After a cross country meet conveniently located in Branson, Missouri, we headed to the Sparta branch of the Christian County Library for the last of its Friends of the Library Book sales for the year. Instead of having sales twice a year at the Ozark branch of the library as in the olden days, they have begun to rotate them amongst the library branches. I picked up the flyer too late in the year to visit the spring sale in Ozark, but we have managed to make our way to Clever and Nixa.
As in Clever, it was $3 for a bag, so I got two bags worth of books (and stuck a couple into my beautiful wife’s single and unfilled bag).
I got:
- The Book of Photography by John Hedgecoe. I keep thinking about taking up photography as a hobby. Should I do so, I have plenty of reading material on it.
- The Joy of Photography by the Editors of the Eastman Kodak Company. So it’s old is what I’m saying.
- Loft Style by Dominic Bradbury. In case I need to decorate a loft, I guess.
- Minimalist Lofts but probably not like that.
- Small Lofts more likely than not. I do sometimes think of having a loft as a pied-a-tierre in a city somewhere. Perhaps over my book store.
- Forever Kansas!, which is what I’m sure it seems like when you’re driving to Colorado. I bought Living in Wyoming in September. I haven’t even gone through the partial sets of travel photography I already own. Why am I buying more?
- Chihuly Seaforms, presumably the glass artist (it is).
- Footprints in a Darkened Forest by Fulton J. Sheen. It’s a hardback with no dustjacket; looking at the table of contents, it looks like something philosophical. Apparently, he was a bishop, and this is a collection of theological essays.
- Pale Kings and Princes by Robert B. Parker, a stated first printing. I already have the book, of course, but perhaps not a stated first printing before this one.
- Six recent issues of Poetry magazine, May 2021 and the first five of 2024.
- The Fall 2015 issue of the Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly.
- Two copies of Elements of Style to give away. Not that I have anyone in mind. Who writes these days?
- White River Journal RadioBook by Robert K. Gilmore, a collection of things by, for, or about KSMU radio, the local university radio station. I have a lot of their old records upstairs, bought at other book sales.
- Lake Woebegon Days by Garrison Keillor.
- Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 by Seamus Heaney.
- Photography by Infofax.
- The Art of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace by Jonathan Bresman. An excerpt from a larger work which was apparently enclosed with the DVD.
- What’s So Funny About Growing Old? by Ed Fischer and Jane Thomas Noland, a humor collection.
- Brother by Michael Dickman. Poems.
- Crybaby Bridge, poems by Kathy Goodkin. It bears the stamp of Poetry Award Winner Moon City Press, an imprint from the local university which has rejected my poems.
- A History of Japanese Economic Thought by Tessa Morris-Suzuki. Because someday I might want to read it, I guess.
- Stranger from the Tonto by Zane Grey in the Zane Grey book club edition.
- Once More with a .44, a more modern Western by Peter Brandvold.
- Shower of Gold by Zane Grey in paperback.
- Mad River by John Sandford, a Virgil Flowers book that looks like it came out after I quit reading Sandford (which looks to be true; the last I read was Shock Wave which came out in 2011 and I read it in 2012. This is new in paperback in 2012.
- The Law of Gun Barrel City by O.C. Marler which looks to be a self-published Western.
Not bad for $9. No videos, though, and to be honest, I am more interested in hunting down some movies that I don’t have on home media than adding to the library stacks. But $3 a bag is hard to resist.
And, oh, gentle reader. Briefly this year I had gotten the stacking of the stacks down to where you could see the bladed weapons on the wall above the bookshelves in my office. But no longer; now I have stacks again on the books atop the bookshelves. Fortunately, the kittens are winding down in their kittency and don’t get up there and knock down books too often any more.
And so much for my internal vow to work down the stack of partially read books next to the chair in the family room. Undoubtedly, I will pick up one or more of these books if I can find them again.
And if this is a quiz:
I got a 75%. I can do better next year. If I come across this flyer or remember to check the dates of these book sales sometime before April.