On the way to do a distasteful task (buy clothing), I made one more stop at the book sale. Arrived when they opened at one to find only a dozen people there. I had only fourteen dollars, so I had to be good even if I found a lot of things.
Only six books this time:
All Around the Year: Holidays and Celebrations in American Life by Jack Santino, which I can now take off my Amazon wish list.
The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, Volume II (no Volume I, sadly).
World Book's Christmas in the Netherlands (a bit in bad shape, but how could I abandon Sinter Klaas and Black Peter?).
The #20 Trixie Belden I missed on Friday, Mystery Off Old Telegraph Road.
Beany Malone, the second book in a long-running series.
and Susannah of the Yukon, the sequel to Susannah, A Little Girl of the Mounties (you may have seen the Shirley Temple version, Susannah of the Mounties).
Showing posts with label used books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label used books. Show all posts
14 October 2012
14 October 2011
Fall Library Book Sale Tally
• New England: Land of Scenic Splendor, National Geographic Books
• This Fabulous Century: 1870-1900, Time-Life Books (I bought this, thinking I might already have it, and I do...but the copy I have is almost 100 pages fewer...not sure if there are parts cut out, print made smaller, or what...)
• A book for James: S.M. Stirling's Ice, Iron and Gold (short stories from different times)
• June Allyson, by June Allyson (Heavens, I had to...how many times have I sat through Strategic Air Command with James? Anyway, I like June Allyson!)
• Tales of the New England Coast (This is a compilation of stories from old magazines from the turn of the 20th century; I used to look at it at Oxford Too, that's how long it's been around!)
• The Literary Guide and Companion to Northern England, Robert M. Cooper (apparently there's one for Southern and one for Middle England as well; anecdotes about literary locations and writers)
• American Country Christmas, Mary Emmerling and Chris Mead (A little gift book, with wonderful old-fashioned home decorations)
• Dear America books: Journey to a New World (Pilgrims), Winter of the Red Snow (Revolutionary War), When Will This Cruel War Be Over? (Civil War)
• Anna All Year Round, Hahn DeGroat (based on a true story, Baltimore before World War I)
• Sword of the Wilderness, Elizabeth Coatsworth (Colonial era; Coatsworth always treated her Native American characters with more respect than many writers of her time)
• A Christmas Companion, Maria Robbins and Jim Charleton (this is mostly recipes, but does have some customs around the world)
• Say It With a Simile, William Safire (Which I've taken out before; I can tell the way the pages are riffled)
• The Night Journey, Kathryn Lasky (based on a true story)
and a book I already have, but I know someone who will love it. And my best find:
• More All of a Kind Family, Sydney Taylor
You could get the All-of-a-Kind Family books for less than a dollar years ago, in Yearling book editions. Then they went out of print, and when they did reprint them, they were $17 apiece. Now you can't find them again, except at conflated prices. (The cheapest one of them is selling on Amazon Marketplace is $17! One is going for over $100! Good heavens!)
All for $22.50!
• This Fabulous Century: 1870-1900, Time-Life Books (I bought this, thinking I might already have it, and I do...but the copy I have is almost 100 pages fewer...not sure if there are parts cut out, print made smaller, or what...)
• A book for James: S.M. Stirling's Ice, Iron and Gold (short stories from different times)
• June Allyson, by June Allyson (Heavens, I had to...how many times have I sat through Strategic Air Command with James? Anyway, I like June Allyson!)
• Tales of the New England Coast (This is a compilation of stories from old magazines from the turn of the 20th century; I used to look at it at Oxford Too, that's how long it's been around!)
• The Literary Guide and Companion to Northern England, Robert M. Cooper (apparently there's one for Southern and one for Middle England as well; anecdotes about literary locations and writers)
• American Country Christmas, Mary Emmerling and Chris Mead (A little gift book, with wonderful old-fashioned home decorations)
• Dear America books: Journey to a New World (Pilgrims), Winter of the Red Snow (Revolutionary War), When Will This Cruel War Be Over? (Civil War)
• Anna All Year Round, Hahn DeGroat (based on a true story, Baltimore before World War I)
• Sword of the Wilderness, Elizabeth Coatsworth (Colonial era; Coatsworth always treated her Native American characters with more respect than many writers of her time)
• A Christmas Companion, Maria Robbins and Jim Charleton (this is mostly recipes, but does have some customs around the world)
• Say It With a Simile, William Safire (Which I've taken out before; I can tell the way the pages are riffled)
• The Night Journey, Kathryn Lasky (based on a true story)
and a book I already have, but I know someone who will love it. And my best find:
• More All of a Kind Family, Sydney Taylor
You could get the All-of-a-Kind Family books for less than a dollar years ago, in Yearling book editions. Then they went out of print, and when they did reprint them, they were $17 apiece. Now you can't find them again, except at conflated prices. (The cheapest one of them is selling on Amazon Marketplace is $17! One is going for over $100! Good heavens!)
All for $22.50!
