All that for six fifty?!

This weekend is the occasion for one of my most beloved events: my library's quarterly used book sale. I've been especially looking forward to this one, because I missed the one in March (the Wife's work schedule prevented me from going then). If you've never been to a library book sale, you really must try to get to one, because you can get unbelievable bargains, over and above the "Five paperbacks for a buck" part of the sale, where you can load yourself with enough Harlequin romance novels to keep the Wife happy for months to come. In booksales past, I have found hardcover copies of Bronosky's The Ascent of Man and Sagan's Cosmos (which replaced my hardcover copy of same that I lost in college), Halliburton's The Flying Carpet (a wonderful travel-and-adventure writer from the early 20th century), and others. Today I scooped up a copy of fifteen of Shakespeare's plays (apparently the "favorites", which seems to mean all of the "biggies", leaving out the ones nobody reads, like Titus Andronicus, Twelfth Night, and The Dancing Plantagenets); a copy of Of Music and Men by Deems Taylor; Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky (so The Brothers K can have company on my bookshelf as it mocks me); Beowulf, because, well, you can't have too many copies of Beowulf; and a few other assorted odds and ends. And a worn, but still quite serviceable, copy of Where the Wild Things Are for The Daughter.

And all of that for the grand total of six dollars and fifty cents -- less than the standard price of a mass market paperback these days.

Today's sale didn't include any really nifty finds like what appears to be an early edition of the collected poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning that I snatched up a year ago, but still, a lot of good reading material has found a good home.