 1959-1971′ (reprint 2001)
Imagination, October 1958 issue (w/Harlan Ellison’s ‘The Assassin’)
Noel Keyes (ed.) Contact (first ed. pb 1963)
Donald Keyhoe ‘Flying Saucers Are Real’ (first ed. pb 1950) (awesome find — cz)
Keith Laumer ‘The Monitors’ (first ed. pb 1966) (dedicated to Harlan Ellison)
Salazar Monroy ‘The Sacred City of Cholula’ (1954 gov’t pamphlet?)
The Philistine, March 1911 issue (’A periodical of protest’)
William Sambrot ‘Island Of Fear’ (first ed. pb 1963)
Various ‘Transit Of Earth’ (first ed. pb 1971)
Nathaniel West ‘Day of the Locust / Miss Lonelyhearts’ (fifth ed. pb 1962)