View From the Bushes

Today was the semi-annual used book sale at the city library. Attending it has become a major tradition for me and my friend Josh. The sale starts at seven am and it's important to show up early and get in line early. Although it's less so this year, because they've moved to a new building, which by the way is one of the coolest bits of architecture anywhere in the mountain west, and the science fiction section is no longer down a dead end, but that's another story.

In the past we've gone to breakfast first, and after waking up at 4 am for years so that we could have breakfast and still be in line by 6 am we finally wised up this year and decided to have breakfast after the sale. So I didn't have to wake up until 5:15 this morning, which is still pretty early for me. But I picked up some pretty good books. I picked up some LeQuin, some Niven and Pournelle, some Sartre and Stendhal in the original French, "The American Language" by Mencken and a nice copy of "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations." With the exception of the last book everything was 50 cents or a dollar.

The book sale is not about saving money, though I'm always surprised when I walk out with a big box of books and spend less on the whole stack than I did for the Forgotten Realms Campaign setting. To a certain extent, showing up at 6 am to stand in line for cheap books and finding a dozen people have beat us there and having a line with hundreds of people that stretches around the corner by the time the door opens restores my faith in humanity.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross