Good Book Hunting: October 16, 2010

I guess it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these (a year and a half), and I know you’re all clamoring for news about how many books I’m going to try to shoehorn into my library this time. Well, this part of October means it’s time for both the Friends of the Christian County Library and the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library to hold their semiannual book fairs. Today was bag day at the Ozark library for the FOCCL sale. Here’s what I got:

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Among the highlights:

• Four bound volumes of old American Heritage magazines. I didn’t already have them. W00t!
• One, count them, one pulp paperback in the Executioner series. I’ve seen this particular book fair lousy with those old paperbacks, but I’m not sure if it was just a one-time dump of a single person’s collection or that I have been here on bag day the last couple of times.
• A collection of hour-long documentaries on VHS that chronicles a year. 2 from the 1960s, 3 from the 1970s, and 7 from the 1980s.
• Two volumes collecting David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers series.
• A Douglas Coupland novel JPod. I think he peaked with Shampoo Planet 15 or so years ago. I haven’t read one of his books since before I started blogging.
• Approaching Zero and Net Crimes and Misdemeanors, books about computer crime. Both are probably old enough that they tell you to protect your America Online password. Or Prodigy. Or in the case of Charles, CompuServe.
• You Look Nice Today, a novel by Stanley Bing. I loved Lloyd, What Happened?, so I will probably start this one soon.
• When Men Think Private Thoughts, a guide for women, I think. But I want to see if this book is real intelligence or counter-intelligence.
• Several self-published books about the Ozarks.
• A volume of Chaucer that includes Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales in both old English and modern English.
• Yes, that is a book called Sexual Revolution. It’s a book of essays about the same by literary writers of the period.
• A book about how to make sundials.
• A book about how to trap animals.
• A book about fireplace design and how it hasn’t changed in several hundred years.

The swath of books are books my children selected and put into their bag; a two-year-old and a four-year-old are about as eclectic and discriminating as their father. Mrs. Noggle got a stack of magazines and a single (!) book.

Total cost: $6 for six bags of books. Three bags of magazines were free. I gave them a $20 and enrolled in the Friends of the Christian County Library ($5 a year, for cry eye).

And they fit in the collection remarkably well once I started putting books atop the bookshelves themselves.