As I mentioned yesterday, I visited the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale yesterday. It was half-priced day, so I hit the dollar (fifty cents!) records. Sometimes, I can put those in the hold area and take all of my purchases out at once, but yesterday, I paid for the records, put them in the truck, and then went into the Better Books section to look for actual, you know, books.
I limited myself pretty much to the art monographs, history, and Missouri/Ozarks tables because I managed to accumulate most of two boxes’ worth of books there as well (fortunately, I had my oldest boy who is going to be a teenager later this year) to help me carry.
As I mentioned, I got a couple of things.
I got:
- The Tent on the Beach by James Greenleaf Whittier, an 1899 first edition in pretty good shape for $25. Because I confuse him with James Whitcomb Riley. I think I already have an old collection of Whittier that I inherited, in a roundabout fashion, from my maternal grandfather.
- Little House in the Ozarks: The Rediscovered Writings by Laura Ingalls Wilder / Edited by Stephen W. Hines. Because I’m going to collect them all, now, apparently.
- The Legend of the Golden Huaca by Colleen Tucker, a local author. Fiction.
- The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack with Bo Burlingham. A local manufacturing executive has created a system to gamify business. My beautiful wife has seen him speak several times, and this book might very well disappear from my to-read shelves. I probably wouldn’t miss it.
- Thawed: The Art of Gary Bedell(?), a comic art monograph. It might be autographed; inside the front cover is the sigil that appears on the cover as the author’s name.
- Three different collection catalogs of June Wayne exhibitions. One is in French, so it might be a duplicate of one of the English catalogs.
- Dan Worth: Photographs 1955-1985.
- Pierro Della Francesca.
- Dialogs with Nature: Works by Charles Salis Kaelin
- Art Noveau Belgium/France.
- William Partridge Burpee: American Marine Impressionist by D. Roger Howlett.
- Adolph Dehn Drawings.
- In Focus photographs by Jim Rathert.
- Missouri Images of Nature by Charles Gurche
- Images of India by Samuel Bourne.
- Gauguin.
- Cezanne and Chagall from the Color Slide Program of the Great Masters series. Instead of plates, each comes with 20 color slides. But, Brian J., do you even have a way to view slides? Shut your mouth! Of course I do. Not a projector, though: just a little slide viewer.
- Catherine Murphy: New Paintings and Drawings.
- Alan Gussow: Oils 1950-1980 by Lyle Gray.
- Jon Corbino: A Heroic Vision.
- John Shaw’s Landscape Photography. The top of the book says “Professional Techniques for Shooting Spectacular Scenics”, so this is more of a how-to guide than a monograph.
- The Art of Carl William Peters.
- Steuben Glass by James S. Plaut.
- The Art of America in the Gilded Age by Shirley Glubok.
- Rodin by Yvon Taillandier.
- Henry Fuseli by Carolyn Keay.
I also found a two incomplete sets of Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization. The sale included two incomplete ex-library sets: one with the dust jacket and one without. The one with the dust cover had Volume 1, but on the overleaf where the price goes, it said “New” and then had some high prices marked down to $129. Others similar to that volume were marked $4 each, so I don’t think it was to be sold as a set, but I didn’t want to get into a controversy when arguing that that volume should be $2 on half price day and not $65, especially since I was already shelling out $25 for another old book. So I’ll look for Volume I and Volume VI now to fill out the set. I’ve been really jonesing for them since I read The Lessons of History in 2016.
“Will you read that?” my beautiful wife asked when she saw the stack of them.
“I hope so,” I said. I hope to read all of the books I buy. Which is why I am hoping for advances in medical science in the next decade or so.
At any rate, it’s thirty-five new books for me. And, friends, we have reached the stacks on the floor stage of book accumulation. Which means I should probably hold off on getting too many more for a couple of weeks yet.
Also, it probably means I should stop re-shelving books from my book accumulation points.
