Good Book Hunting, April 27, 2024: Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale

Technically, this is not so much a Good Book Hunting post as I really only bought a couple books. I dragged my youngest away from his video games for a couple hours yesterday to head up to the sale’s Half Price day, where records, DVDs, and most books were fifty cents each. First, we hit the records:

I got:

• Several Tennessee Ernie Ford spiritual/gospel albums since his A Friend We Have has replaced the Swedish Gospel Singers and The Teen Tones as our Sunday morning spin as they have disappeared into the disorganized LP library of Nogglestead. I cleaned the desk in the parlor before going to the book sale, so it, too, is probably lost. Instead, for the next couple of weeks, undoubtedly we will listen to the new platters, Jesus Loves Me, Nearer the Cross, and Tennessee Ernie Ford Sings from his Book of Favorite Hymns. The sale had a lot of his work and several copies of each of these.
• A couple of pianist Frank Carle’s platters: Frankie Carle plays the Great Piano Hits, Favorites for Dancing, and Let’s Do It, which appears to be a later record as he is much older in the cover photo.
• A couple of Florencia Vicenta de Casillas-Martínez Cardona Vikki Car records: For Once In My Life (which I might already have) and The Best of Vikki Carr (which I also might already have).
• Music for Trumpet and Orchestra by the Unicorn Concert Orchestra. Because I can get away with these spending sprees if I bring at least a couple of trumpet records home.
• George Jones and Gene Pitney which features both artists and many duets from the middle 1960s. I don’t usually buy country records unless there’s a Pretty Woman on the Cover (PWoC), but, c’mon, early George Jones, y’all.
• The Beat of the Big Bands: Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra.
• Bergen Sings Morgan by Polly Bergen. The PWoC sings the works of Helen Morgan.
• Bach Live at Fillmore East by Virgil Fox / Heavy Organ.
• The Prophet: A Musical Interpretation Featuring Richard Harris which was a timely pickup as I just finished reading The Prophet on Friday night (as you will soon see or, perhaps, have already seen if you’re not visiting every day and this post appears below the book report).
• The New Limelight by Frank Chacksfield and his Orchestra. Close enough to Frankie Carle. Also, it has and his orchestra which probably means I’ll like it.
• The Tender Touch by Nelson Riddle and His Orchestra. See? I already know I like Nelson Riddle who worked with both Frank Sinatra and Linda Ronstadt.
• The Bravado Brass by Brass Busters (or Brass Busters by the Bravado Brass). Another trumpet record to please my beautiful wife.
• Stereo and All That Jazz. Which has jazz in the title, so it’s likely something like and his orchestra, a safe jazzy record for squares in the 1960s.
• A couple from Placido Domingo: A Love Until The End of Time and Great Love Duets with Katia Ricciarelli. Because he is not Mario Lanza.
• Hurra Die Games by Orig. Mürztaler Musikanten. An Austrian LP from 1985 that might well be the find of the sale, as Discogs says this band’s records list for $100 on Ebay.
• Swing Softly With Me by Steve Lawrence. Arranged and produced by Don Costa, who is not as pretty as Gal Costa but who did good work.
• A couple of Nonesuch Records entries: Virtuoso Wind Concertos and Yankee Organ Music. I will pretty much by a Nonesuch Record on sight, as my youngest, who carried the growing stack of records, learned.
• The Bells of the Protestant and Orthodox Center at the New York Worlds Fair played on the world-famous Schulmerich “Americana” Carillion by John Klein. C’mon, man, you know I’d never see this again. This disc is so rare that the Internet and Discogs do now know it exists. So maybe it’s worth more than the Austrian record above.
• Festival De Éxitos En Voltops Vol. 10, a 1972 collection of South American pop (I presume). “Que es ‘voltops’?” I asked my son, who speaks remarkably little del español for someone actively studying it in school. “You’re getting records in other languages now?” he said, ignoring the fact that he was already holding records in German and, presumably, some Italian.
• Look To Your Heart by Perry Como. I passed over a number of other records of his that I already had.

27 records for $13.50, y’all. Including a couple that made the trip a financial gain.

I spent most of the money on audiobooks and audio courses. I got one audiobook from the dollar section, but the Great Courses/Teaching Company and Modern Scholar courses were in the better books section, where prices ranged from $1 to $7.50. I bought a ton. Well, if not a ton, several cubic feet.

They include:

• Early American History: Native Americans through the Forty-Niners
• Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition
• Great World Religions: Hinduism
• Great World Religions: Judaism
• Great World Religions: Christianity
• Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku, the aforementioned fifty cent audiobook
• The Masters of Enterprise: American Business History and the People Who Made It
• The Lives and Works of the English Romantic Poets
• WWII: A Military and Social History. Oh, boy, social history.
• The Long 19th Century: European History from 1789 to 1917. This might only be part of the full course.
• Philosophy and Religion of the West
• A History of the English Language

Most of them are on CD, which means car listening. But I’ve been trying to venture out to the gym a couple times a week which might give me a chance to listen to some of the audio courses. But for now, they’re relegated to boxes in the closet.