21 July 2008
Unexpected Find
The last time we were in Book Nook, James picked up a copy of L. Neil Smith's The Nagasaki Vector; he had all the "Win" Bear/North American Confederacy books at one time, but about half of them disappeared in the course of three moves. I said impatiently "Well, why haven't you looked for them online?" and clicked around on Amazon.com and found a bit worn but acceptable copy of The Probability Broach, which arrived Saturday and which he's been reading ever since.
Happily, we also found another in the series, a later publication (2001), which he didn't even know about, The American Zone. That arrived in today's mail and there was a gleam in his eye about having found a new book in a series he already loved...so understandable to me after finding Verney's Samson's Hoard and Frost's Fireworks for Windy Foot, not to mention L'Engle's last novel. It's like finding a long-lost family member.
Happily, we also found another in the series, a later publication (2001), which he didn't even know about, The American Zone. That arrived in today's mail and there was a gleam in his eye about having found a new book in a series he already loved...so understandable to me after finding Verney's Samson's Hoard and Frost's Fireworks for Windy Foot, not to mention L'Engle's last novel. It's like finding a long-lost family member.
08 May 2008
Successful Searches
I took some time at lunch today to do some book searching on Amazon Marketplace and was pleasantly pleased. I had a list of three books I was looking for and found them all for less than $20 (that's with postage). One was Gladys Taber's Harvest of Yesterdays: My Life Before Stillmeadow, which will fill in the gaps between Especially Father and Harvest at Stillmeadow, the first Stillmeadow book. Another was the Christmas book I found at the library last fall, Jack Newcombe's New Christmas Treasury. The copy I found was only 27¢! The third book I was looking for, Christmas From the Heart of the Home by Susan Branch, I actually found on Barnes & Noble's equivalent to Amazon Marketplace.
Despite having a 30 percent off coupon to Borders, I took the opportunity to order America 1908 from Amazon Marketplace as well. I found it for a price that would basically be equivalent to having a 30 percent off coupon when the paperback comes out next fall.
While I was searching I thought about other books I had not been able to find and went searching for Mary Ann Madden's Son of Giant Sea Tortoise. The title needs explaining, I'm sure. :-)
Many, many years ago, when I was in high school, I was in the Woolworths at Garden City Shopping Center and, in a rack of remainder books, found a book called Thank You for the Giant Sea Tortoise, edited by Mary Ann Madden. Apparently New York magazine (not The New Yorker) used to—or maybe they still do—would host these clever little contests in each issue. Sometimes it was asking for clever anagrams, or creative casts and/or titles for movies (Henry Fonda in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? or Michael York and Burt Lancaster in The War of the Roses, for example), or appropriate names for products ("Kiddy Foil" and "Ova Kill" for contraceptives), but as I read through the book (of course I bought it; it was only a quarter) my favorites became the contests in which they asked people to write something.
Some of these were (1) a composition written about a pet by a celebrity at age eight, (2) epitaphs for the famous, (3) various prose items in the style of a famous writer (for instance, a weather report by A.A. Milne or Shakespeare or a letter of resignation by Dr. Seuss, in rhyme, of course), (4) typical final dialog from two different movie genres, etc. These entries were always by far the funniest and also showed brilliant cleverness on the part of the person who entered.
Thank You for the Giant Sea Tortoise, incidentally, came from the contest "unseemly greeting cards for unlikely occasions." Over ten years later I found another book in the series, Maybe He's Dead, so today I searched about and found out there was a third book (actually the second of the three), called Son of Giant Sea Tortoise. How could I resist?
Despite having a 30 percent off coupon to Borders, I took the opportunity to order America 1908 from Amazon Marketplace as well. I found it for a price that would basically be equivalent to having a 30 percent off coupon when the paperback comes out next fall.
While I was searching I thought about other books I had not been able to find and went searching for Mary Ann Madden's Son of Giant Sea Tortoise. The title needs explaining, I'm sure. :-)
Many, many years ago, when I was in high school, I was in the Woolworths at Garden City Shopping Center and, in a rack of remainder books, found a book called Thank You for the Giant Sea Tortoise, edited by Mary Ann Madden. Apparently New York magazine (not The New Yorker) used to—or maybe they still do—would host these clever little contests in each issue. Sometimes it was asking for clever anagrams, or creative casts and/or titles for movies (Henry Fonda in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? or Michael York and Burt Lancaster in The War of the Roses, for example), or appropriate names for products ("Kiddy Foil" and "Ova Kill" for contraceptives), but as I read through the book (of course I bought it; it was only a quarter) my favorites became the contests in which they asked people to write something.
Some of these were (1) a composition written about a pet by a celebrity at age eight, (2) epitaphs for the famous, (3) various prose items in the style of a famous writer (for instance, a weather report by A.A. Milne or Shakespeare or a letter of resignation by Dr. Seuss, in rhyme, of course), (4) typical final dialog from two different movie genres, etc. These entries were always by far the funniest and also showed brilliant cleverness on the part of the person who entered.
Thank You for the Giant Sea Tortoise, incidentally, came from the contest "unseemly greeting cards for unlikely occasions." Over ten years later I found another book in the series, Maybe He's Dead, so today I searched about and found out there was a third book (actually the second of the three), called Son of Giant Sea Tortoise. How could I resist?
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