ABOUT TOP SHELF BOOKS

Top Shelf Books is a specialty bookseller specializing in collectible Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror hardcover first edition books since 1991.

We started as a mail order bookstore in 1991 in the San Francisco Bay Area. We published catalogs on a quarterly or semi-annual basis. Drafting, printing and mailing catalogs were extremely time consuming. Each catalog was written and edited in Word Perfect in the publishing mode, printed at the local Kinko's shop, assembled into catalog format by page number, address labels applied (printed from another program) and finally stamped with postage and carried in boxes to the Post Office for mailing to our customer list.

Our last catalog before going online was our Spring/Summer 1996 catalog, shown below and dedicated to Allison.

Top Shelf Books was one of the first specialty bookseller to go online. We actually had to create the website, page by page, coding in HTML. Each book's jacket had to be scanned and uploaded.

"This catalog was assembled with WordPerfect 6.0, Corel Illustrator, Internet surfin', Pacific Brew Ale and Blues Traveler albums One and Four. And of course, Allison."