Damaged Book Sale at the CUP Bookstore

27Dec06

In the spirit of manic day-after-Christmas sales, the Cambridge University Press (CUP) Bookshop holds a not-publicized damaged book sale on the day after Boxing Day. I only heard about this through word-of-mouth, but found four bookshelves worth of texts available at ridiculously low prices. Damaged paperbacks/hardcovers were priced at £2/£5, where ‘damaged’ includes books with a slight scuff on the cover.

I arrived at 9:15am while they were setting up and assumed that the sale was tomorrow, only to return at 11:30am to find that it had started at 10am. Most of the ‘hot’ physics and mathematics books were probably gone by then, which dashed my hopes of snagging a scuffed copy of Becker-Becker-Schwarz or Dine’s new SUSY/String book. I’ve heard that in previous years people have purchased £5 copies of Weinberg (hardcover) that, other than a ‘damaged’ stamp on the inside, are good-as-new.

I ended up purchasing a few books for recreational reading, and was happy with the present for myself. So if anyone happens to be around Cambridge on the day-afer-Boxing-Day, I suggest stopping by the CUP Bookshop at around 10am for some great bargains. (This seems to be something of a secret that gets passed down by starving grad students… so keep it on the down low!)

Incidentally, I’m quite fond of the CUP Bookshop, which has a stocked copy of every CUP book in print and gives Cambridge students a neat 20% discount. It’s also exciting to be able to leaf through copies of books while one’s colleagues in the states are only pouring over pre-publication versions (Becker-Becker-Schwarz came out about a month ago, while Dine’s book came out a few weeks ago… both have yet to be officially released in the states).

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