Elizabeth’s Secondhand Bookshops

I’ve never walked out of a second hand bookshop with three books tucked under my arm and with a promise to return shortly for more highly digestible brain food.
The range is lovely and broad, the books in good nick. My collection purchased ranged from social economics, the sci-​fi to a fashion illustration show book for my niece.
Conveniently located next to better read than dead, it’s worth ducking in here for a squizz too. Why not buy preloved if it’s an option? Enjoy :)

The thing I love about Elizabeth’s is that they recycle books for you.
I can go in with a box of books and I get credit towards new purchases.
The new store is much roomier and I can still loose a few hours in here happily. Staff are always friendly and there’s the dog water bowl out the front with a cute quote on a chalkboard usually.
What more can you ask in a bookstore really?

The olive green façade of Elizabeths is a familiar feature of King St.
The shop has recently moved down the street and this transition has been so smooth that I can barely remember what the old shop looked like. The new location still hosts a selection of second hand books under a few headings of History, Military, Literature, Erotic Fiction, Children’s Books and a good selection of theatre scripts and theory. They’ve got a nice selection of coffee table books and also sell a limited range of new books, including the complete Asterix and Tintin titles and Penguin Classics. The prices here aren’t the cheapest and I find it worth a look through Vinnies down the road first — chances are you’ll find a book there that has been bought from Elizabeths and passed down to Vinnies and is now going for a third of that price again.
The shop is well organised, unlike many second hand book stores of a similar nature, and the staff are friendly and usually know what they’ve got, taking the hunting work out of the shopping experience. Mind you, if you’re anything like me, when shopping at second hand bookstores, it’s all about the chase.
One of my favourite aspects of Elizabeths is that it’s open late, thus making dinner and browsing the perfect and theoretically cheaper alternative to dinner and a movie. ‘Theoretically’, I say, because more often than not I end up buying a stack of books that would easily surpass the cost of a Dendy’s movie ticket.

Moving house is always stressful, never more so than when you unpack a bookshelf into one plastic box. Only to find it overflowing and overcapacity. On the shelf, it looked like it would all fit, but you curse yourself for not being more anal-​retentive and purchasing books of identical size. As I wondered around the new and relocated Elizabeth’s Bookstore in Newtown, I pondered how long it would take to shuttle a whole bookstore’s worth of tomes, even if it was just down the street.
Despite the relocation, don’t expect anything souped up — this is the Elizabeth’s that you have come to know on King Street and Pitt Street, only now with a much wider back room and some nifty shelves on the columns. Although I was not devoting optimal brain power to it, I did find the new store a little difficult to navigate: I couldn’t find the movie section, even as I located the always nearby music section and looked around. Oh well, just another reason to visit again.

Elizabeth’s Bookshop is great.
They always have funny quotes scribbled in chalk on the chalkboard that stands right outside the entrance.
This, for example;
«It’s better to have loved and lost, than to live with a psycho for the rest of your life».
Humour, AND books? What more could you want from a bookseller?
The store itself is immaculately well-​presented. The store is well-​lit, there is an impressive collection of genres (‘chick-​lit’ being the most amusing), and the staff are virtually unindentifiable if not for their enormous, welcoming grins every time someone enters the store.
There’s an eclectic mixture of both popular books, and second-​hand books, to ensure variety, and I would definitely buy my books here.

Do you ever double-​take when you see the price of books nowadays? Elizabeth’s Bookshop is a brilliant second-​hand Aladdin’s cave of books, all in excellent condition, and some barely used at all. You can find the latest books for a fraction of the cost of a new one — saving you money and doing your bit to help the rainforest, too. The perfect shop to while away a few hours, I could spend hours rooting around for some new reads. The shop is split in to History, Fiction, Cookery, Art, table books etc. They also have a children’s section, with a vast array of Tintin and Asterix & Obelix books.
It’s a shop with real character — boxes of books are set up outside, and propped up against them are blackboards with advice such as ‘time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted’ and ‘any idiot can face a crisis — it’s day to day living that wears you out’. This kind of wisdom can only be gleaned from plenty of book-​reading, and is the perfect reason to have a browse in Elizabeth’s Bookshop soon.

Amongst all the other second hand bookshops in Newtown, Elizabeth’s bookshops is the one where you’ll be most likely to actually buy one. The reason for this? Instead of entering a city of high-​rise book buildings of every fiction, non-​fiction, genre or language, you’ll find the books here are actually organised into neat categories — which makes it easier when you’re on the hunt for a particular book or two.
For second hand books you’ll find that most of these are old, (some non-​fiction outdated obviously), but still very readable and not falling apart at the seams.
The one drawback is that they aren’t as cheap as you’d expect, you won’t find prices like the ones at your local book fairs or garage sales. But then again, you do have a much, much larger variety to browse from.

I just found the Voodoo Revenge book at Elizabeth’s bookshop, now anyone who ever pissed me off is going to suffer.
Elizabeth’s is second hand book– shop (with an extra large Tin Tin section), they also a few interesting new books, the Voodoo book being one of them, so if you too need to seek vengeance, you had better get there fast.
They also have a great selection of film books, particularly film script books, many of which are out of print.