Half-Price Books -- A Dallas Original
By Don Hobbs

New York City has Mysterious Books, Portland Oregon has Powell's City of Books and Dallas has Half-Price Books. From its humble beginnings in 1972 in a converted laundromat co-founders Ken Gjemere and Pat Anderson started  Half Price Books with about 2,000 books from personal libraries. Their philosophy was to sell a great product at a great price and it has worked. The chain slowly grew and can now be found in 15 states with over one hundred locations.  The Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex has nineteen from which to choose.
As a chain of neighborhood bookstores every store holds treasures unique to that particular store. I have been a loyal customer since the beginning and I have shopped at every single DFW location. Many of the original locations around the metroplex have moved several times. The first  store was located on Lover's Lane before it moved to McKinney Avenue and a few years later, it moved across the street to a larger space. The main store has moved three times since then and is now on Northwest Highway in Dallas. They still follow the original motto: "buy anything recorded or printed except yesterday's newspaper."

I  try to get to  HPB if there is one near where I am working. Each store is set up in a similar fashion even if each ones list of books is completely different. I can generally be found in the Nostalgia section, where all of the older and interesting books are and next in the mystery section, then the foreign language section. I normally will check out the children's section and the literary anthologies sections during a typical visit to a HPB location.

Many of the books in my collection have come from HPB. Once, while at an Austin, Texas store, I found a Collier's magazine with NORW in it. It was priced at $5.00 and that was far below the magazine's value. I have found bargains at HPB's in Washington, Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, and of course in Texas. I have signed up online and I get many discount coupons sent right to my computer. In these trying economic times, it is important to get as much a possible for one's dollar. HPB is one of my favorite places to shop for books and for those Sherlockians living near one of the hundred-plus stores you already know what I am talking about.

With the growth of computer shopping and the general decline of mortar and brick stores, it is very refreshing to see a bookseller that is expanding instead of shrinking. Shopping at HPB makes is easy for me to say...

Happy Collecting!!