Tuesday, January 03, 2006

 

Bookwoman's holiday

I took the day off on Monday, and got out of town. What was I doing? Visiting other people's bookshops, of course. I get tired of looking at my own books and need to see someone else's. One of my favorite stops is the Big Chicken Barn on Route 1 between Ellsworth and Bucksport. Over 120,000 books. Most I am utterly uninterested in, but I can easily spend a happy two hours seeking out the ones I am interested in. This trip, I came away with two grocery bags of books for under $100. A few things to read, and the rest for my shop. Books by Penelope Lively, T.C. Boyle, Ronald Firbank, John Thorne, Richard Feynman, etc., a biography of Ian Fleming, a book I haven't yet read by "The Author of Elizabeth & Her German Garden" (another favorite of mine, the author's real name was Elizabeth von Arnim - she also wrote The Enchanted April and numerous other books), a thick book on medieval book-making, a small and charming antiquarian book about wildflowers in the Berkshires (1880, $4), and a few things I always like to have in stock, like the Oxford Book of English Verse, for one, which I sold last week. Some days I think that's why I'm in this business - so I can buy. I think I bought 25 books in all. At a good library sale, I might buy 10 cartons of books. Gluttony!

Comments:
Let's raise a toast to gluttony! And let's not forget book lust! Ahhh... for a good library book sale!
 
One of the first things I do when January rolls around is get a new calendar and fill in all the good library sale dates from the previous year's calendar - the sales are almost always the same weekend every year, and I want to make sure I don't miss my favorites... I undergo a bout of anticipation, for both the sales, and the warmer weather surely to come.
 
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