Good Book Hunting, May 1, 2021: The Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale

I know, I know; you saw my post about albums I bought this weekend, and you said, Who cares about the cheap, obscure easy listening records you buy in an attempt to find something of yours on Lileks’ Thrift Store Vinyl feature on Fridays?. Well, my bibliophile friend, it’s your turn to feast your eyes on the bonanza I got on half price day:

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The audio courses section was pretty picked over, but I got:

• From a series of two-cassette lectures on philosophers, I got bits on Neitzshe, Kierkegaard, Aristotle, Dewey, Hume, Spinoza, Aquinas, St. Augustine, and Socrates.
• Lost Worlds of South America.
• Comedy, Tragedy, History: William Shakespeare on cassette–I shall certainly miss having a cassette player in my vehicle again should I ever get another.

It looks like I mis-filed and mis-appropriated my beautiful wife’s audio course Myths, Half-Truths of Language Usage. Because I wanted to impress you with the height of my stacks, gentle reader, I stooped to inadvertent deception. It looks like I stacked 2001 Things to Do Before You Die in my books as well. As you can imagine, it has been banished to her shelves. Our books cannot conmingle.

The books I got include:

• The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk in the Reader’s Digest World’s Greatest Reading edition. I have started to accumulate these books, but I bypassed a number of titles that I already have in other editions. So where’s my dedication really?
• Peter Ackroyd by Charles Dickens. Because I actually finished David Copperfield and need more Dickens to read.
• Long Lost signed by David Morrell, whose books I continue to accumulate without reading.
• The Art of Carl Fabergé by A. Kenneth Snowman.
• Fabergé Eggs, a browser dedicated to the designer’s fantastic eggs.
• Louis C. Tiffany: Rebel in Glass by Robert Koch. Although it includes a lot of pictures, it’s a reader more than a browser.
• American Art Deco by Eva Weber. A coffee table book, but hopefully someday I will understand what Lileks and Ed Driscoll are talking about when they talk architecture.
• Motels: American Retro, a browser that would be right up Lileks’ alley.
• Strive and Succeed, a two novel omnibus from Horatio Alger that includes Julius and The Store Boy. It’s in better shape than the other Alger novel I have, so I will probably read it first.
• Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin. It looks to be a 1903 ex-library copy, but it’s in such good shape that I think it might be a later edition.
• Oriental Love Poems edited by Michelle Lovric. It looks like it has some kind of pop-up cover, or it has some wrapping paper stuck on the front cover. I am not sure which.
• I’ve Seen It All at the Library by Jonathan M. Farlow, a memoir by a librarian.
• The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry by Sven Birkerts. Of course, the book is dated 1989, so it’s less modern by now than the title would indicate. Given that I am trying to write poetry these days, I thought I might buy a book of criticism. Although who knows when I might read it.
• The Use and Abuse of Literature by Marjorie Garber. Definitely longer than The Use and Abuse of Books.
• Poetics South by Ann Deagon, a short collection of poems.
• The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. Longer than The Lessons of History, but shorter than the Story of Civilization.
• The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. To be honest, I remember looking at this book and touching it, but not putting it into my stack, but my visit to the Better Books section’s Literature section was late in our trip; by this time, my beautiful wife was taking small stacks from my hands to put on the holding tables, so I lost track of a lot of what I bought.
• Tales from the Missouri Tigers by Alan Goforth. I am thinking of giving this to my mother-in-law for Christmas, but we might already have done so. Which might lead me to justifying keeping it for myself.
• For Everything There Is A Season by Carolyn Gray Thornton, a collection of light essays by a regional author.
• Rock On: An Office Power Ballad by Dan Kennedy, who took a job in the music industry to find it wasn’t like the movies advertised.
• Chin Music from a Greyhound: The Confessions of a Civil War Reenactor Volume One: 1978-1987 by Robert W. Talbott.
• The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain, also in the Reader’s Digest World’s Best Reading edition.
• Journey Through Heartsongs by Mattie J.T. Stepanek, which looks to be a collection of grandmother poetry in hardback.
• Privilege and Privation by Todd Parnell, a local author.
• Home Is Where The Heart Is a collection of Thomas Kinkade something something. To browse during football games or something.
• Moon of Mutiny by Lester Del Rey in the library binding just like the ones I read in middle school. Which might have included this one. My youngest is tearing through YA fantasy these days; perhaps I’ll give loan him some rocket jockey fiction to see if he likes it.
• Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in The East Teaches Us About Living In The West by T.R. Reid. Probably that it’s better, but we will see.
• Fourteen Acre Gold by Georgie Hicks. Looks to be grandmother poetry, although it says on the back she got her start when her twenty-year-old son died.
• Messages To Lelia by Billy Reed. More poetry.
• McAddoo About Nothing, a collection of old columns by a local columnist.
• The Old Dog Barks Backwards by Ogden Nash. A paperback, and not one of the collections I already own.
• Death to the Death of Poetry by Donald Hall. More criticism of poetry to inspire me to read poetry.
• Early Royko: Up Against It In Chicago by Mike Royko. Man, it’s been a while since I read Royko. How come nobody collects John Kass’s columns? He’s about the closest Chicago or most major cities have to Royko.
• Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge by Kevin Starr.

I also grabbed four copies of the local university’s literary magazine, the Moon City Review, which recently rejected several of my poems; I wanted to see what kind of poetry does appear in the digest to see if I should submit again. I picked up the 2009 issue, and every time I found a later one, I picked it up, intending to put the less recent copy down, but by that time, my beautiful wife was whisking them away, so I didn’t get the chance to put three of them back.

Apparently, in taking the photograph, I also purloined my wife’s copy of The 29% Solution. She tends to read more practically applicable books than I.

But you know what I did not find? Any Lee Goldberg. So, you know what is right across the highway, practically, from the Ozark Empire Fairgrounds? ABC Books.

So we diddly-bopped into ABC Books and told Ms. E. that we were just from the book sale and couldn’t find anything, which she likely did not believe. Although I found that my martial arts section was still not restocked, I found a couple of books by local(ish) authors and several by Lee Goldberg.

I got:

• Mr. Monk is Miserable in hardback.
• The Shooting Script, The Death Merchant, The Dead Letter, and The Waking Nightmare in the Diagnosis Murder series by Lee Goldberg. Although I like Lee Goldberg, as I mentioned, I am not going to hurry to pick up these books any time soon as Dick Van Dyke, the star of the show, is still alive, and this year my reading has adversely impacted world events.
• The Underwater Window by local author Carol Shackleford. The name sounds really familiar.
• The Reluctant Bachelor and Why Aren’t We Rich Yet? by Andy Willoughby, a local author that ABC Books promoted on its Facebook page. I thought the books sounded interesting in the post on Facebook, so I meant to seek them out.

Even though the mysteries were 25% off due to a sale I didn’t know was taking place, the full price of the local author books and what my wife bought meant we almost spent as much at ABC Books as we did at the book sale.

At any rate, a good haul, and it is making me rethink my current streak of reading books based on television shows and movies. But we will see how it goes when I actually get into the reading chair.

The funny thing is that, with the 40+ books I’ve read so far this year, I was able to straighten my to-read shelves so that most books were vertical, albeit double-stacked. Welp, that was that. Now they’re laid atop each other willy-nilly again. Which is their native state here at Nogglestead.