Good Book Hunting: May 24-26, 2008

The Memorial Day weekend provided us with our first post-event chances to add to our library, and we took advantage. By we, I mean, me, mostly.

Saturday, May 24, 2008

On Saturday, we hit a couple of yard sales, including one at Concordia Lutheran Church in Kirkwood, Missouri. This last stop (of 3, as we ease ourselves back into it) had excellent prices (and half off by the time we got there), but the book selection was light, and this is all we got:

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I got:

• A little book of love sonnets.
• A collection of Heathcliff cartoons. He was almost as big as Garfield once, wasn’t he?
• A second copy of On Man in the Universe by Aristotle, Classics Club edition. For a quarter, I had to pick it up as insurance. I’ll pass it onto someone.
• All Quiet on the Western Front because it will bring back fond memories of John Boy getting it.
• Test Your 80s Cultural Literacy, some quiz book Heather picked up for me.
• Rumbles, a nonfiction work by William F. Buckley, Jr.
• Favorite Houseplants in case I ever run out of cats and can grow houseplants.

• All About Pickling in case I actually harvest something this year.
• How to Shop Wisely, part of the Vanderbilt Success Series for Women. I could learn something from it, surely.
• A couple other books whose titles are obscured and I’m too lazy to go check.

A light Saturday, so I had to go out again on Sunday.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Actually, there’s this house on Reavis Barracks Road down in Lemay that has a yard sale on Memorial Day and Labor Day Weekends, so I was going here by habit on Sunday morning. A number of years back, I bought my initial set of Gor paperbacks for a quarter each (and sold them on eBay for gonzo money before trying and liking the series myself). This year, the books for sale were heavy on the Light His Fire titles. I’m sure one could probably make a convincing case on the evolution of that marriage, but I’m not going to.

I got a couple titles for a buck total:

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• Confessions of a Hooker, a book by Bob Hope on golf. Paperback. Which will become relevant in my next post, which you’ve already read.
• Unsolved Murders and Mysteries, a compendium sort of idea book.

Well, that’s nothing, I know, but it means that I’d almost kept pace on the reading for the week versus acquisitions. Well, no, but at least it wasn’t a 1:20 ratio.

Monday, May 26, 2008

Sometime in the last couple of weeks, Heather uncovered an unused Barnes and Noble gift card that we’d bought at Christmas as an extra gift we could give to an unexpected guest that we could use if no such guest appeared. She wanted me to use it on magazines, as I often go into a bookstore and come out with $60 in magazines that I thought looked interesting. However, when I have a gift card, I cannot find any interesting magazines. And since the Barnes and Noble music department had no Aaron Tippin or Sammy Kershaw, I found myself in the Fiction section, letter H.

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• Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill in mass market paperback.
• A collection of short stories by Langston Hughes.

There we have it, a bunch of books over three days. Not as bad as what I do with a good book fair, but it’s a sad commentary on how few books are out in the wild in garage sales these days, I suppose.