I’m loving my local library’s book sale. Today the mini-Marli and I brought home a big sack of books for $4. I got a large volume of 100 years worth of New York Times book reviews and essays, and an Ellery Queen collection; she scored about a dozen other books, some of which I picked out because I remember enjoying them as a kid (Marilyn Sachs and Zylpha Keatley Snyder, anyone?).
Four. Bucks.
Last month I snagged volumes 1 and 2 of Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God, Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, and a handful of well-remembered YA books for nostalgia’s sake.
My next library sale score will be my first. Every time my library has a sale, I swear, they ransack the globe to find the least desirable stuff ever bound and put between covers. Guides to obsolete operating systems, technical monographs on Eastern European economies in the 1970’s, twelve copies each of sleazy Harlequin potboilers . . . man, I don’t know where they find that stuff. On the plus side, I guess my library is saving anything that might have any conceivable value to anybody.
Yale Shakespeare set (the small blue ones)
Britannica Encyclopedia
Britannica Great Books
Annals of America
Harvard Great Books (incomplete)
Durants’ Story of Civilization
And a bunch of individual books. Actually, a large percentage of my books come from there. Yes, I am something of a loon.
A book I bought at a library sale recently which I liked quite a bit was Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. It was my first ever library sale purchase, in fact. Really good book, especially if you only paid three dollars for it in hardback.
Twice, I’ve scored old HB copies of J. Carroll Quigley’s TRAGEDY AND HOPE, which is a classic in Right-wing circles for discussing the internationalist aims of the Council on Foreign Relations & its British forebearer the Royal Institute of International Affairs- each time for fitty cents.
I’ve gotten several Rutherford-era JW books, and the multi-volume first edition of the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures. Also 50 cents each.
Albert Pike’s MORALS AND DOGMA OF SCOTTISH-RITE FREEMASONRY- Perhaps a dollar.
Once at a junk sale held at the out-of-business Piggly-Wiggly, a 1910 book THE GOSPEL OF THE HERE-AFTER which was an Evangelical book but sympathetic to notions of Purgatory & Post-Mortem Salvation. Ten cents.
But the greatest find- from a Christian used book store- for a dollar…
First edition of Billy Graham’s PEACE WITH GOD…
AUTOGRAPHED!!!
(I’ve checked the signature with an authenticated one pictured on the Net & I can detect six idiosyncratic points of similarity.)
I got a first edition of Michael Murphy’s “Golf in the Kingdom”, which is a classic in the spots book world. It was published by Viking for the Esalen Institute Press in 1972.
It goes for about $200 in the market. Even the early paperbacks go for close to $100.
A first edition hardcover of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos”. The book and TV series predated me a bit (I was born the year the book was published), but even to this day, most of what’s in the book hasn’t changed meaning despite advances in astronomy because Sagan infused the subjects with remarkable timelessness. I had the paperback, of course, and had put a lot of effort into trying to find a hardcover edition with no damage for the longest time, to no avail. Imagine my surprise when it turned up at the library book sale one day, in incredible condition, for a paltry $10 (which, according to the jacket, is $9.95 less than what it sold for in 1980).
I got Neal Stephenson’s 3 volume Baroque Cycle for $1.50 total in trade paperback. The great thing about that is, I wasn’t even going to read them, but they were so cheap, and I liked his other stuff, I said, what the hell. And they are now on my list of favorite books of all time. So it was a good deal all around.
I also found The Dark Crystal movie companion coffee table book for $1, which has all the diagrams of Augra’s machine, an explanation of who each of the Uru and Skeksis are, and the mythos of the universe. Most excellent childhood nostalgia/nerd book ever.
The Dune Encyclopedia was a good find, since I have never been able to find it since.
Before someone complained, the library in my Grandparents’ town passed on some great encyclopaedias of warships and aircraft of WWII that they passed to me.
I’m not sure why anyone should complain, I think it was in relation to how they were giving away so much discarded stock and other libraries weren’t.
A early 1900’s copy of the Prizoner of Zenda, for free. I thought they’d want a time for it, but the library guy just looked at and told me to take it. It had photographed stills from a silent movie version of the story as illustrations.
