About Concord Books
We are a used bookshop in Amherst, Massachusetts. Books come to us from estate sales, library discards, moving boxes and people clearing a shelf — and every one of them gets looked at and graded by hand before it goes online.
That is the whole idea behind this site: a listing here is not a generic edition record, it is one specific book. If the previous owner wrote their name inside the front cover, the listing says so. If the spine is sunned, the listing says that too. When that copy sells, the listing goes quiet until another one comes through the door.
One thing to be plain about: the picture at the top of a listing is cover art for that edition, not a photograph of the book in the box. Printings vary, and the copy you receive may carry a slightly different cover. Where we have photographed the actual book, the listing links to those shots separately and labels them as that copy — and where we have not, it says so rather than letting the cover art stand in for one. The written grade and the copy notes are always about the specific book you are buying.
Questions about a particular copy? Email us at jeremy@concordbooks.org — mention the ISBN and we will go pull it off the shelf and take another look. Every full detail — phone, mailing address and more — is on our contact page.
How a book gets here
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One
It arrives in a box. We scan the barcode on the back, which tells us the ISBN, and the catalog fills in the title, author, publisher and edition from public bibliographic data.
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Two
We grade it by hand — Like New down to Acceptable — and write down anything a buyer would want to know before paying: inscriptions, foxing, a cracked hinge, a price sticker that is not coming off.
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Three
It goes on a shelf with a price, and onto this site as its own listing. Two copies of the same title in different shape are two separate listings at two different prices — you pick the one you want. Then it ships from Amherst within the United States, free on orders over $30. Full details are on our shipping policy.