One of my favorite films starring my favorite actor, Johnny Depp, was Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate. It was a fascinating film about rare books, the occult and a devil in love.
In the movie, occult obsessed Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) hires Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) to track down two copies of The Nine Gates of the Shadow Kingdom. Perhaps he should have googled Abebooks!
My experience from Abebooks came after I learned that The Ninth Gate was based on a book by Edward Duarte: The Club Dumas. This book was readily available at my local library. It too, was a fascinating book. I learned about the real relationship between the girl who followed Depp's character Dean Corso by reading The Club Dumas. It was strongly hinted that she was the devil. In one chapter of the book, the girl gave Corso a very rare 17th Century Book by Jacques Cazotte, a French author, entitled The Devil in Love. Cazotte, the author, was later beheaded. I found out that this book was real as was the demise of the author. Many ideas in the Club Dumas, and thus the Ninth Gate were in part inspired by this 17th century fantastique novel. I set out in search of an English translation of The Devil in Love. My local library networks encompassing a huge chunk of Massachusetts? No. Barnes and Noble? No. Borders Book Stores? No. E-Bay, Craigs List? No and No. Download from the internet? No. I finally found a copy for sale at Abebooks.
Abebooks
Abebooks, simply put is a website that allows one to buy and sell rare or hard to obtain books. By searching for The Devil in Love, this site, and only this site came up with a copy for sale. The site was easy to navigate. It said where the seller was from and the conditon that the book was in. I got a good condition hardcover book that did have an inscription written on the inside jacket. On the home page, you can search for your desired book by title, author, keyword or even ISBN number. I searched by title and found the book translated to English. There was only one seller and one copy, but that is all that I needed. The other copies were in French which did me little good, since I am not fluent in French. See the website for yourself, its Abebooks.com
Once I completed the simple registration process to use Abebooks, I was able to order the book and was given a choice of reasonable shipping rates. Three dollars got standard shipping (up to ten business days), and five got expidited shipping (3 to 5 business days). I chose expidited and soon checked out via a credit card payment. Almost immediately, I got an e-mail confirming my order. Within 24 hours, I got an e-mail saying my order had been processed and within 48 hours another e-mail saying that my book had been shipped. Indeed within 3 days, I recieved a bulky bubble wrapped package at my post office. Exactly as described within the website, I received one hard copy book with an inscription on the inside jacket of Jaques Cazottes 17th Century novel, The Devil in Love translated by Stephen Sartarelli. I am half way through the book, as of this review of the website. (It is quite fascinating)
I do get occasionaly e-mails from Abebooks now telling me of books on sale or specials that the company is having, but only on occasion, and not enough to be considered junk mail or a nuisance.
Summary
I was pleased with the service, quality and overall experience that I had with Abebooks. They had a book that NOONE else had, and they were able to deliver it to me as promised. I highly recommend Abebooks for obtaining that book you can't find anywhere else. For the record, The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows was unavailable.
