Finding Used Gay books: Book Project Post 1
Where can you find Gay books? Saving Gay books from oblivion.
The link to all the Book Project Posts is at the very end of this post.
This guide is how to find used books that are Gay and not finding “queer” books filled with non-Gay material and “genderqueer” straight women putting coloring in their hair.
This is important to make sure that the Gay books that are worth preserving find owners and don’t end up in the trash can. Also, to find books relevant to Gays and not books written for the Queer studies academics or the LGBTQXYZ establishment.
There are two parts to finding used Gay books.
Looking for a book that you know about and are trying to find.
Discovering books that you didn’t know existed.
I am going to discuss the major platforms to find used Gay books and then discuss as a separate topic searching for Gay books. In discussing the platforms I will also suggest how to save money.
Ebay has lots of difficult to find materials.
Amazon carries used books.
Advanced Book Exchange is really good.
https://www.abebooks.com/
When the above searches fail, this is the super search engine.
For used book sellers on Ebay and Amazon only go with a rating of 95% or better.
Expecting 95% or better isn’t being demanding. They are shipping books, it isn’t that hard to do.
A book seller with a 90% rating, means one out of ten customers got the wrong book, never got the book, or it was way more damaged than indicated, very much delayed in shipping or in some cases it is a reprint and not the original or not a first edition or is a knock off. It might be inadequately packed.
For Advanced Book Exchange go with FIVE STARS. Five stars mean you have a rating of 96% or more.
If it is only a few dollars more go with the used book seller with a higher percentage rating.
Ebay and Amazon have programs to deal with bogus sellers. I am not saying they are perfect, but you are somewhat protected.
To Save Money
Always check Ebay and Amazon to see which two have the lower prices. Always try them first. It isn’t that Abebooks is expensive, it is that they include people that are more used book specialists and deal with rarer books.
Often times a rare book is offered on Ebay or Amazon by someone who doesn’t know books and doesn’t know what the value of the books they are dealing with.
Set up searches.
Now only Ebay and Advance Book Exchange will allow you to have automatic searches to email you when a book you are trying to find and isn’t available, later becomes available. Sometimes the only copies available are at outrages prices and you will want to see what might show up. I will discuss this more in automatic searches.
Search Engine Quality.
Advanced Book Exchange, Amazon, and Ebay have fairly good search engines. Bookfinder tends to not be so focused, but it is the only one and you will just have to deal with it. You use Bookfinder when none of the other search engines work.
SEARCHING
Watch for spelling errors. I know this is basic, but when you are typing in names and other words it will happen more often than you realize.
Basic Searching.
So a lot of times just putting the author or title into the simple search engine provide plenty of results that will work. For example, Japanese Gay artist “Sadao Hasegawa” will give you his books and not much else.
In other cases you get a lot of irrelevant junk. For example, supposing I am looking for this book. (Continued after image. }
If I just put in “Homosexual verse” into the Advanced Book Exchange simple search engine, the 2nd book is an anti-Gay Christian book condemning homosexuals with Biblical verses. There is also a lot of other books which are books of Gay poetry.
What I want to do is chose the advance search and do the entry like this.
The result is just this book and you can order it from lowest price to highest price. (Don’t let low price lure you to purchasing it from a low rated seller.)
For Amazon the first result for the simple search engine was the book that was wanted. For Ebay the first result for their search engine was the book that was wanted. For both Amazon and Ebay some of the other results were sort of irrelevant.
However, some of the other results are book that aren’t the desired book, but might well be of interest. For example, the 4th result of the Ebay search was the book, “Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry” by Robert K. Marti. This same book also came up as the 4th result on Amazon. But they had junk that wasn’t relevant.
To use the Advanced Search in Amazon, you will have to first do a search in the category Books and then you will see as one of the tabs the choice of Advanced Search. The print is small, but it is in the row of choices for books.
The result is only the book you are looking for. Notice the other filtering options. Maybe you only want hardcover. Maybe only used. This research gave only the one book which we were looking for. Warning about Amazon, if it fails to find anything it will still produce a list of junk and in smaller print say it didn’t find anything. You don’t want to waste time reviewing the results and then realizing they are junk.
