Book sale haul, 5.11.13

This is the weekend of my favorite book sale. It’s  held by a small library upstate, very few books are over a dollar, and if you buy a $10 tote bag, you can take home as many books as will fit in it. And that, of course, is what I did.

It's hard to tell in the picture, but this is a really big tote bag.

I usually limit myself to as many books as I can carry in my hands, so when my arms started to hurt, I went to check out. But once I’d gotten my books into my bag, the woman at the counter said, “you know, there are more books in the other building.” That was my downfall.

Anyway, here are the things I got, in reverse order as I unpack.

I didn’t buy all the Nero Wolfe books — just the cuter, older paperbacks and In the Best Families because it’s In the Best Families. Apparently my cat likes Nero Wolfe too.

Not the Felix Salten one with the deer, but the Marjorie Benton Cooke one with the people. The woman who helped me check out said she heard it was pretty racy, which seems unlikely, but I told her I would be pleased if that turned out to be the case.

I keep meaning to try Mary Stewart. And at this point I had well over $10 worth of books, so these were basically free.

Some miscellaneous paperbacks–One Hundred  and One Dalmatians  because my copy is missing pages, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold because I can’t find my mom’s copy, and a romance by Meredith Duran for no reason at all.

This is the Mary Roberts Rinehart portion of the haul. All of these books are more battered than all of the other books, but who cares? I own a copy of K
now.

This is the Ethel M. Dell portion of the haul. I…own a copy of The Way of an Eagle now. So, uh, that’s a thing.

The last few miscellaneous things: Rose in Bloom, my favorite Alcott book I’ve never owned; Trustee from the Toolroom, which I buy whenever I find it so I can give it as a gift; and Brat Farrar, which I own a couple of times over, because this copy is super cute. I assume the girl in the sheet on the cover is Eleanor, but I don’t understand why.

One Minute to Play

I picked up One Minute to Play in a used book store a month or so ago because I momentarily mistook Harold Sherman for Ralph Henry Barbour. They were both popular writers of sports stories, but it turns out that there’s an important difference: Ralph Henry Barbour knew how to write. Harold Sherman did not. I mean, it’s not like Barbour was all that great or anything, but Sherman, judging by this book, was really, really bad.

The Odd One

I feel like I should say anything about The Odd One, by Fannie E. Newberry, except that it was, well, an odd one. But I can’t help it. The title describes the book much better than it describes the main character.

Beth Merritt is the third of five sisters, and she’s called the odd one because, while Clarissa (Sister #1) and Trix (#4) are close, and Nell(#2) and Lala (Laura, #5) are close, Beth is always off on her own. The five of them live with their invalid mother in an old house somewhere in Ohio that, while pretty, has seen better times. The same applies to the girls. It’s all very Little Women.

The Lady of the Forest

The Lady of the Forest, by L.T. Meade, is another recent acquisition, and one of the most crazily convoluted books I’ve ever read. It’s so confusing that you need a family tree to understand it. The author didn’t include one, though, so I’ve had to make up the deficiency myself.

New acquisitions.

The camp where my brother works has a lot of old children’s books. My brother told me about it a while back, but I didn’t see it until yesterday, when my parents and I drove him up to Maine. Most of the books are in terrible condition, but there’s some really excellent stuff. The camp director let me pick out some to take, and I am going to replace them with newer books.

I got an Alger I didn’t have — Frank Hunter’s Peril — Three Dana Girls mysteries (that’s a Stratemeyer series that began in the mid thirties), and Slippy McGee, by Marie Conway Oemler. I was so excited when I saw the latter that I think I squeaked.

I have a copy of Slippy McGee! I can’t wait to reread it.

New Old Books

This weekend I was upstate with my family, and on Saturday we visited a used book store that my parents like a lot but where I’ve never found anything particularly interesting. I was about to not find anything interesting again this time, but while I was looking around the little room where they keep the children’s books, one of the store owners — I think — came into the room to get something out of the closet. I looked over his shoulder and saw piles and piles of exactly the kinds of books I wanted, mostly boys’ series like Tom Swift, The Boy Scouts, and Percy Keese Fitzhugh’s boy scout books. The guy let me look through them, and with the help of my father and my brother, who are much taller than I am, I got to look through most of them.

I ended up getting six books: two Tom Swifts (the first Tom Swift — think Tom Swift’s Motorcycle rather than Tom Swift’s Jetmarine), two Fitzhughs (one Tom Slade and one Pee-Wee Harris), one trashy looking women’s novel with nice illustrations and a main character named Sybil, and The Golden Boys in the Maine Woods.

I’ve just finished reading the latter. I am about to post about it, but I can’t figure out how to post two Flickr photos at once, so…