Last month, I discussed why to buy art books, and how to pick good ones. With prices of new art books often hitting $70 or $125, of course, you also want to know how I get them for 0-$30. So here we go:

• Look on the remainder shelves. Most bookstores have a section where they sell new books that turned out to be surplus, at a deep discount. You can often find best-sellers from two or three years back, at maybe $3.99–but you can also find coffee-table art and nature books, priced typically between $5 and $25
• * While I’m not a big fan of chain bookstores, they do have great values on art books–Barnes & Noble, in particular, because they publish some of them themselves
• Yard sales, estate sales, used book stores, flea markets, Friends of the Library book sales, and similar used-book venues (sniff the books for mildew and check for water damage before buying)
• Consider the art in obsolete calendars, as well as old National Geographics (both often available for free or very cheap)
• Library discard sales
• Museum stores, while selling most art books for full retail, will sometimes have great deals on a few selected books, and also on catalogs of their current or recent exhibitions

Lots more frugal fun ideas in my 280-page e-book, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant’s Pocketbook.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Frugal Fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.