Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

My winter reading project (Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain - I still can't decide how to refer to him) isn't the only thing going on, book-wise, right now.  In early February our neck of the woods experienced one sunny almost-warm Saturday morning, and Ryan and I took advantage of it by traveling to a nearby town to participate in a familiar ritual.  Half work and half pure fun.  We used to plan almost every weekend around events like this, and you know, almost every weekend we could find one, somewhere.  I speak, of course, of the venerable friends-of-the-library book sale:


This particular one happens on the first Saturday of every month.  The library isn't huge but it does have a very supportive and bookish community surrounding it, and so donations to the friends-of-the-library group for the book sale are quite good on a regular basis.  We go once every few months and always find something.  Or rather, lots of somethings.  This time around we waited for the doors to open for half an hour and it was such a pleasure to stand outside in the sun and not feel freezing.  We spent part of the time talking about how different buying used books is today, compared to twenty years ago when we started seriously hunting for them, to buy, keep, read, and resell.  Pre-internet, do I even need to say it?  In "the old days" between five and ten local book dealers would have been waiting in line with us.  We all chatted and caught up and gently (and sometimes not so gently) gossiped about doings in the book world.  It was truly congenial, and I miss those times.  Of course, things changed a bit when the doors opened, because we were all there for the same reasons.  The books.  


And, despite the promising "CLASSICS" sign above, the books being offered have changed, too.  The friends group naturally wants to maximize profits for the library.  This is right and good, and is as it should be.  So their volunteers sell the better books online.  They check book prices online too, and subsequently books are priced higher than they used to be, for those books that actually do make it out onto the shelves in the basement sale room pictured above (I did buy that book I was looking at, by the way).  So, the days of finding truly great deals may be long gone, but it seems like something always turns up, somehow.  At this sale, I bought three cartons of books for a hundred dollars.  I put some books back which were priced at five dollars each, but I bought a few at that price, too.  But most of the ones I bought were a dollar or two each - general stock for my book booth at the antiques mall and a pile of books to read.  I did find two signed hardcovers - one by historian David McCullough and one by novelist Michael Chabon.  The friends group had not noticed that either of these books were inscribed by their authors, and so I paid two dollars each for them. When I wrote my check I rounded the amount up, to compensate the library a bit and alleviate my vestigial guilt (which was faint but persistent).  Overall it was a lovely morning, and we came away buoyed up at the fact that there are still books in the world, and lots of them.

Speaking of which, I guess I do have to talk about Samuel Clemens (there, that settles it) again for just a moment.  May I mention some book-love, from his English Journals of 1872?  In them, in an appendix in Mark Twain's Letters Volume 5, he describes his time at the British Museum's incredible Reading Room (p.598):

"Nobody comes bothering around me - nobody elbows me - all the room & all the light I want under this huge dome - no disturbing noises - & people standing ready to bring me a copy of pretty much any book that was ever printed under the sun - & if I choose to go wandering about the long corridors & galleries of the great building, the secrets of all the Earth & all the ages are laid open to me.  I am not capable of expressing my gratitude for the British Museum - it seems as if I do not know any but little words and weak ones."

There it is, in a nutshell, this book-love.  Our little basement book sale certainly isn't the Reading Room, but it still contains multitudes.