Yet Another Book Sale

Every year my mantra is "I'm only going to buy the books on my list," and every year I break the rules.


Well, granted, some of the books on my list are very recent and perhaps I shouldn't expect to find them at the book sale. They're about to come out in paperback, or they just have come out in paperback, so I have found books like that at the sale before. But, alas, not today. I found only Craig Johnson books I didn't need, no Victoria Thompson in the Gaslight series (although I did find the second book in her new series), alas no Gladys Taber, no Jodi Taylor books, nor The Silver Gun, etc. But I still managed to come home with A Stack fifteen inches high.

• Jesus and His Times, a "Reader's Digest" book that seemed appropriate for Lent or the approaching Easter season
• Firehorse, about a teen girl who moves to Boston right before the great fire
• Hattie Ever After, the sequel to Hattie Big Sky
• Anything for a Laugh, another Bennett Cerf collection
• Here's England, a tour book of England from 1950 by a husband and wife team
• My Sherlock Holmes: Untold Stories of the Great Detective, pastiches
• City of Secrets, a sequel to Victoria Thompson's City of Lies
• A Christmas Party by Georgette Heyer, which will go into my Christmas reading pile
• America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, which seems perfect reading for March
• Good-bye, Mr. Chips and Other Stories (I had no idea James Hilton had done other Chips stories! This collects all of them, and is illustrated to boot)
• Victoria's Daughters, which I've wanted for ages
• a hardback edition of The Wind in the Willows with no cover but Tasha Tudor illustrations

I'd taken time out to go to the rest room and then look at dismay out the open cargo doors of the civic center; it was pouring as if heaven were emptying out and a whole family, mom and three kids, including a very sopped baby, were drying off in the bathroom. So I went back and looked at the kids' books again—there were still lots of picture books and elementary grade reference books left, but the middle-grade books were practically stripped—and then the young adult and trade paper books, and there in the middle of the YA amongst the vampires and supernatural and steampunk were two books by Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. There are currently two biographies about Fermor in the travel section at Barnes & Noble; in 1933 he left home at eighteen and walked from Rotterdam to Istanbul. The books, which chronicle his journey, are supposed to be classics. Well, I'm game. If he can write like Laurie Lee, that will be a definite plus!

I also bought something for Alice and Ken, and a curiosity for Rodney.

I finally got done at the civic center at quarter to noon; it was still raining, but lightly, so I stacked the two bags of books one on top of the other and got them out to the car without getting them wet. It took me a while, but I got down to Tin Drum despite lunch-hour traffic, picked up lunch for both James and I, and got home without incident.