Read everything the library has, then ILL titles and visit other libraries when they run out. Worked great as a kid, but not so much as an adult with limited free time.
Read the classics. The famous, seminal works of each genre that everyone agrees are excellent and make it onto the mainstream must-read lists. There's a reason those titles get roped into the cultural canon, but the list of classics is finite. Most of those authors are dead. They won't be writing more and one day I'll run out. They're also only a tiny fraction of what's out there.
Collect recommendations from friends and folks I know have similar tastes. My friends have excellent taste and haven't steered me wrong yet, but sometimes I want to read trash.
And recently I've added another technique to the rotation. What I've been doing more and more lately is choosing books based on pure aesthetics, literally judging them by their covers. It's worked like a charm.
When I'm looking at shelves of books, usually in a used bookstore but also in libraries, I scan over the titles and apply this criteria:
1 Cover: Is cheesy vintage art. The hand-painted oils that we know and love old pulps for.
2 Spine text: Is a dated typeface, custom font with unique graphic flourishes and bits (maybe even a graphic itself, the fancy title text from the cover taken off and resized to fit the spine), or is the bare bones sans-serif small caps of standardized mass market pulp from the 60s to 80s. (No matter what the font is, the spine itself should be bent and worn. a spine without any signs of wear is a red flag.)
*The order of 1 and 2 are interchangeable depending on how the books are displayed on the shelves and which is visible first.
3 Title: The cornier the better. I love a sincere yet ultra-dramatic, overwrought, and ultimately goofy title. A terse no-frills title that pulls on core pulp imagery like 'The Sword and the [X]' is good too.
4 Blurb: Read the synopsis and hook paragraph in the front matter to see how it presents itself and if the premise is interesting.
5 Text sample: Open to a random page and read a bit to evaluate the writing quality, because sometimes it really is bad.
6 Price: Unless it's desperately intriguing and exciting, has to be $5 or less.
7 Smell: If there's even a hint of mildew/old book stank it goes back on the shelf. (Mildew can spread to other books and doesn't belong in my collection.)
If a book clears all seven stages it comes home with me. I'll also check if it's part of a series and grab any of the other books that are there too.
Now there's a caveat. I'm specifically looking for old obscure fantasy, sci-fi, weird fiction, and horror. This method works for that because it's scanning for the quirks of the publishing industry's style and trade dress used in those genres during that time period. It's incredible for finding mass-market paperbacks from that segment but gets less effective if you move to other genres and eras.
It's been invaluable in helping me scour shelves and find things I've enjoyed reading that I'd never have found through the regular channels of book recommendations and discovery.
There are so many books that are good and have just fallen out of the public eye over time. Ones that aren't considered sci-fi/fantasy classics, don't make people's must-read lists, and are fading from the cultural consciousness as the decades pass and new titles eclipse them. It doesn't matter how popular a book was when it was originally published if it's been out of print for over 30 years, and that's the situation of most of the books I find.
They're out of print, no one's talked about them in literal decades, and the medium of a mass market paperback is too delicate to survive that long circulating in a library's collection. The only way I'd realistically have a chance of encountering them is by stumbling across a used copy in a bookstore. This criteria gives me a way to do that smoothly and sift through shelves fast to find and grab these books before they fully evaporate into obscurity.
Give it a try. Go to bookstores, library book sales, estate and garage sales, anywhere with a random mix of old books en masse and search. Don't spurn $1 book/clearance/last chance carts and tables either. You're looking for the cheesy pulp that everyone missed was gold. See what you find.
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