For example, I just did a search for Persian Homosexual Poetry in Books, and got 92 results. It said, 92 results for “Persian homosexuality poetry” but under the heading “Showing results from All Departments” it says, “No results for Persian homosexual poetry in books” in really small print.
Ebay just says no results for the same search. That is one reason to use Ebay instead of Amazon.
For Ebay you don’t have that much control, but you have some, this is their advanced search.
I went for exact words and exact order. NOTE: I also specified the category, “Books & Magazines.” You might otherwise get junk like, greeting cards with a homosexual verse or maybe a recording. This search only resulted in the exact book for which we were looking. On Ebay I avoid including the description in the search. It mostly results in a lot of irrelevant junk showing up. But if you are at a dead end in your search you might use it. I would go to Bookfinder searching first though.
Cautionary notes
Check what edition it is or whether it is a reprint or a print on demand. Look for a publication date.
Go for the seller who provides a picture of the actual book.
Also, confusing descriptions. I am looking at an edition of “The Sotadic Zone” by Sir Richard Burton with the words “1934 [Premium Leather Edition,” but it is also listed as a Print on Demand book. They do explain you can choose the color of th edition, but the listing is confusing. Read the description all the way through. Sometimes they are purposefully misleading, but sometimes they are just careless or jumbled in their listing.
If it is over $100, make sure you check all the directories. There are predators online which offer the book at a high price and people carelessly order it and they just re-order it from someone else at the generally lower price, or just say the book was lost and not delivered.
See where the book dealer is located.
AUTOMATIC SEARCHES
So lets search for Mutsuo Takahashi’s landmark book, “Poems of a Penisist” on Ebay. Ebay doesn’t have it. (It is on Amazon, it is a collectors item.) Notice the blue heart next to “Save this Search.” If you save it, Ebay will send you an email if anything matches your search and will keep watching forever.
Advance Book Exchange has it, but only the republication by the Univ. of Minnesota Press and the price is a ripoff in my opinion. You always need to check several directories to understand pricing.
I had to make up a Gay book that I knew doesn’t exist to show what you can do if there no book. You can create what is a Wants. In this case if a book, “Space Ships and Gay Poetry” shows up it will email me.
EXPLORATORY SEARCHING
This is where you find books that you didn’t know existed. You might find lists of books of interest online, but usually there are lists which have a lot of items of which you aren’t interested in also. Also, the persons doing the lists tend to be focused on contemporary materials and materials of their particular interests.
So lets do some exploratory searching.
Ebay can be used, but we will look at Amazon and Abebooks next.
Ebay is a good place to get started. However, it has its limits.
If I do a search for “homosexual poetry” with the restriction of the category “Books & Magazines,” I will get a lot of books related to the topic desired, but the first thing is a children’s book by author Romney Gay and the third book is another book by Ross Gay which isn’t related to Gays at all. There is the excellent book of poems, “Carnivorous Saint,” by Harold Norse however.
There is a lot of junk. So lets use this Advanced Search. I use All words, any order, but I exclude “Children” and that gets rid of all the irrelevant books. The number of results dropped from 1,999 to 22.
Always try different word combinations. Homosexual “poems” instead of “poetry” in the above search only produced one book.
This search on the other hand produced 1,100 books.
A lot of it is relevant, but there is also every poet who had “Gay” as their last name.
Let’s say I am looking for every book that Gay Sunshine Press published. I can submit this search
It returns five pages of the books that Gay Sunshine Published. It turns out that they published a book, “Queer Dharma: Voices of Gay Buddhists, Vol. 2” I didn’t even now this existed.
You have to do some general searches on various topics, publishers, authors and see what you get. Maybe searching Harold Norse you discover Gay Sunshine and from there you discover, “Partings At Dawn: Anthology of Japanese Gay Literature,” by Stephen D. Miller.
END NOTE
The above will get you started. You will learn as you search and find things.
Please share and help others purchase Gay books.
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This is the general omnibus list of posts on Gay books. This is Part One in case it gets too long for Substack. If it does get too long there will be a Part Two.