Author: Brian J. Noggle

Oops, I did it again.

We’re driving down Elm onto an errand and a couple of garage sales, and my beautiful wife sees the sign at the church up ahead: Book Fair. “It’s dollar bag day,” I said.

“Do you want to stop?” she asked.

I stopped.

An hour or so later, I ask if they have a box price since I don’t want to put the books in bags to price them. $3 a box, we agree on even though my beautiful wife was quite ready to negotiate up.

Here they are:

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Including:

• The Unknown Patton, a biography of that guy Kelsey Grammer plays.
• Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right by Bernard Goldberg. Polemics were cheap. I bought many.
• Betrayal by Linda Chavez. As I said.
• Shadow War, about George W. Bush and the war on terror.
• Square Foot Gardening. Heather picked this up for me, hoping I’ll get more than 20 cherry tomatoes, 6 raspberries, and 3 green beans out of our garden next year.
• The President, The Pope, and the Prime Minister, a book about Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II and their roles in defeating communism 1.0.
• Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity, a John Stossel Snopes-like debunking of common tropes upon which policy is based. I’m currently reading it in the paperback, but I’ve upgraded my permanent copy.
• Hollywood Nation, about how liberals are bad.
• The Lessons of History by Will and his wife Durant. Hey, I have the story of philosophy, why not get the whole collection.
• The Year of Decision 1846, a history book about that important year.
• The Big Ripoff, a book about how crony capitalism will be the death of our economy. Timely, no?
• Persecution by Limbaugh the Lesser.
• 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America by Bernard Goldberg. My collection of his work is complete and mostly unread.
• The Best Years 1945-1950, a history book about why those were the best years, apparently.
• Build It Better Yourself, a book about building things. Good for a President Obama economy.
• A five volume history of England. I hope it’s only five; I got volumes I-V.
• A Friend Forever, a collection of poems edited by Susan Polis Schultz.
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy. Must be one of his flash fictions since it’s 135 pages. Looking into it, I discover it’s a pre-dialogued former university textbook.
• Dynamic Freedoms: Our Freedom Documents, which collects the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and other selected bits.
• Spain, a concise history of a great nation. Part of a series.
• Fix It Yourself Small Appliances and Fix It Yourself Major Appliances, just in case the Democratic quartfecta manages to keep the lights on and the rest of the world does not veto our electricity usage.
• Architecture: Style, Structure, and Design, an architecture textbook.
• Near Eastern Mythology, a book about mythology in the near east. I think that’s like Ohio and West Virginia.
• 28 of the hardbound library editions of American Heritage from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Good for ideas, I hope, and burning for heat if the rest of the world doesn’t want me to heat my house above 60 degrees in the winter.
• Almanac of American Letters. I forget what it is.
• The First Immortal, a science fiction novel.
• Built from Scratch; given the Home Depot logo on it, you’d think it was about building things. No, it’s about the building of the Home Depot company.
• JOB: A Comedy of Justice by Robert Heinlein.
• The Legend that was Earth by James P. Hogan. Science fiction.
• The Gunfighter: Man or Myth?, a musing no doubt that tells us that nobody owned guns on the frontier.
• Grumbles from the Grave by Robert Heinlein, co-authored by Heinlein’s estate.
• Disraeli, a biography of the English PM.
• Nine Tomorrows, tales by Asimov.
• Jude the Obscure, a mostly handome edition of Hardy’s work. Except for the water damage.
• You Can’t Get There From Here by Ogden Nash. Because I was running low.
• Tales of Edgar Allan Poe; I already own this book/edition, but this one looks better than the one I remembered here.
• Danger! Explosive Tales of the Great Outdoors. The first book I picked up.
• The Civil War. By the time we get to the end of an Obama presidency, perhaps it will be called the “First Civil War.”
• Misery by Stephen King. Didn’t own this one yet, and this is not a book club edition. Most of what you find at book fairs is.
• Shots Fired In Anger, a book about a couple island battles in the Pacific in WWII.
• The Case for Extinction, a contrarian work that takes on the conservation movement. You can tell it’s dated because it talks about conservation.
• Man and his symbols by Carl Jung. I have so much Jung I haven’t read. Certainly that means something.
• AD&D Second Edition Player’s Guide to the Dragonlance Campaign. Brother, if you see a D&D sourcebook at a Catholic church’s book fair, take it, for that one is blessed.
• How to Photograph Cats, Dogs, and Other Animals in case I decide to try harder with the digital camera.
• Consumer Guide Mustang, a book about the pony car.
• The Mighty ‘MOX, a history book about KMOX radio.
• The Home and Workshop Guide to Sharpening. This will come in handy in about 2010, after President Obama takes the guns away.
• Modern Handloading, which will come in handy if a Democrat-controlled Congress only passes microstamping….Ah, forget it, even I’m getting tired of the election-goes-bad humor. If only I’d have bought fewer books, I could have made it through the list.
• Kohlhoff on Guns by Kohlhoff.
• The Next 50 Years in Space. Written 40 years ago. Let’s see how much we have to make up in the next decade to do this guy proud. Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll only expect a couple space stations and trips to the moon by 2018.
• Four Fugitive Slave Narratives.
• Wizard by Ozzie Smith. For when I miss baseball, I guess.
• Fatherhood by Bill Cosby. When I discover I already own it, it will make a good gift to that one guy I know who named his daughter after a Chicago Bears running back.
• Tales from the Left Coast, another book about bad liberals.
• Good Intentions by Ogden Nash. Sure, I already own it, but this one is blue.
• Madame Bovary. Didn’t have it previously. I don’t think. Heck, I cannot see what I do own in here these days. Maybe I own a first edition in the original French. You know, I used to hate those used book stores with disarrayed piles of books blocking everything. Sadly, I’m patterning my office after that.
• The World’s Progress, a book about man’s progress. It’s an old book, obviously. If it had been written in the latter half of the 20th century, it would have told of the failures of the world.
• Communism and the New Left, a 1970 U.S. News and World Report book. Let’s see what they predicted for the 21st century based on it, hey?
• Do As I Say, a book about celebrity liberals who don’t walk the walk.
• Scott’s Quentin Dunward, Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, and Milton’s Comus, Lycidas, Etc., 100-year-old pocket editions of these classics. I think I own the same edition of the Pope book, but not in as good of condition.

The wife notes that she lost in the competition. Honey, it’s not competition, it’s compulsion.

The boys got a couple of books, too, and obviously, the one with vertical ambulatory capacity cannot wait.

So that’s, what, 94 books for me? A year’s worth of reading. Fifteen bucks. Good deal, except this means I need a $70,000 library addition on my house for the collection.

On August 20, 2008, we went to a church rummage sale and lit upon a couple books:

I got a book by Marlin Perkins, the Wild Kingdom guy and a story about an American woman who married Prussian nobility in the 19th century.

Uh, that’s it, but you’re almost up to date.