I went quickly by the DVD tables. They were both crowded and mostly picked over, so I only got a couple.

I got:

• Assassins with Stallone and Banderas. How did I not hear of this film? Or had I forgotten it?
• Bill Cosby: Himself
• Police Academy: Mission to Moscow. My son asked if this was the second film in the series; I said no, and I guessed the fifth. But this is actually the 7th film in the series, released 10 years after the original.
• Butterfield 8. Not sure what it’s about, but it has a lovely Elizabeth Taylor on the cover. I might have to introduce the PWoDVDC abbreviation.
• Epic Movie by the people who did Not Another Teen Movie and Date Movie. So I know what I’m getting into.
• Denis Leary: The Ultimate Collection which includes No Cure for Cancer and Lock ‘n’ Load along with other clips.
• Git-R-Done by Larry the Cable Guy.
• The Right Stuff
• Posse starring Mario von Peebles, Stephen Baldwin, and Billy Zane. I can guess what I’m getting into here.
• The Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts featuring the roasts of Bob Hope and Ronald Reagan, or parts thereof. After watching videocassettes in the The Best of the Dean Martin Show set a couple years ago, I wondered if I’d find volumes in the celebrity roasts set. This is on DVD instead of VHS, so it seems newer, but they probably both sold to the same audience with different home video formats in the middle 1990s.

Ten DVDs. Five bucks. And, best of all, the stack is not so big that I’ll have to figure out where to put it. They should fit in the cabinet where I’ve created space by actually watching films and whatnot recently.

Oh, and it’s a book sale? Well, I did pick up a couple.

As is my wont, I looked through the lit section and the poetry section of the dollar books. The poetry section had three bundles of chapbooks and pamphlets banded together, but one band had Journey through Heartsongs and another had One World, One Heart facing out, so I skipped them.

I bought a bundle that contained:

• The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Hour of Lead: Sharing Sorrow by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• Memoirs of Ms. P. by Amy Petrus
• Recipes of Hope: Holiday Stories for and From the Kitchen (with a special gift of Christmas stories from David L. Harrison, the local children’s book author with a school named for him here in southwest Greene County). The Kitchen is a local non-profit.
• One Story, One Story Among Many…. which looks to be a fundraiser for and/or history of a church damaged by a tornado in Stockton, Missouri. Strangely, this is shaped like a chapbook, saddle-stitched, but the text is laid out on 8.5″ by 11″ page, so that it’s oriented so that the staples are in the middle of the page, and you read the book sideways.
• A Thistle Flower From the Prairie by Jens Christian Bay, a story.

I also dropped fifty cents on Sonnets and the Ballad of Alanna McDale by Michael J. O’Neal. Because, hey, sonnets.

Then I breezed through the Better Books section. I went looked over the collectibles/antique books section, the Books about Books section, and breezed over the local interest books before loading up on the aforementioned audio courses and looking over the disappointing set of better records.

I got:

• Lieutenant Hornblower by C.S. Forester in a nice 1952(?) Book of the Month Club edition with a nice mylar-wrapped dust cover. Has it been seven years since I read a Horatio Hornblower book? Yes. To be fair, they’re not exactly easy for me to spot in the wild since I’m mostly looking at record crates.
• The Play Goes On, Neil Simon’s memoir. Jeez, Louise, has it been thirteen years since I read a Neil Simon play? Yes. I keep passing over one of his novels. Maybe I should get to that and then read this, or vice versa.
• Book Finds: How To Find, Buy, and Sell Used and Rare Books by Ian C. Ellis. I just read A Pound of Paper, I bought a $100 record for fifty cents, and I might have a lot of free time soon for scavenging estate sales and rural junk shops. Maybe I will turn this hobby again into a slightly profitable endeavor.
• Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry edited by Gary Mex Glazner. I’d hoped for a history or discussion of the poetry slam, but it looks like it’s more of a collection of poetry slam-style poetry. You know, poetry open mic nights and poetry slams greatly influenced my poetry, transitioning it from the traditional to the fun to read somewhere in the middle 1990s. Between the Unrequited and Deep Blue Shadows chapbooks and Coffee House Memories. We will see if I enjoy this collection. More than Insta-poetry at least.
• Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I already have a copy, of course, so I have two options with the lesser copy: 1) save it so both my heirs have a copy or 2) put it on the free book cart at church or in a little free library. It cost $1, so either option is good.

All told, I spent $70, mostly on the audio courses (which sold new for, what, $60 or $100 each)? Given that I’m only going to the two Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sales each year, I can probably splurge. It’s certainly less expensive than going to ABC Books every week.