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Best place to buy $200 worth of art books for $70 New England Mobile Book Fair manager Jon Strymish's father started wholesaling books to schools and libraries when he lost his job back in the mid 1900s. He also sold books -- at school "book fairs" -- out of the back of a station wagon. So the NEMBF name makes sense, even though it's clear that the sprawling 40,000-square-foot retail warehouse on Newton's traffic-hellish Needham Street isn't going anywhere. NEMBF still works the wholesale/education book market, but even if you're looking for something less specific than, say, 200 copies of America: Its Land and Its People, you can't go wrong here. Strymish buys books from hundreds of sources -- direct from publishers (for new titles) and through untold combinations of middlemen (for remainders and overstock). NEMBF is something of a retailing Luddite; in the back room, they still use typewriters. Titles are arranged (on, Strymish boasts, "badly labeled shelves," which have been a Book Fair trademark for as long as he can remember) by publisher. That's a holdover from NEMBF's wholesale days, and it makes shopping something of a challenge. But the discounts -- 20 to 30 percent on new titles; anywhere from 50 to 90 percent on older ones -- make the browsing and backtracking worth the effort. That's especially true if you're buying high-priced art and photo books. In addition to (and often shelved amid) a wide selection of fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and school texts, NEMBF offers an impressive stock of monographs, art-history anthologies, scenic "pretty picture" gift books, and photo-documentary collections. Hefty volumes (some slightly damaged; some in their original shrink-wrap) of works by artists from Renoir to R. Crumb, Weegee to Richard Avedon can be had for a fraction of their cover prices. And the selection's broad enough to fill out anyone's gift list -- Kodachromes of Maine lighthouses for grandpa; a punk-rock scrapbook for the kids. New England Mobile Book Fair, 82-84 Needham Street, Newton, (617) 527-5817.
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