Becker's Books

05/01/2026

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran — Day 30 of 30 Books in 30 Days for the

We take one minute to share one unique used or rare book from our inventory every day, highlighting what it is and a few facts about why it’s interesting.

For our final day of 30 books in 30 days, I’m bringing you a special copy of one of my absolute favorite books, The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. Gibran was a Lebanese-American poet and painter who died in 1931 at forty-eight, with no idea this little book would go on to be read at JFK Jr.‘s wedding, given out by Elvis to friends, and translated into more than a hundred languages. It’s been continuously in print since 1923 and is one of the best-selling works of the twentieth century. This copy is the tenth printing from July 1966, still in its original Knopf slipcase — which is rarer than the book itself, since most slipcases got tossed or destroyed decades ago.


||| Who are we? |||

Becker’s Books is one of ’s most beloved independent bookstores, open since 1993. We carry nearly half a million books in-store and online, from affordable used reads to rare and collectible titles. www.beckersbooks.com

My name is Charlie Becker and I am a second-generation bookseller. I’m also developing an AI tool for identifying and cataloging used and rare books. I write about books, independent bookstores, and the future of small business.

04/30/2026

What’s What: A Visual Glossary of the Physical World by Reginald Bragonier Jr. and David Fisher — Day [ #] of 30 Books in 30 Days for the

We take one minute to share one unique used or rare book from our inventory every day, highlighting what it is and a few facts about why it’s interesting.

Today’s book is What’s What: A Visual Glossary of the Physical World by Reginald Bragonier Jr. and David Fisher, published by Hammond.
This book labels everything. Every part of a shoe, a helicopter, a human face, a church, a wine bottle — detailed illustrations with every single component named. The plastic tip of your shoelace is called an aglet. The little groove between your nose and upper lip is called the philtrum. This book calls itself “The Whatchamacallit Book” and that’s exactly what it is. Reference is one of the most overlooked sections in any used bookstore. People don’t browse it because they wouldn’t know what to look for, and they assume everything in a reference book is just as easily found on the internet. But you can’t Google something if you don’t know the word for it. That’s what books like this are for.



||| Who are we? |||

Becker’s Books is one of Houston’s most beloved independent bookstores, open since 1993. We carry nearly half a million books in-store and online, from affordable used reads to rare and collectible titles. www.beckersbooks.com

My name is Charlie Becker and I am a second-generation bookseller. I’m also developing an AI tool for identifying and cataloging used and rare books. I write about books, independent bookstores, and the future of small business.

04/29/2026

Buried Treasures by Maxfield Parrish — Day 28 of 30 Books in 30 Days for the

We take one minute to share one unique used or rare book from our inventory every day, highlighting what it is and a few facts about why it’s interesting.

Today’s book is Buried Treasures: The Black-and-White Work of Maxfield Parrish, 1896 to 1905. Maxfield Parrish was the most commercially reproduced American artist of the early twentieth century. At his peak in the 1920s, it was estimated that one in four American households had a Parrish print on the wall. Parrish belonged to the last generation of illustrators who were the primary visual medium for publishing and advertising before photography replaced them. He and his contemporaries, such as Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle and others, were doing the work that cameras would eventually take over. Parrish himself actually used photographs as references for his paintings, so he was competing with the technology and borrowing from it at the same time. He’s famous for his luminous color work, but this book collects his black-and-white illustrations from the first decade of his career, work that most people have never seen. This is a beautiful chronicle of some lesser-known work by an American icon.


||| Who are we? |||

Becker’s Books is one of ’s most beloved independent bookstores, open since 1993. We carry nearly half a million books in-store and online, from affordable used reads to rare and collectible titles. www.beckersbooks.com

My name is Charlie Becker and I am a second-generation bookseller. I’m also developing an AI tool for identifying and cataloging used and rare books. I write about books, independent bookstores, and the future of small business.

04/28/2026

Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez — Day 27 of 30 Books in 30 Days for the

We take one minute to share one unique used or rare book from our inventory every day, highlighting what it is and a few facts about why it’s interesting.

