The thing I miss most about school is the university library. I used to spend lots of time reading old books and papers about computer science (and other subjects). It's hard to find those things at Barnes & Noble. -- Kris Johnson
Depending on your interests you may find some really good sources of these on the internet:
MIT AI Lab publications:
www.ai.mit.edu 
. A good starting point is ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/classic-hits/
Cite Seer:
citeseer.nj.nec.com . Search engine for CS papers and references/bibliographies.
Alibris:
www.alibris.com . Second hand book store, where you can often find out-of-print books that you want and buy them cheap.
Manuscripts of Ew Dijkstra:
www.cs.utexas.edu , from the 60s up to the present.
Henry Baker's archive of research papers:
linux.rice.edu .
Dennis Ritchie's homepage:
www.cs.bell-labs.com . Various Unix-related papers.
Some collected papers from various authors on Richard Fateman's website:
www.cs.berkeley.edu
Move to any big city! You'll have plenty of university libraries to choose from, and all the other great cultural elements as well.
See original on c2.com