Each year for the past twelve years, the county library, my secondary childhood home, holds a book sale. The volunteer Friends of the Library organization collects and organized donated books and sells them for two dollars or less, depending on whether the book is a mass market paperback or a large hardcover, and all the funds go towards the library. I have been to each and every one of these book sales.
The sale has grown from a dozen or so boxes on the benches by the library’s side entrance; to a three-day event held in the nearby National Guard armory, replete with scholarship funds, shuttle buses, a snack tent, nearly 100 volunteers and 100,000 books.
As the sale grows exponentially, so do my expenditures at it. This year I purchased one hundred and eleven books, seventy-one of them on the first day alone, fiction and non-fiction, with topics ranging from political strife at the onset of the French Revolution to writing and language advice from William Safire. Only one book was accidentally bought twice (In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien). My tastes have changed over the years; as a child I filled a tote bag with short chapter books, in high school I zeroed in on Anne Rice novels, and this year I snapped up several backpacks’ worth of classics, writing reference books, and literary fiction. It was a good year for the Russkiyes – Nabokov, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Gogol all made a good showing. In fact, with Gogol I bought my first plays. One of the Chekhov volumes is entirely in Russian, but I know just enough of the language to know it’s by Chekhov. In addition, Twain, Flaubert, Kafka, Hemingway, Woolf, Wilde, Dumas, and Orwell all represent.
In addition to literary fiction, a myriad of modern names emerge. Anne Lamott, Joyce Carol Oates, Amy Tan, Flannery O’Connor, Pat Conroy, T. Coraghesson Boyle, Kurt Vonnegut, Sylvia Plath, and Tim O’Brien are all present. The amount of popular fiction is very limited, and includes Helen Fielding, the creator of Bridget Jones, and Candace Bushnell, the creator of “Sex and the City.” I also got a nice copy of The Witching Hour by Anne Rice, a giant hardcover that accommodates the thousand-plus pages of the novel much better than the brick-sized paperback of it I already own.
Bookstores place a high price on literacy. Any one of these books, these treasures plucked from stacks and boxes and the grasp of a hundred other browsers, could have been as much as thirty dollars. The Anne Rice book I scored for a buck would have set me back even more. Average the retail ransom out to say twenty dollars, to include the few trade and mass market paperbacks in the loot, and the retail value of my haul surpasses two thousand dollars. I paid about $175. This is bargain hunting at its finest and most refined. It’s better than Christmas, and longer lasting than Halloween.
I got a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Unfortunately, I hadn’t noticed that it was in French.
Le sigh.