Today’s book is Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel García Márquez. Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 for novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. Strange Pilgrims is a collection of twelve stories about Latin Americans living in Europe, and he worked on them for eighteen years. In the prologue he describes throwing finished versions away and rewriting them from scratch, over and over. García Márquez once said he prefers reading translations of his own work over the original Spanish. This particular book is translated by Edith Grossman, who also translated the most popular current version of Don Quixote. This is a first US edition. Mylar is the clear protective wrapping you see on a valuable book’s dust jacket. And when you see that, it means someone decided it was worth preserving.


||| Who are we? |||

Becker’s Books is one of ’s most beloved independent bookstores, open since 1993. We carry nearly half a million books in-store and online, from affordable used reads to rare and collectible titles. www.beckersbooks.com

My name is Charlie Becker and I am a second-generation bookseller. I’m also developing an AI tool for identifying and cataloging used and rare books. I write about books, independent bookstores, and the future of small business.

04/27/2026

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, Modern Library Edition — Day 26 of 30 Books in 30 Days for the

We take one minute to share one unique used or rare book from our inventory every day, highlighting what it is and a few facts about why it’s interesting.

Today’s book is The Turn of the Screw and The Lesson of the Master by Henry James, Modern Library edition. The Turn of the Screw is one of the most famous ghost stories ever written. A governess arrives at a country estate to care for two children and begins seeing the ghosts of two former employees. The central question — are the ghosts real or is the governess losing her mind? — has been debated by scholars for over a hundred years with no resolution. Henry James himself refused to say. This is a Modern Library edition. In 1925, Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer bought the Modern Library from publisher Horace Liveright for two hundred thousand dollars. They used it as the foundation to build Random House, which became the largest English-language publisher in the world. The Modern Library was the seed. And for years, if you saw the torchbearer emblem, you knew it was a good book.


||| Who are we? |||

Becker’s Books is one of ’s most beloved independent bookstores, open since 1993. We carry nearly half a million books in-store and online, from affordable used reads to rare and collectible titles. www.beckersbooks.com

My name is Charlie Becker and I am a second-generation bookseller. I’m also developing an AI tool for identifying and cataloging used and rare books. I write about books, independent bookstores, and the future of small business.

04/26/2026

The Black Flame by Stanley G. Weinbaum — Day 24 of 30 Books in 30 Days for the

We take one minute to share one unique used or rare book from our inventory every day, highlighting what it is and a few facts about why it’s interesting.

Today’s book is The Black Flame by Stanley G. Weinbaum, published by Fantasy Press in 1948. Stanley G. Weinbaum published his first science fiction story, “A Martian Odyssey,” in 1934. It was one of the first stories to depict aliens as genuinely alien rather than just humans in costume, and it changed the genre overnight. Isaac Asimov called it a watershed moment for science fiction. Eighteen months later, Weinbaum was dead of lung cancer at thirty-three. His entire career lasted a year and a half. This novel was published posthumously in 1948 by Fantasy Press, a small specialty publisher in Reading, Pennsylvania that put out hardcover editions of stories that had previously only appeared in pulp magazines. This copy still has its original dust jacket with illustrations by A. J. Donnell.


||| Who are we? |||

Becker’s Books is one of ’s most beloved independent bookstores, open since 1993. We carry nearly half a million books in-store and online, from affordable used reads to rare and collectible titles. www.beckersbooks.com

My name is Charlie Becker and I am a second-generation bookseller. I’m also developing an AI tool for identifying and cataloging used and rare books. I write about books, independent bookstores, and the future of small business.

04/25/2026

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley — Day 24 of 30 Books in 30 Days for the

We take one minute to share one unique used or rare book from our inventory every day, highlighting what it is and a few facts about why it’s interesting.

Today’s book is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Bantam Classic edition. Frankenstein the monster is ubiquitous in our culture, but the backstory is possibly even more interesting. Mary Shelley was eighteen years old when she wrote this book. She was at a villa on Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori when Byron proposed they each write a ghost story. Hers is the only story that has survived, and it became the foundation of both science fiction and horror. She was also the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the founders of feminism, who died giving birth to her. This book is a Bantam Classic. Bantam launched its Classics line in 1958 to package canonical literature that was a little more highbrow with scholarly introductions for as little as thirty-five cents. In 1963, Bantam fought a case all the way to the Supreme Court and won, striking down government blacklists of books.


||| Who are we? |||

Becker’s Books is one of ’s most beloved independent bookstores, open since 1993. We carry nearly half a million books in-store and online, from affordable used reads to rare and collectible titles. www.beckersbooks.com

My name is Charlie Becker and I am a second-generation bookseller. I’m also developing an AI tool for identifying and cataloging used and rare books. I write about books, independent bookstores, and the future of small business.

04/24/2026

Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare by Isaac Asimov — Day [ #] of 30 Books in 30 Days for the

We take one minute to share one unique used or rare book from our inventory every day, highlighting what it is and a few facts about why it’s interesting.

