Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

We aspire to a dusty shelf. (Possession)

I took the daughter to a book sale at the local library yesterday. It was a "buck-a-bag" sale, in which you pay a buck when you enter the door, they hand you a big paper bag, and you then fill it with whatever you want from the books piled on the tables. Library book sales are always fun, because they're like Mr. Gump's box of chocolates in that you never know what you're gonna get.*

Sure, there are always things like Advanced WordPerfect 5.1 Tips or Get the Most Out of Your New Kaypro or TIME Looks Back at 1994. And of course, these sales are heaven if those trashy romance novels with Fabio and his lookalike-minions are modeling the cover paintings. But there are treasures, too, in amongst the crap: those old Disney storybooks, based on the movies, but nevertheless feature more words than pictures, for example. Or a nice copy, almost brand-new, of A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh and Now We Are Six. (How these got passed over by the other people there with their kids is beyond me.) And I found what looks like a brand-new copy of Gunter Grass's Danzig Trilogy, which I remember hearing about once before. I had no idea what it's about - - I didn't know, until I got home and looked it up in my Merriam Webster Encyclopedia of Literature - - but since basically I'd already paid for it, I snatched it up. And I grabbed a few other items as well, stuff I've never heard of but yet possibly deserves better than incineration or life in a landfill.

Of course, when one is an aspiring writer, one cannot attend a library booksale without entertaining the thought that one day ages hence, my own long-out-of-print, long-discarded books will be part of the picked-over piles at some library. In the short term, I dream of selling my books…but in the long term, I can only hope that they will still be read. In the end, my dreams of immortality -- or at least, very long life -- through my books will probably run up against the more likely scenario of a person many years from now picking up a dusty copy of something of mine at a library sale, and standing there for a second or two, deciding if this author she's never heard of before is worth the price she'd pay for the book (next to nothing). I hope I don't come up wanting.

Oh, well...what else is there to do?

* Isn't that a bad metaphor, anyway? Most boxes of chocolates these days have little diagrams inside the lid that tell what each thing is. A much better box-of-chocolates metaphor comes from The X-Files, courtesy the Cigarette Smoking Man:

Life, it's a box of chocolates: A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. You're stuck with this undefinable whipped-mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while, there's a peanut butter cup, or an English toffee. But they're gone too fast, the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits, filled with hardened jelly and teeth-crunching nuts, and if you're desperate enough to eat those, all you've got left is an empty box filled with useless, brown paper wrappers.