Once Read is a store that still stocks according to historical moment—little pockets of paperbacks marooned 50 years out of their own time, like the bunch of beat-up bottom shelf Mickey Spillanes next door to the doorstop (also note—Once Read has high-ticket autographed Spillanes for sale in the vault) or the stiff-spined sci-fi standards (Disch and Dick but Dickson deserves a different place) that keep a squeaky old drugstore rack leaning off balance. And though I appreciate the many different ways Long Beach presents lost books for low prices—acres to planets, depending on how much space you want—I tend to find the little scores all at once at Once Read. So—a set of five second-generation Raymond Chandler paperbacks, the luridest-common-denominator editions that pinched extra royalty payments out of the author’s self-respect. Pocket Books got a little daring when reprint time came around in the ’50s and ’60s and started swapping in new cover art and jacket copy to grab readers from the monied thug demographic. These are a little harder than the curvy ’40s editions—disheveled girls either dead or alive with a gun or a cigarette in hand if their hands are even in the picture at all, with ladies found dead on the back cover “as nude as a mermaid.” (Seems fishy, thought Marlowe, maybe . . . ) As per collection The Simple Art Of Murder, the Pocket copies squeeze the genre til it pulps: “Under the bed a dame with a broken neck. Outside her door a guy pumping lead into a big thug’s belly.” Pneumatic! Underlined on page 205 of this particular Long Goodbye: “We make the finest packages in the world, Mr. Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk.” But I’m a cheerful kind of guy—I think this actually worked out the other way around.

$3.95 EACH. AVAILABLE FROM ONCE READ BOOKS | 5422 E Village Rd | Long Beach 90808 | 562.420.1034.