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If it was a healthy record store with a decent used selection (i.e. not Tower), one could usually find them within the rest of the records. Or if one was out on the floor and a customer asked for it, that would lead to more titles "behind the counter".
As a kid who had parents who loved swap meets and flea markets, both were hot spots for bootlegs. In fact, when I was 10 or 11, I clearly remember one dealer at the Kam Super Swap Meet with about three or four boxes of nothing but Rolling Stones bootlegs, sold wide open to the public. I would ask my parents sometimes for records people were selling, but they were 50 cents to a dollar. These boots are $8+, I asked and my parents immediately said NO.
There was also mail order. "Rolling Stone" had always been known for their great classified section, and if one person was selling a rarity, that would be the person to send money to. In the late 70's and early 80's, one could buy boots from German or Italian dealers.
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As someone mentioned, cassette trading was another way too, which continued up until the late 90's, as CD burners became cheaper and more affordable. But there were collectors who would trade tapes and you had to deal with B+P (blanks plus postage) or whatever rules one would need to obey to get what you wanted. If you wanted something that looked professional or at least was pressed on vinyl, then once you found a place that sold one, you'd want more and somehow you would be "in the know". The old term was "vinyl is final", so while cassette trading was more convenient for years, many wanted to see the records look like those made by the big boys. It also helped that the bootleggers were pressing their records at the same plants the majors were, and those who had an eye and knowledge of record pressings would figure out where they were being made. In fact, in a book I read on bootlegging, one of the biggest bootleg labels of the 1970's was run by a woman, and no one questioned her simply because she was "the female music fan".
The bootleg industry was run as an "after hours" industry. The threat was that the boots were ripping off from the actual industry. Truth is, most bootlegs barely caused a dent. Most boots were pressed up between 500 to 2500 copies, and 2500 was "high end". With top names like The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Bruce Springsteen, some titles would and did go as high as 10,000, if not more. Now, compare 10,000 copies of a bootleg to an album on Atlantic that sold 4,000,000. But the threat of the police caused a bit of paranoia, and maybe made things worse than what it truly was. Bootlegs were for the avid/diehard fans, not for the casual music fan who listens to the radio religiously. As technology changed, so did the threat, from the first bootleg CD's to the introduction of the MP3 in 1995 or so.
What was also a threat was the content. For years, bootleggers would obtain live recordings, and that tradition had been going on since the early days of jazz and classical music. Then some would record performances off the radio and press them up. What made major labels paranoid was when bootleggers obtained unreleased recordings that were believed to be "locked up in the vaults". Outtakes, alternate takes were now in demand, and if those could surface, what else could? That's what made labels panic: the fact that someone would control and obtain what they felt they could make money from, even though that had no intention of ever releasing what the artist would feel was "crap".
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