Half-Price Books 20% Off Sale!

Have you ever been to Half-Price Books?  If you haven't gone, it's totally amazing!  Basically, the store works like a book consignment shop.  You sell your books to them (any books! I've seen textbooks, comic books, art books, history books, and novels!) and they re-sell them for at most half of the price listed on the cover.  The only exception to this rule of course are the rare and valuable books that are sold to the store.  They also sell bookmarks, calendars, cards, DVDs, VHSs, posters, iPad cases, and sometimes small statues or busts.  We love going there, especially to use my teacher 10% off discount!

Unfortunately, there are only five stores in the whole state of Indiana, and the Indianapolis area has four of them.  The other is in Fort Wayne.  There are two that are fairly close to where Kyle's parents live, so we tend to make regular trips.  I don't know how many books we've bought from there over the last few years.  Probably too many to count!  I stocked up on most books for my classroom at Goodwill because it's cheaper, but with popular series or books that I personally loved and wanted for my room/home that I couldn't find at Goodwill we got from HPB.  

We heard on the radio on the way to school one day that there was to be a 20% off storewide sale (we get the Fort Wayne stations in Portland) over Labor Day weekend.  Since we planned to be at Kyle's parents house for a cookout this weekend, we left a little early to be sure to make a stop at the Castleton store and the one in Nora.  Nora's a little ways away and traffic was awful, but the Nora store is bigger than Castleton's and has a better comic book collection, which is VERY important to my hubby.  Of course, they don't stack the discounts, so I couldn't use my teacher card.  Bummer!

Here are some pictures (sorry, got them from the Internet because I'm too lazy to take the pictures myself!) of some things we bought:

Superman Ultimate Collector's Edition

A 14-disc set (7 movies with alternate versions) of the Superman movie collection.  It came with a comic book, too, which of course Kyle loved.  It originally went on sale for $99 back in 2006 when it originally came out, but you can get it new on Amazon for about $50.  The one we bought from HPB was listed at $14.99.  With the store sale, we got it for about $12!  I'd say a good deal, especially as it had never been opened!

We've recently gotten into watching Smallville, a TV show about Clark Kent's growing up outside of Metropolis.  We watched season one already, but since we had to borrow it from the library and had  a very short amount of time to get through all the discs, we had to watch an average of 3-4 episodes a night to not accumulate fines!  We tried to renew, but someone else in Muncie wants it and keeps putting it on hold, so we can't renew.  We've been in a check-out/hold war with them for over a month, and the 3-4 episodes at a time doesn't work out now that I'm in school (each episode is 45 minutes long).  Luckily, my sister-in-law has seasons 2 and 4 that she let us borrow and Kyle already owned season 3 from before we were married, so now we're at a point where we can go at our own pace.  We looked into buying more seasons from Wal-Mart, but they're still being sold there for $20 apiece.  We scored this at HBP for $8, originally 10 before the discount.  Now we can take our time!

My parents actually have a copy of this book that they bought when we were very young.  My mom read it aloud to my sister and me and I remember thinking that the paintings in it were very beautiful.  Found it in the clearance section for $2, so the discount made it $1.60.  Ha!  Eat my shorts, Betsy!

Georgia Nicholson book #8

Georgia Nicholson book #9

The Georgia Nicholson book series was popular when I was in high school.  They're written in diary form from the perspective of a crazy British teenager.  I laughed out loud several times when reading these!  By the time I quit reading them in high school, they were only up to Startled by His Furry Shorts (#7), so I've actually never read these!  I already have 1, 2, and 3 in the series, so now I need 4-7 and 10.  Original list price: $16.99 apiece.  HPB price: $7.99.  With discount, about $6.40 apiece.

SEVERAL books from The Royal Diaries series!  This is only one of seven that I bought yesterday.  I already had four of them, so that brings me up to eleven out of twenty in the series.  When I was reading these books (early middle school), I only got up to #5, so it'll be fun to read the newer ones.  I like them because the authors in this series do their best to be as factual as possible.  All of these are in my classroom library!  At this point, it's pretty cheap to buy these online; you just have to pay for shipping.  These books ranged from $1.60 to $4.40 yesterday with the discount. 

Probably the one I'm MOST excited about!  Something else to add to my Kennedy collection to use when I teach the JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories/Nonfiction unit.  It works out perfectly, because that's EXACTLY what I'm teaching to my sophomores right now, and I totally plan to use this this coming up week!  What I got was a book with the interviews as well as 8 CDs with the interviews recorded.  When this originally came out in Books-a-Million last year, it listed for $60.  HPB had it for $30, and I got it for $24.  Alright!

Finally, The Outsiders movie.  We watched this today after church, and I loved it!  I'll be teaching the novel That Was Then, This Is Now, which is a sequel to The Outsiders, to my sophomores in a few weeks.  I think I'll use this movie to help them understand the context of the story, because that was a little difficult last year.  A few students have read it, but most haven't.  I thought it was pretty good.  $4.00 at HBP, so with discount it was $3.20.

Kyle also got 27 comic books and 10 trade paper backs to fill in his comic collection.  He was also very pleased with his haul.

I'm thinking it'll be awhile before we get to go back to HPB any time soon, so I'm glad we made the trip when we did!  Hurray for cheap books, movies, and memorabilia!  Without HPB, there would either be hardly any books available in our house OR we'd be flat broke.