Buying Used Copies of Scholarly Texts and School Texts Online

        You may be able to get a used 7th edition of the Norton by now because it's been out for years, but a new copy of the paperback lists at $60 at Barnes & Noble's online site, and at the bookstore on campus it would cost you even more.   (They charge more because their low volume brings in less revenue and lower quarterly profits.)  However, online booksellers are a good alternative if you have time to wait for shipping.  Used copies in "Good" condition (some highlighting or note taking) now (April 2005) are available for under $15 to $40.  Softcover (paperback) editions are much cheaper than hardcover editions, of course.  If you are near any big college town in the summer before classes begin, check out the local used bookstores by phone and see what they've got.  They're the key to preserving our stocks of affordable literature in an era when the IRS taxes backstocked print runs as if they were new and the marketplace tends to devalue used copies unless they are new.

        Remember, you want the BIG anthology of early literature, not one of the several "period" volumes (e.g., Renaissance, Restoration, Sixteenth Century and Early Seventeenth Century).  We are covering the literature from the tenth century (c. 900-1000) to the year 1700 (with a few authors publishing after that date).  Even if you can get the smaller volumes more cheaply, the pagination will be wrong, and you may be missing works that are only in the larger anthology.  Here's what it looks like:

Format: Textbook Hardcover - 7TH Pub. Date: October 1999

The safest way to identify it is by "ISBN": 039310544X

        You also can scan online sites using ABE or Alibris.   They give you access to catalogues of a large number of used bookstores around the world.  You should check how much they'll charge you for shipping (typically $2.50 to $4.50 per volume for the first volume), but their price breaks are significant when compared with local branches of the national chains.  You have to shop smartly, though--remember it's the 7th edition, published in 2000 or later (as they reprint this one for the next five to ten years). You'll see all six other editions out there in vast numbers because the 7th has made them obsolete for most modern university courses (though why that should be is an interesting debate). I wouldn't recommend Bibliofind.com anymore because Amazon acquired them and messed up their interface so you can't do an advanced search to specify editions and failed searches get sucked into the Amazon site. You might want to do price comparisons with new ones at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Just don't get confused--it's not the "Major Authors" series or any of the other various Norton Anthologies--just "English Literature Volume One."