The Book Sale

Yesterday I went to the giant book sale at our local public library.  Well, giant for our small town.  It's always a great sale -- no entrance fee, and lots of great books, some in new or nearly new condition.  That said, I'm already thinking I've gleaned this sale for all it's worth.  This was my third time going, and I found fewer things right off the bat than I did the last two times.  I also saw many books that I had picked up previously.  If I ever want to build a larger fiction collection, though, this is the place to go.  There are thousands of paperbacks and hardbacks in many genres (although I think the scifi and fantasy sections are probably pretty thin).  I did get a couple of Jan Karon books, as we already have some and I'd like to complete the series.  I got a Sherlock Holmes anthology, because those stories are timeless classics.  I also picked up The Kite Runner, The Time Traveler's Wife, and Life of Pi.  (One person's New York Times best-seller list is another's person's fiction collection five years down the road.)  Otherwise, it was hit-and-miss as far as my fiction buys.  I didn't come with a list, and that was a mistake.  However, we have had some fiction donated, and it's always an area in which it's easy to get cheap books.  So building the fiction collection wasn't a priority this time.  In fact, not much was a priority, since I've been so busy I've barely had time to think.  I went in not as prepared to shop as I could have been, but figured this sale is always worth going to.  I was right.

Shopping at a book sale is fun but stressful.  You have to get there before the doors open, because dealers and rabid (I use that word somewhat kindly) book lovers will grab the best items.  There's not much time to ponder your choices.  But at 25 cents to 4 dollars a book (with most at the lower end), mistakes aren't terribly costly.  I scored one great find: Commager's Documents of American History, the one-volume 8th edition, which one of our instructors had requested.  Only 50 cents, and in great shape.  I picked up a newer edition of Fowler's, which probably isn't as good as the older one we have but was worth getting for, again, 50 cents.  Also in the history section: a paperback of The Federalist Papers, Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment, and Supreme Conflict.  I got lots of medical stories, which is a genre our faculty have asked for: How Doctors Think, Saving Millie, Losing My Mind, The Blood of Strangers, And the Band Played On.  I only got one self-help book, a genre I usually score big on at this sale: Oprah's Live Your Best Life.  I had passed it up at the last sale, and when I got back to the library I saw why my original instincts were right: there's a section on sex with a photo of a nude couple in a coital embrace.  Nothing adults can't handle, but I certainly don't want to go to the mat over an Oprah title, especially when it's only peripherally relevant to our collection.  So I ate the $4 expense and am thinking maybe I'll keep it under my mattress as a lumpy reminder to be more careful next time.

Otherwise, I got very little for myself: a paperback of The Catechism of the Catholic Church (another of my "lost" books) and Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point (which I might end up donating to our library after I read it).  I resisted the $8 Dorothy L. Sayers-edited one-volume Omnibus of Crime again -- I've seen it at previous sales -- as well as many Best American Essays collections. I'm a sucker for essays and would just sit around getting nothing done if I bought one of those.  I looked for essays by David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, but I couldn't find any (although I did see, again, multiple copies of The Corrections).  Either people are not buying those at all or, if they are, they're not getting rid of them.

All in all, a worthwhile use of my morning.  Now on to catalog what I bought!