I’ve fallen down on showing the oozing sores of my sickness, incessant and sometimes indiscriminate book acquisition. Maybe you thought that the state of the world has left me too depressed to go buy cheap books. Au contraire. Here are the results from four book fairs we’ve attended recently.
We went to a church in Lafayette Square, and it was bag day or pay a donation day or something. Regardless, we got a few:
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Some highlights include:
- Several old Macintosh and Commodore 64 computer books.
- Elements of Style, a copy to give someone.
- Several eastern nation history books.
- Two books I saw yesterday and almost bought: For the Love of Benji and Everyone Else Must Fail.
- The novelization of the movie Krull.
- A Philip K. Dick book, Our Friends from Frolix 8.
- Allan Quatermain.
- The Freddie Prinze Story. I think I’m volunteering to keep his memory alive. His son is on his own.
Total books bought: 60
Then, we went to the Kirkwood Book Fair and I got this:
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Highlights:
- A book of Currier and Ives prints.
- Supercarrier, the novelization of the television series or the book the television series was based on.
- A copy of The Lonely Ocean. This is the first instance of this book you’ll see here because unlike For the Love of Benji and Everyone Else Must Fail, I could not resist.
- Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby. If I had seen them separately, I wouldn’t have bought them, but they were right next to each other. Does that make sense? That’s a rhetorical question.
- Democracy in America.
- A copy of The Octogonal Heart, a story about living in a local house.
Total books bought: 60 again.
I cannot recollect where this next book fair was. But I gots some books.
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Highlights:
- Another gifting copy of The Elements of Style.
- One Knee Equals Two Feet, a book about football by John Madden.
- Life in the Age of Charlemagne. Sure, he was French, but he was the Magne.
- Two books by Leon Uris, Trinity and Mila 18 because my mother-in-law asks me every couple of months if I’ve read anything by him. In a couple years, I will have.
- A bound copy of the Constitution. Before it becomes contraband.
- Teddy Bare, an old indictment of Teddy Kennedy. Came out right after Chappaquiddick.
Total books: 32
Then, yesterday, we went to the St. Charles Book Fair. I bought:
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Goodness. Highlights:
- A pile of paperback novelizations and novel sources for films, including Outland, The Taking of Pellham 1 2 3, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Meatballs, and others.
- A series by Jack Chalker. If they had them all, I said, I’d buy them. And I did. Which series? Hell if I know. I’ve shelved them and won’t find them for a decade now.
- A couple of Classics Club books that I did not already have, honey. Give me some credit. Even for a happy accident such as this.
- A Patrick O’Brian Master and Commander novel, The Ionian Mission. Seeing it made me slow down looking for others, but all I found was the first novel with Russell Crowe’s face on it.
- Past Imperfect, a book about the study of history. I had also seen the Joan Collins autobiography of the same name, and when I unpacked the boxes at home, I feared in my bookzerker frenzy I’d bought the Collins book. Even I cannot explain why it happens, but I recognize it would not have been outside the realm of possibility that I’d bought it.
- A single volume of three Heinlein novels. I was looking specifically for Heinlein novels, and I found some. And some others that were not Heinlein.
- Star Trek Memories and Star Trek Movie Memories by Shatner. Because they had both near each other, like the Ira Levin books mentioned previously.
- The Hungry Ocean, again. The next time I look tempted, someone tell me I already own all of Linda Greenlaw’s books.
- A Ross MacDonald book, The Goodbye Look.
- Two Walter Mosley books.
- Two Sandford novels I didn’t recognize. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t read them and that I don’t own them. It just means that I didn’t recognize the ritualistic killing depicted on the jacket flaps.
- A hardback copy of I’m No Hero to replace a paperback I’d bought previously.
- A two record set of Shirley Bassey’s greatest hits. I blame Mark Steyn and the old Red 104.1.
Total books bought in the two hours: 91. And some calories burned lugging books.
Total bought for the month: 243. Or, to put it in perspective, 2 years and a couple months’ worth of reading.
If you need another suggestion for your (now-burgeoning) Bassey collection, The Remix Album: Diamonds Are Forever is quite a bit of fun. If you wear a tux while listening to it, it sorta makes you feel like a dot-com era James Bond.