Good Book Hunting, Saturday, August 23, 2025: Friends of the Christian County Library, Nixa Branch, Sale

Ah, gentle reader. It was bag day at this sale, but it’s always bag day at the other branches when they have the Friends of the Christian County Library book sales. What’s different about Nixa is that they have a three-day sale, and bag days is the last day. I am helping to set your expectations, gentle reader, for what you’re going to see below.

Also, we headed to the book sale after noon on Saturday on our way to the 2025 Crane Broiler Festival in Crane. It’s not exactly on the way, but we only made one trip out, so we headed out in the afternoon instead of in the morning, so it was toward the end of the sale, and everything was pretty picked over.

Which is why we only got a single bag, $3:

I got the following books:

All the Paintings of Raphael (Part I)
The Home Pro Reupholstering Guide
Fugitive Trail by Zane Grey. To add to my growing, but yet small, collection of westerns.
The Story of Civilization IX: The Age of Voltaire by Will and Ariel Durant. Already have it, but this one has the dust jacket.
Saturday Afternoon at the Bijou by David Zinman. I might already have this–it looks familiar–but it was essentially free.

I got two books on tape:

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. I’ve already read it once or twice, but it might prove entertaining.
You Are A Badass by Jen Sincero on a Hatchette Audio playaway which is an electronic device which you can hook up to your audiosystems to listen to. It remains to be seen if it works.

I also picked up a couple videos:

Matchstick Men, a Nicholas Cage film.
Emergency!, the 1970s drama series, season five. My mother was a fan.
Five Dragnet binders. I think it’s the later series, not the original black and white.
The Pacifier, a Vin Diesel action comedy.
The Treasure of Sierra Madre with Humphrey Bogart.
The Stranger with Orson Welles.

The last two were the real scores, honestly, as you don’t see those old movies around that much.

My beautiful wife got a couple of travel/dining/self-improvement books.

Overall, it was a very manageable accumulation. But that doesn’t mean that I’ll get to any or all of them any time soon.