The Good Used Book Edition

On IG, reading, and social capital

Matt Rodbard (MR) is the founding editor in chief of TASTE and the author of Food IQ and Koreatown: A Cookbook. He’s also the host of the TASTE Podcast, a feed of lively conversations about food and culture. He’s written a past WITI about Coffee in Seoul.

Matt here. A Good Used Book is a Los Angeles-based used and antiquarian book seller that operates a little differently than the dusty, coffee-perfumed shops of your town (every town, really). Founders Chris Capizzi and Jenny Yang engage mostly online, using Instagram to sell a large selection of vintage pocket paperbacks and edgier pulp fiction (The Prince, Animal Farm, a lot of Vonnegut—but also Murakami and the novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood show up). It’s no doubt a cool idea, though selling used books via traditional online platforms like Abe and Biblio, and more recent app shops like Depop, is nothing new. But it’s when A Good Used Book shows its face IRL that things get really good. After taking a winter hiatus (to buy books, perhaps), A Good Used Book’s weekend pop-up returned recently to P.F. Candle Co. in Echo Park.

Why is this interesting?  

There’s no doubt that literature is cool. Books rule. And the publishing industry? It’s getting more diverse, and cooler—just check out the red carpet from the 2022 National Book Awards. Fits and more fits. Yet the A Good Used Book Instagram Stories is different, and honestly feels a little bit like a 2am after-party. The idea is dead simple: in the style of “what’s in your bag?" at Amoeba or Tower (RIP), customers pose with their purchase—and are tagged for convenient DM drop-ins should you want to…talk Steinbeck with your new friend.

What is striking is how the feed feels like a place to earn a little status, with Millennial and Gen Z LA living its best bro, queer, uptight, loose, nerdy, Bode selves—all framed around well-worn editions of Chekov, Freud, and maybe a copy of Rosecrans Baldwin's truly imaginative and quirky Everything Now that seems to have shown up a lot this weekend. 

There’s not much book talk going on here from what we can tell. And that’s OK! It doesn’t matter anyways. Books living their best lives on the digital high plains is one of the biggest stories of recent memory in publishing.  So called BookTok is really real, and while some may snipe at the inherently shallow nature of talking up literature in 60-second filtered bursts, it’s still getting readers to bookstores and libraries in a really big way. A Good Used Book’s IG feed is no different. The books may be older, and the Alo crop tops may be shorter, but like BookTok, it’s still a fresh way to think about the analog book. (MR)

Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Matt (MR)

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