Library Student Vices

All hail the annual Plano Friends of the Library Booksale, going on this Friday and Saturday. We went to the earlybird special last night, and ended up with ten--count 'em--boxes of books. Hardbacks are $1.50, I think paperbacks are $.75, and children's book are $1 for a fistfull.

Our Spoils...


We even topped last year, when I think we got around eighty hardbacks (something like six boxes). This year, three of the boxes were two different encyclopedia sets, and one was paperbacks.

It's always fun and interesting--you find odd books, popular books, beat-up books, old books, and books that you loved in childhood and had forgotten about.

This year, I found two Reader's Encyclopedias (I bought one last year and it proved imminently valuable for reading Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series), which is exactly what I wanted to find, The Sunflower Garden--a book that I read as a kid and had completely forgotten about, The Story of Ping--a book about a bad Chinese duck who gets spanked for being last back on the boat that I hated as a kid but have been wanting to read again, and a hardback copy of George and Martha--a book about two rich hippos who are friends, which is a childhood favorite of Alex's.

There were also, inevitably, a few we bought because of cool titles or interesting dust jackets--including this intruigingly bizarre-looking science fiction novel from 1957, Space Cat Meets Mars:



This reminds me; if you have ever wanted to find a children's book for which you don't know the title or author, check out Loganberry Books. This website features Stump the Bookseller, a directory of children's book stories that you can search by theme, character, etc. to find the title--or search by title if you don't know an author. And if you don't find your book, you can submit it to Stump the Bookseller for $2, and either the bookstore owner or one of hundreds of online readers may find the answer for you!