Good Book Hunting, Friday, October 5 and Saturday, October 6, 2024: Davenport, Iowa

As I mentioned, I was in Davenport, Iowa, over the weekend. As it happened, the Source Book Store was only a block and a half from our hotel (and a block from the conference center), so I stopped in there. It’s 5000 square feet of books across several floors in an old building. The proprietor, an older gentleman, said his grandfather started the store 89 years ago in a different location and gestured to a painting of an older man reading a book before some bookshelves. I only looked in a couple of places: Poetry (looking for more early Edna St. Vincent Millay editions), literature, and local history (so that if we attend this conference again next year I can tell my beautiful wife all about Davenport).

Also, if I thought I was safe from a book signing merely because I was several hundred miles away from ABC Books, I was sorely mistaken. The conference did not have many vendors present, but one was a table with a large display from an author.

So I got a couple of his books, too, but not one of each–he had like twenty books scattered among four or five series and one-offs.

At the Source Book Store, I got:

• A 1909 edition of Old School Day Romances by James Whitcomb Riley. I wonder if I should order more mylar for book jackets just to cover this book (and some others).
• The Dangerous Summer by Ernest Hemingway, his account of a summer in Spain watching bull fights.
• The River and the Prairie by William Robu. “Do you know Bill?” the proprietor asked. Apparently, the author used to call the book store when he was looking for things, but the proprietor is not sure if the author is still alive.

From author Ben Wolf, I got:

• Unlucky, a one-off Western.
• The Ghost Mine, the first book in the Tech Ghost series about an energy mine that has gone silent and the investigation thereof.
• Winterspell, a cyberpunk dystopian thriller and the start of the series which sounds maybe a little like William Devore’s Earthborn series, the second of which I have around here somewhere.

In all likelihood, I will pick up the Riley book and the history first. As to Ben Wolf’s sci-fi/fantasy books, I still have to get through five or six Bucky and the Lukefahr Ladies books to get through sometime soon, which might be in the next decade, first.