Isaac Asimov published nearly five hundred books across virtually every category of the Dewey Decimal System. He is best known for science fiction — Foundation, I Robot — but he also wrote guides to the Bible, Greek mythology, physics, history, and humor. This is his play-by-play companion to all of Shakespeare’s works, and it’s organized differently from most Shakespeare guides. Instead of grouping the plays as tragedies, comedies, and histories, Asimov organized them geographically — Greek, Roman, Italian, and English — and arranged them in chronological order of the events they depict, not when Shakespeare wrote them. He included maps, traced characters across multiple plays, and noted how much of each play is real history versus invention.


||| Who are we? |||

Becker’s Books is one of Houston’s most beloved independent bookstores, open since 1993. We carry nearly half a million books in-store and online, from affordable used reads to rare and collectible titles. www.beckersbooks.com

My name is Charlie Becker and I am a second-generation bookseller. I’m also lso developing an AI tool for identifying and cataloging used and rare books. I write about books, independent bookstores, and the future of small business.

12/25/2025

12/13/2025

CHRISTMAS IN THE STACKS

This was the view from the back corner at the end of the night. In the right foreground, you can see a small part of the “sunburst” design.

This past Monday was Becker’s Books’ thirty-first annual holiday open house. We used to call it the “Christmas Party,” but seven or eight years ago, I invited a bunch of my friends in their mid-to-late twenties. They got really dressed up, brought dates, and then ended up just standing around eating snacks on the deck outside in the quiet. I realized then that “Holiday Open House” sets a better expectation, though we still call it the Christmas party amongst ourselves.

The party is currently the only event that we do at the bookstore—no readings, signings, or sales—and it is one of the major milestones of my year. In fact, when I wrote A Pilgrimage for Book People, the essay that first connected me with a sizable chunk of you, I wrote a long passage about this party that eventually got cut from the final draft. It feels right to share it now:

“There were two annual bookstore events which were the anchors of my childhood years more so than any holiday. The first was the bookstore’s Christmas party. Every year, my Mom and Dad would frantically clean the store for a few days leading up to the party. The day of and day before, my Dad baked dozens of cookies, brownies, and cakes. Together with my Mom, he also prepared an eclectic menu of snacks and hors d’oeuvres that included Swedish meatballs, turkey and dressing, green chile enchiladas, chile con queso, and mixed nuts.

This menu was built from a series of last-minute decisions in past years when my parents realized we didn’t have enough food so they made whatever they had on hand. The additional item would invariably be a hit, so the guests came to expect it the following Christmas. When I moved home from college, the bookstore Christmas party was where I brought new friends to meet my family... The Christmas party was a homecoming because, to me, the bookstore was my home.”

It is a little melodramatic, but it was a first draft. In the three years since I wrote that, things have changed. This year, I invited fewer friends. But my childhood best friend is now a part-time employee at the bookstore, and he was there to help set up. Another best friend from graduate school came with his daughter who is the same age as mine.

This is the biggest difference from years past: the kids. My daughter is about to turn four and my son is about to turn one. It is delightful in a surreal way to see my daughter running up and down the Mystery aisle—the longest unbroken hallway in the store—or thudding up and down the carpeted ramp that connects “US Presidents” to “US History.”

All night, whenever she wasn’t playing, I would introduce her to someone who would wave or shake her hand and say something sweet. Then my daughter would giggle and run off and stuff her face with one of my Dad’s brownies. And I would turn around and someone thirty years older than me will say something to me like, “I’ve been coming here for twenty-five years. I’ve known you since you were a kid,” and it’s wild to think that some of the people I introduced my daughter to might be saying the same to her someday.

For many of these people, I will only see them once a year at this very party. The people who find themselves at the party are special and usually make their mark. I can sit and think of all the different characters who have come through the store: what they liked to read, what they liked to eat. I can see them on the walls and in the decor.

In the backyard sitting area is a beautiful “sunburst” pattern on the ground. One former “employee” was also the head landscape architect for one of Houston’s biggest parks traded landscape design services to my parents for store credit at the bookstore. He used only leftover materials we had lying around and designed a beautiful, thirty-foot-wide sitting area that has a circle in the middle with bricks and brick pieces radiating out in every direction like sunrays. Everybody who sees it can’t resist saying something about it being beautiful or delightful.

