The Quizbowl Resource Center

Hello everyone,

Since this is currently a topic of discussion on the collegiate side of things, I thought it would be worthwhile to discuss book prizes and where you can find them.

1. A book store. This is obvious to most people, but visit your local bookstore and see if they have a bargain bin.

2. A Goodwill or similar store. In Washington, David likes to stop by the Goodwill and see what they have in stock. We've gotten a copy of Kafka on the Shore to a text of Bahai scripture in that store, so you can definitely find some good stuff in Goodwills.

3. This is what I used to find my book prizes for this year. I look up book sales going on near me on booksalefinder.com. (http://booksalefinder.com/) It's a great resource, and leads you to some great sales; I bought a bag of books for a tournament for $5 at the last sale I went to.

I'd appreciate hearing what other people do to find their book prizes and any advice/resources they may have. Thanks!

We went to a local thrift store. Books were a buck for hard cover titles from Hossuni, Faulkner, Shakespeare, etc. Cheap and the money,what little it was, stayed in the community. Also, check the school or local library to see if they are rotating out older books.

1992 in spaceflight wrote:A Goodwill or similar store. In Washington, David likes to stop by the Goodwill and see what they have in stock. We've gotten a copy of Kafka on the Shore to a text of Bahai scripture in that store, so you can definitely find some good stuff in Goodwills.

I second Goodwill as an excellent option, especially if you live in or near a college town, since many students will donate piles of old books they read for class and professors will donate their old home library books. I populated my own book collection largely from several trips to my local Goodwill store and collected several sets of book prizes there too for an incredibly cheap price.

That being said, I also think local independent used bookstores could really use the sales in this age of Amazon. If you have one in your community, please patronize it. You might even be able to work out a partnership or give out bookmarks, coupons, etc., at your tournament in exchange for a small discount. Most of these bookstores are owned by people in the local community who might love to help support an academic activity if you just ask.

Oh boy. Here's a list of the books which I brought to UVA's site of the Early Fall Tournament for book prizes:

• Eisenhower and the Cold War (Robert A. Divine)
• History of Russia (I forget the author)
• The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States [2nd ed.] (Theodore J. Lowi)
• Democracy, Revolution, and History (Theda Skocpol)
• The Marx-Engels Reader (ed. Robert C. Tucker)
• KGB Today: The Hidden Hand (John Barron)
• Lineages of the Absolutist State (Perry Anderson)
• The Soviet Paradox (Seweryn Bialer)
• The World at War (Mark Arnold-Forster)
• Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (Ved Mehta)
• Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (US govt publication on the Watts Riots)
• The New Season: A Spectator's Guide to the 1988 Election (George F. Will).

You will note that most of these books deal with academic political topics. This is because the first eight titles were culled from a pile of free books that the UVA Politics Department was just giving away. Then, when I went to Heartwood Books to pick up another few to round out the list, I figured that I might as well roll with the theme and make it a full set. Local used bookstores are an incredible blessing -- if I'm tactical, I can usually buy a whole bunch of quizbowl-suitable books for maybe a dollar or so apiece at the absolute lowest. The problem is with variety: it's generally a good idea to get different kinds of books (for example, when buying stuff recently I tried to offset the mostly Cold War politics titles with diverse political / academic viewpoints), and while the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders was a pretty good price, I couldn't bring myself to buy the other three copies that were in the store. (No idea why my favorite local bookstore had four copies of that book. Can't imagine where they got it from.) I also tried to pick books that would provide useful knowledge for college quizbowl (at least one of those titles has been an actual answerline in the past year).

Thank you for the link to booksalefinder.com, Jacob! The website looks really cool and I kinda wish I'd known about this earlier.

If you have a half price books outlet near you, consider yourself spoiled. I am under the impression that their normal stores have fantastic deals as well but have never actually been to one.

TylerV wrote:If you have a half price books outlet near you, consider yourself spoiled. I am under the impression that their normal stores have fantastic deals as well but have never actually been to one.

Yeah these stores are great. They have a pretty good bargain section where you can get a slightly more interesting set of books (i.e. not just classic literature) for somewhere between $2-$4.

Not sure if this is a common thing, but we have a "Swap Shop" in our town dump, where people leave usable items they don't need anymore/can take said items for free. Ours has a wide range of books in surprisingly good condition. Tag sales can also be good- the Boy Scouts in my town hold a yearly giant tag sale where they have a wide variety of books for cheap.

I always go to our library booksale here in wonderful Columbia SC. Like Jacob, I come away with bags of books for not much money. It's listed on http://www.booksalefinder.com/, so I have to think there are lots of other great book sales out there with similar deals.

One thing I have done in the past is purchase books at the book sales and resold them at no profit to others who needed books for their tournament. Feel free to contact me round the cracker barrel (i.e. facebook, e-mail 2.0, this thread, or whatever) if you'd be interested in getting cheap books from me.