Books Only Multiply

So I went to the library on my lunch hour, intending to return Degrees of Separation and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town (previously mentioned). Instead of driving to the closest library (Sibley, a tiny bit of a library crammed next to a car financing company), I went to the central library downtown. In her blog, Dani Torres has mentioned the Phryne Fisher mystery novels and I was intrigued. The Cobb County Library system has three of these Kerry Greenwood-authored novels, two of them at the central library (of course, as luck has it, none of the three being the first one), which explains my attendance.

The central library always has a little cart out of mystery books and in scanning it I found an delicious-looking book: The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Murder Case by George Baxt. According to the back cover Baxt has also written something called The William Powell and Myrna Loy Murder Case, which sounds equally delicious. I suppose I will find out if it's actually true after my read of Fred and Ginger. I checked the card catalog—now a misnomer since all the books are listed on computer instead—to see if the library had any other Baxt books, but apparently the Fred and Ginger book is so new it's not even on the computer, never mind Bill and Myrna. :-)

So I sallied forth into the stacks to fetch Phryne (#9 and #12; she's a British ex-pat living in Australia during the 1920s) and of course came back via the Christmas books, and found myself smack-dab next to the linguistics books, so I also picked up two William Safire "On Language" volumes I don't remember reading, Quoth the Maven and Spread the Word. Yum...nice fat books about word usage!

As I departed the library I debated also taking out Ballet Shoes (I've never read any Streatfeild and the television production piqued my interest), but dismissed it for now. I wish Cobb County had more than one Beany Malone book! If I want to read the others I will have to get them through interlibrary loan, darnit.

A sign at checkout said "Try our new self-checkout," so I did! Just like the grocery store (although it helps when you scan the library's barcode, not the book's...LOL).