Your best bet will be “friends of the library” book sales.
My library has gone to crap. Big horrible childrens book section. Absolutely zero practical information books. A bunch of non-value added biz and general history stuff...and whatever the fiction genre of the year is.
They don’t even have scanned versions of historical newspapers and magazines....no microfiche and not even digital versions.
I find great value buying a bag of books for pennies on the dollar from all the stuff donated that they don’t want to keep. My library has surpassed 25k books (~10% paperback) and I ran out of room years ago. The best books are the oldest ones...I specifically target anything pre-1960 these days.
I have not read an abundance of such works, but those I have are typically invoking the technology of those days which to me make takes away the timelessness of what such works could have been.
Even Rand's Atlas Shrugged relies heavily on radio even as television was completely taking over the mass media. She simply blew that off, not to mention the emphasis on railways even as passenger air travel was growing exponentially. It was a time of transition.
Still, the obsession with Communism and its tentacles was palpable everywhere. A few years ago I finally got the Whitaker Chambers book ‘Witness’ but wouldn't you know it my vision went south. It took me several weeks to have the cataract surgery. Gosh was that great.
My vision became as if I were 12 years old again but somehow I never again borrowed (yet) the book. Soon enough. I am done with Kindle, my latest one has barely been used and it locked up on me months ago, inexplicably. I refuse to deal with this shit any longer. I will go back to paper. My local library is part of a big network, so I can get anything pretty much, and it truly is not very far away, easily walkable.
Ya, but how many of them have you read?