WellAtMidnight

I think it's a generic requirement for college towns to point out the number of used bookstores they have (that and the number of bars, but that's another story). A few years back, when I was visiting Bumfsck as a prospective grad student, I was told that this town had the most bookstores per capita of some geographical region (I don't remember if it was the state, northeast, or specifically what).
This may be true, if you count bookstores that have gone out of business, and ignore the fact that most of the bookstores, particularly the used bookstores, are crap (or if everybody had left town that day...). Which is to say, the selection of books available is basically the same in all of them. Unfortunately, that selection is mostly of no interest.
In Hyde park, there were several bookstores. One had good philosophy books, another had good fiction or humor books, and a third had good used math books (none had good programming books, but that was easily taken care of by a ride on the Metra). Here, if I want good math books, I'm basically screwed. Same for good philosophy books. If I'm looking for fiction or humor, then I'm alright. There are more computer books available, but most of them are 1 how-to guides for programs or operating systems I don't use, or 2 language guides for programming languages I have no use for (AK anything that can't be used for data processing on Unix).
There is a fairly good used booksale a few times a year though. It's a good place to pick up fortran books (apparently borders and barnes&nobel think that nobody uses fortran anymore), but that's about it. I've given up on finding any manuals for the particular unix variant I use most of the time, because it's basically obsolete (in the sense that the manufacturer is trying to forget it exists...Unfortunately, it's still the best available option).