That’s not the only mark he left on the Becker family. He was a bachelor who rarely cooked for himself, and one night we invited him over for a home-cooked dinner. And three times in fifteen minutes, when someone else said something tasted good, he chimed in with, “sure beats macaroni and cheese.” We laughed hard the third time he said it, and he did too when he realized he’d repeated himself. “Sure beats macaroni and cheese” became a running joke in my family, for when you want to say something in good spirits but you’re a little out of it. After family stories, the vast majority of background color and inside jokes that my family shares come from people like him.

Despite all the memories we make, we don’t make a lot of money during the Christmas party. That’s not to say nobody buys anything. My good friend (who brought his daughter) said he and his brother count Charlie Munger as a huge inspiration—Munger, in turn, counted Benjamin Franklin as an inspiration, so my friend bought matching copies of Poor Richard’s Almanack in a beautiful slipcase to give one to his brother and to keep the other.

There’s one woman who works a day and a half a week at the bookstore, and this was the first year in a while she wasn’t the person “working the register” during the party, but she did show up to buy a book. While I was working the register this year, a younger guy also said he saw the post for the party on Facebook, and also while he was checking out told me that he subscribed to my blog (hey, by the way).

My Dad said something kind of funny to me the other day when we were debriefing the Christmas party, as I complained a little about having to clean up some mess that was there before the party: “If you’re in a used bookstore and it’s not a little messy, it’s not likely to be a very good bookstore.” There’s something counterintuitive—rebellious, even—to a place like a used bookstore. It’s messy and a little disorganized. It’s not convenient, or frictionless, or “one-click,” or “hassle-free.” But I think that’s kind of the point.

My Dad also told me that, contrary to new bookstores or what people might think, “churn” is an overrated idea for used book inventory. It’s a good idea for a book to sit for a long time after you load it into inventory. You shouldn’t be trying to get rid of stuff. (Later that day, I was driving around and he sent me a picture of a book he had pulled for an online order. “I probably put this on the shelf almost thirty years ago,” he told me. He was selling it for $150.)

One of the last things my Dad said in that conversation was that “we have to do the Christmas party every year.” I was a little surprised. He has strong opinions about how to run the store, but I always thought the Christmas party was a bonus event, like a fun afterthought. He generally doesn’t care too much about parties, sales, etc., which is a big reason why we don’t do other events (in addition to them not making money).

As I watched my daughter that night, chocolate on her face, weaving between the same people who watched me grow up, I understood though. The party isn’t separate from the bookstore’s mission: it is the mission, made visible. Some books sit for decades waiting for their person. There are some people I see only once a year, but they know they’re always welcome there. The messiness of the store, the eclectic menu, the thirty-year-old inventory—it’s all part of the same truth: some things are worth preserving, just because they are.

Subscribed

Man! It has been a minute. Anybody who writes “advice” for bloggers on Substack says, “don’t comment on your absence when you don’t write for a while, nobody will notice,” but I have trouble believing them.

I had to pause due to an unexpectedly busy professional transition, but that has calmed down, so in the new year, I will be writing much more often and also launching a “show.” Over the next few weeks, I plan to write a “wrap up of 2025” and “looking to 2026” type post where I detail the plans for the blog, bookstore, podcast, and AI project.

Here are a few things I read and enjoyed recently:
On the Beach by Ross Barkan - Ross is a novelist and political writer who I think is one of the most interesting and influential “native Substackers” on the platform—in that he writes and promotes mostly here. Everything he writes is good, but this is an exceptionally compelling and poignant story about his relationships with his father and how it is (and isn’t) reflected in his recent novel, Glass Century (which I bought as a result of reading this essay).

To my best belief: just what is the pragmatic theory of truth? by Cheryl Misak - This is a great, short essay about a heady philosophical topic I’ve been thinking a lot about over the last few years. I’ve been trying to reconcile my belief in a capital-T metaphysical truth with the multiplicity of possible interpretations and the evolving nature of objective reality, and found that Pragmatism has a lot of good answers. This short article punches way above its weight class in giving background on this dialogue.

The Muppet Christmas Carol is the best movie ever made. by Marcus Pittman - I mean, I don’t really need to explain this one, I don’t think. I think The Muppet Christmas Carol is probably in the top two Christmas movies with It’s a Wonderful Life, and this essay does a good job making the case.

Nick Catucci: Mischief is one of the most important things by Ethan from Human Pursuits. This is a great interview with the US site director for GQ. It’s good if you’re a writer or content creator or just generally curious about how culture gets made and shared on the internet, the value of gatekeeping, how to put yourself out there, etc.

Becker's Books is a family-owned used and rare bookstore offering titles in over seventy genres, Houston Texas.