A lot of you who have been either pulp and cartoon art enthusiasts, photography lovers, and just plain lovers of beautiful books have known about Bud's for a while. Some of you publishers have used Bud's to showcase some of your best pulp reprints.
I guess I missed the memo when Bud announced this in his December catalog. December was a blur for me. I just noticed the announcement on the cover of the current "Farewell" issue. Besides the nails in the coffins that places like amazon and ABEbooks.com have put in the coffin of most mail-order businesses, Bud writes in his farewell letter:
I know that a great many of you are not buying online and depend on us for your books. I've been getting many letters and phone messages from customers about this. But there are not enough of you to support the catalogs we produce.
Bud says he was hoping to find a buyer for his online store. Sadly, that has not come to pass, so he will be shutting down the online business as well. That is not going to happen immediately, and I noticed that there are a lot of books on the website that are not offered in the catalog.
Go to BudsArtBooks.com to see their current offerings online. I couldn't find any information about the closing of the business on the website, but if you go to Bud's Blog (on the bar at the top) there is a post there from last year announcing the sale of the company.
For now, the Farewell Issue of the catalog has some steep discounts on a lot of books, which must be his liquidation inventory. In any event, if you want to buy some books at deep discounts, get a hold of the last issue of this great tradition (Bud's Art Books has been in business for 42 years), and take part in something that is quickly disappearing from our lives: the book catalog.
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4 comments:
I used to get alot of book catalogs in the mail, including Bud Plant's catalog, which was enormous. Now, because of the internet and online ordering, these catalogs are just about finished.
Before the internet my want list was so large that I couldn't fit it in my pocket. Now, I have found just about all my wants because of ebay, abebooks, amazon, online ordering, etc.
I missed the announcement in my latest Bud Plant mailings.
I knew Bud when he was a college boy, though I haven't seen him for ages. Does this mean he'll no longer issue catalogues but still have a mail order business, or is he shutting down everything?
From what I could determine, the catalog business is going away now. The online business will stick around for a while but will eventually go away.
Thanks for the answer, Laurie. Speaking of catalogues, when we moved into this house we were getting all the catalogues of the former occupants. And I doubt they bought anything except groceries at a store. There were dozens every week, and nothing I cared to have. I finally wrote a post card to every company that was sending a catalogue asking them to remove me from their list. It worked.
Now, we get innundated with garbage because my wife was unwary enough to send a check to an animal welfare place.I hate sucker lists.
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