Recently I was in Houston, where among other things I visited a couple of bookstores. The first was in The Woodlands, a used bookstore in a converted house. This store is called Good Books in the Woods, https://www.goodbooksinthewoods.com – it appears to have been converted from an old residence into a bookstore with walls and walls of books. The SF section is small. Prices appeared to have no rhyme or reason; some paperbacks were cheap, others expensive. Some hardcovers were close to $100, others under $20.
Although I already had a couple of editions of Jack Vance’s The Eyes of the Overworld, I found a nice paperback edition that I didn’t have. The $8 cost made me hesitate, but these days finding any Vance book in decent shape is next to impossible.
As far as books that I didn’t already have, I came across a 1975 collection of short stories by William Hope Hodgson, Out of the Storm, published by Donald M. Grant. Grant would later publish three more Hodgson collections: The Dream of X, which I don’t have, plus The Haunted Pampero (1991) and Terrors of the Sea (1996) which I already owned.
Out of the Storm contains seven short stories, as well as quite a long biographical introduction from Sam Moskowitz, and is illustrated by Stephen Fabian. The price when published in 1975 was $10. I paid $25. I think was I surprised to see that book there, and not in the glass-enclosed “rare book” section, where books apparently cost $100 and more. Still, I was happy to find the book, as I like Hodgson’s sea stories.
Grant is perhaps better known as a publisher of Robert E. Howard and Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. They seem to have tapered off recently in the number of books published, so likely will become a defunct publisher at some point, if that hasn’t already happened.
