This is the short autumn book fair season in the Ozarks, as the Friends of the Christian County Book Fair, Friends of the Polk County Book Fair, and Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Fair all occur in the same two weekend stretch. Today, we started off by going to the Friends of the Christian County Library (why, yes, we are members) Book Fair in Ozark.
And look at this small haul on my part. That’s my stack on the right. I got fewer books than the children and a smaller stack than my wife, who buys magazines in bulk to tear apart for recipes:
Among my purchases:
- Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Special Edition 2005, A Treasury of Early American Homes, Firearms Encyclopedia, and Jokes and Anecdotes, books to flip through during ball games. I hope the Cardinals make it to the World Series; at the rate of five or six nights of sports a week, I was running low on my stock of flip-through books, so I bought these. If the Cardinals don’t make it to the World Series and I’m down to one night of sports a week in the next couple of days, I might have bought too much.
- It’s Your Ship, a book about management written by a Navy captain.
- Lord Jim by Conrad. It might be a duplicate, but who knows? It was only a buck, and it’s better to be safe than sorry.
- Battlestation by Ben Bova.
- The 96th Executioner book. A couple years back, this particular book fair had a dump of the latter day pulp series, and I bought a couple, but not many. I should have jumped more as I like at least the Executioner series and the SOBs, and I’ve not seen it replicated. One household or estate dumped a bunch, one time.
- Three that I bought on the aforementioned “I might have them already, but it’s only a buck, so I’ll buy them to be sure” protocol. I already have Hidden Prey, Mortal Prey, and The Robots of Dawn, so I traded out one better copy but now have dupes to share. If you want them, let me know, and I’ll post them out.
No, I don’t have a smart phone, which is how I get the dupes. And I’m against getting one and using it to check the values of books on the tables. You know what? A decade ago, when I was doing the Ebay thing and buying books, games, and whatnot from garage sales and estate sales to list on Ebay, I had to know or guess what might sell. The real pros, too, had to know something about what they were dealing with and what would sell.
Now, every bozo with a smart phone gets an app to tell him what’s worthwhile, and it takes a little out of it, and when that bozo gets in front of you going through the books and bogs the ever-loving peat out of it by scanning the UPC of every last book, it, well, leaves one completely peatless. At some point, the smart phone ceases to be a tool for the seller, and the seller becomes just a tool of the Internet. Or just a tool.
At any rate, I plan to hit Friends of Springfield-Greene County Library Book Fair this week on a school day and to hit Friends of the Polk County Library in Bolivar (rhymes with Tolliver, somehow) next Saturday. And in just three book fairs, I expect to have bought more books than I’ve read the entire year. Although I only bought 10 net books (13 gross) today, so maybe I’ll behave myself.
