How far will we drive for a book fair? Well, friends and readers, that answer now stands at 65 miles one way, as Saturday we travelled to Greenville, Illinois, home of FCI Greenville and a small contingent of housing on the Illinois prairie. Heather found a book fair listing on BookSaleFinder.com, the only nearby book fair for any number of weeks, so we packed up the baby for his first long car trip and went. Heather printed out a set of directions from MapQuest and failed to actually retain names of the location of the book fair or the name of the group hosting the book fair. Still, I won’t knock her navigational abilities nor the wisdom of working from MapQuest directions too much since we did actually get there alive.
We got there about 30 minutes after the starting time, and no one was in the gymnasium of the church. Apparently, the ad said the fair would include 40,000 books, and perhaps it did; however, nothing really tempted me, and for the first time, Heather bought more books than I did:
Among my choice purchases:
- Milwaukee America Kalendar 1924, a 1924 almanac/calendar in German printed by George Brunder. It contains a number of tables, days with lines where you can write in whatever you need to remember for that day, and advertisements. It was printed in Milwaukee, so even though I cannot read it, I had to have it.
- Beggars in Spain, a novel by Nancy Kress. She writes a column on fiction for Writer’s Digest (or did when I took the magazine), so I want to see what she writes.
- How to Play Blues Harmonica, a videocassette. I already have the hat and several harmonicas.
- Solved!, a collection of true crime pieces by mystery authors.
- Dave Barry’s Guide to End All Gift Guides.
And a couple other things. Books and cassettes were only 65 cents, and I couldn’t find much to tempt me. Heather, on the other hand, raided the religious books section and carried off a number of Dr. James Dobson titles. Hmm, one of those is Love Must Be Tough: New Hope for Marriage in Crisis. I wonder if we’re going to have a talk soon.
Probably about my commentary on her navigational abilities.
