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I know that, in the Palladium setting, spells should be relatively uncommon - it's not like every merchant in every podunk little village is going to have entire libraries of spell books turning up - but if we assume for a moment that you DID have a hypothetical merchant who sold magic spells, what kind of percentages should I be looking at per level? Basically what I want to be able to do as the GM is roll random percentages for loot and merchant's inventories, and weight things so that the lower level spells are much more likely to appear than the higher level spells (with the proviso that no Spell of Legend, or spell book from the Library of Bletherad, should appear anywhere in random loot drops or merchants). Obviously a level 1 spell should be much more widely available than a level 15 spell, which should be incredibly rare and feel like a major find when it turns up. I'm thinking of having some kind of spell book exist, and having different numbers of spells per "quality" of spell book (a small notebook might only have one or two, a Grimoire might have a ton of spells, and in any given spell book, lower level spells would appear more commonly). I know there was an article in a Rifter once on spell books, but... it was great flavour text but honestly I kind of found it useless for figuring out how spell books might work in-game, in a practical sense. If I go with the spell-book option, then if I'm ever creating my own setting then I can keep the relative percentages for spells the same, and then just make the actual books more or less common, depending on how widely magic is practiced.

From what I have read, I think that ordinary merchants selling books that actually write out how to cast a spell, that a wizard could learn from, are extremely rare to the point of being almost unheard of in the Palladium World. Wizards don't write down spell formulas (quote: "to write a spell down [is] pure folly, making it and him vulnerable to others"). Even magic guilds or the Library of Bletherad don't have spell formula books available. "Spell books" are not mentioned under the section in the main book on learning magic - in fact, I'm not even sure you can learn magic just from a book.

If you want to purchase spell knowledge, you probably need to visit an alchemist. Alchemists are very protective of their niche market, and don't take kindly to ordinary merchants muscling in on their business. For percentage chance of spells being available from alchemists (or anywhere else), I tend to adopt the percentage availability of scrolls, included in the main book (page 248): Levels 1-7: 40% chance of being available, Levels 8-12: 25% chance, 13 or higher 12% chance. I hope that helps!

Scrolls (from alchemists) and Priests are the way most of my players get new spells. The enemy Wizards do have spell books but tend to hide them.

Rule of thumb:

For common spells (i.e. anything in the PH), subtract 3 times the level from 30%; that's the chance of an alchemist having any given spell, but add 1% per level as a wizard and 2% per level as an alchemist...

So a 1st level alchemist, who is at least a 6th level wizard, will have about 35% chance of any given 1st level spell... 30 + 6 (wizard) +2 (alchemist) -3 (1st level spell).

Once you start getting 7th or 8th level, the chances really drop, unless it's a high level alchemist. And that is just "has the spell" not "will teach you the spell."