Sourcing Obscure Titles
 

I've been on the hunt for several Beta books for some time to add to my library, but am having some problems finding some of them in even the best of archives (i.e. university libraries dedicated to fraternity literature). Can anyone make recommendations on how to acquire the following titles?

Beta Allegories (Baker/Scheetz)
Beta Life (Shepardson)
Beta Leaflets (Chandler)
Fraternity Studies (Baird)
Forty Years of Fraternity Legislation (Baird)
The Mystics and Beta Theta Pi (Fischer)

I'd settle for digitized copies in cases where that didn't represent a violation of copyright. Thanks in advance for ideas on how to source these books.

Have you contacted General Fraternity yet? They might be able to help point you to good sources or perhaps let you have some images of pages. I would expect you might need to go there and make copies yourself, but worth asking. Plus the Historian might be able to notify you in the future if a Beta or relative of a deceased Beta calls them looking to sell or donate their Beta book collection. If any one place is going to be a likely recipient of such phone calls- it is Oxford.

Also, do you ever use abebooks.com? I just did a quick search and did not find these titles but found quite a few Beta books. It is mostly Son of the Stars and music books, but there was also a real treasure trove of books issued by individual chapters which would be quite rare in the open market. I buy for my own use and education a lot of single edition- and thus often out of print- books and catalogues for painters whose work I study- and abebooks has been my best resource to find rare editions at good prices. When you get into the more obscure areas, abebooks can sometimes have a better selection and more competitive prices than amazon.

Beyond that, it never hurts to keep an eye on eBay. Lots of fraternal material comes up there and since there is such a limited audience for many fraternity books, it is more likely that something like what you seek would come up there when someone cleans house versus coming to market through a book dealer. eBay is where you can find such things on occasion for a real song. Good example on the art side- I picked up Gustav Klimt's rare 1968 catalogue raisonne on eBay last fall for about half the going rate from a book dealer. And that is a book in very high demand. For something more obscure like a Beta book, your savings should be even greater if you have the patience to search every week.

Beta books have recently become an interest of mine, too!

These will likely be hard to find. I even tried finding them on alibris and didn't have any luck.