Good Book Hunting: Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library, October 23, 2014

It’s been a bad season for the local book fairs and Brian J. I missed the one in Clever because I didn’t know when it was (although since I’m a Friend of the Clever Library, I probably got a notification that I discarded). I missed the Christian County Library book sale due to car problems. But I managed to sneak off to the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale yesterday.

Strangely, this one is at the upper limit of my size preference. There’s a lot to look at, and it would take hours to browse all the tables. So I headed to the LPs and went around the Classics and local books sections of the $1 books.

Here’s what I got:

I got 23 LPs, including:

• Portrait by Lynda Carter because… Lynda Carter.
• Playing to an Audience of One by David Soul to counter the notion that I buy albums based solely on attractive women on the cover. Also, if I was going to have Wonder Woman, I was going to have Hutch.
• Look Around by Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66.
• A Christmas album by Eydie Gorme and Steve Lawrence.
• Big Bad John by Jimmy Dean because my mother had this song on a record (and I probably still do somewhere) and I wanted to play it for my children. The older one loves it already.
• Two jazz clarinet albums by Pete Fountains, French Quarter and Pete’s Place.
• My first Pat Boone album, Moonglow.
• Alley Cat by Guy Lombardo. Not because it has a cat on the cover, I swear. Although I did not buy any albums with dogs on the cover to balance it out.
• Inseperable by Natalie Cole.
• Music for Lovers by Sammy Davis, Jr.
• Music of Erin by Mary O’Hara.

And I got a boxed set of Bach’s Mass in D Minor.

I don’t mind throwing a dollar for an album by someone I don’t know; many of these, I’ll only listen to once and then only sporadically. However, I might find something I like and will not only listen to over and over again, but I’ll keep an eye out for other records (and other music formats) in the future. It explains why I have a pile of Eydie Gorme and Herb Alpert CDs and records.

At any rate, I didn’t let you down: I did buy some books, including:

• The Epic of Gilgamesh because I didn’t want that uncomfortable silence if one of my children were to ask me if we had it.
• A Red Cell novel, Vengeance, from this century that someone helpfully incorrectly classified as a classic.
• Collections of poetry by Rod McKuen and Gunter Grass.
• A couple of bundles of what I thought were chapbooks; however, these bundles look to be instructor’s guides to different authors and a writing workshop card set. I’m a little disappointed.
• A book about the writing of Ross McDonald, the creator of the Lew Archer series of books.

I don’t know if I’ll make it back tomorrow (Saturday, half price day). It’s not like I need more books, and this particular sale is more important to me for the LPs these days anyway.