So yesterday morning, I played hooky from the dojo to go to the Friends of the Clever Library Book Sale down in the fire station in Clever. I had a spot of trouble finding it because they put up a new Walmart Neighborhood Market in front of it which hid the fire station from view as I came west along Highway 14. But I got there. It was a smaller sale than usual with about a table less worth of material, but I found a couple books there. It looked like an English teacher from the 1960s might have divested of books, as there were a collection of pre-Cliff Notes summaries and surveys of books, a lot of classics in paperback, and some related literaria and teacheraria.
Additionally, as we were driving to a park in Republic, we happened upon the Relay for Life fundraiser sale at Hope Lutheran Church. I didn’t see that it was going to be this weekend, but there it was. It had more books than usual and several boxes’ worth of direct-to-video slasher and horror movies. I think that’s a plea for help from someone who gets the counseling he or she needs.
Here’s the pic of my plunder:
Some of the highlights:
- The Cross and the Switchblade and Beyond the Cross and the Switchblade, two books about being a priest at a church in a bad part of town. This was a genre of television for a while if I remember, and the first title was made into a movie starring Pat Boone. I know because the sale had two copies, and I opted for the movie tie-in edition with full color photos.
- Two humorous western novels, Hey, Cowgirl, Need a Ride and Hey, Cowboy, Wanna Get Lucky? by Baxter Black. The Republic Monitor used to run a newspaper column by him, I think.
- Two by Isaac Asimov, Lecherous Limericks and Adding a Dimension.
- The Deep Range by Arthur C. Clarke. I don’t particularly like Clarke, but last night, while volunteering at the localer Friends of the Library Sale, I saw someone with a stack of Clarke paperbacks, and I guess I’m easily influenced.
- A book of Jack Kirby’s work from the late 1940s before he went to Marvel.
- GI Joe: The Story Behind the Legend which is about the toy and not part of the fictional canon.
- Flawed Dogs, Berkeley Breathed’s young adult novel. Note this is in my stack, not the young young adults’.
- The Incas, a history of the Incas appropriately enough.
- The C.S. Lewis Handbook.
- Faust.
- Ernie’s America, a collection of travel columns by Ernie Pyle from before his writing in World War II.
- How to Find Missing Persons. Probably from the pre-Internet age.
- The Best TV and Trivia Quiz Book Ever. I hope I fare better than the The TV Theme Song Trivia Book.
- The Starcraft Archive, a collection of StarCraft fiction.
- The Medium is the Massage (not a typo) by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore.
- Wolverine: Weapon X, a novel.
- A couple westerns, Two Pistols South of Bradwood and The Sharpshooter. Both from different series old enough to not have a lot of boom chocka chocka.
- E.B. White’s The Second Tree from the Corner.
- Four great plays by Checkov.
- Andre Norton’s The Starman’s Son. Probably not related to the Starman television series.
- Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks, one of the old Dr. Who books from the 1980s.
- Two Ross Thomas novels, Cast a Yellow Shadow and If You Can’t Be Good.
- A book about medieval myths.
I know I read “Star Man’s Son” but I can’t for the life of me remember anything about it other than it kept me from reading just about anything else by Andre Norton.
I read Dare to Go A-Hunting twenty some years ago, and it didn’t move me to run out and buy or seek out more Andre Norton at the time. But other people have expressed affection for her work, though, so I’ve bought a couple over the years but I’ve not been driven to read them yet.
So, yeah.