Cheap books

It was a heavy weekend in Calgary for book sales. The CBC Calgary Reads sale and the Servants Anonymous sale were going on at the same time, which I don’t recall has ever happened before. The lady and I tried to restrain ourselves; came away with a modest haul:

You might be able to guess which stack is mine and which is hers. I got to cross off four books from my always-growing list of titles to track down:

• A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. Very first find of the weekend.
• Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
• A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman
• Nuremberg by Airey Neave

The others were more serendipitous. Among them are a copy of The Bonfire of the Vanities which I have already but this edition was too cool to pass up; Mordecai Richler’s first two novels; a biography of Isaac Newton, and a history of the Canadian prairies. Also one book, Zola’s Germinal, to add to my daunting stack of French reading that I keep meaning to get to.

My girlfriend-now-fiancee Rielle got some good finds too, but she killed it with The Fashion Book, shrink-wrapped and never opened, for $20 (all the other books were $3-$5 each).

In Montreal we used to get these kinds of sales at least four times a year at various locations (Westmount Library, Atwater Library, McGill, Concordia, etc.) but I think two sales per year is plenty. We do have to read all of these at some point. But it’s hard to resist the thought of the treasures those boxes can conjure, so we keep showing up. Maybe someday I’ll post some photos of the incredible stuff we’ve found in past years.

Cheap books for life.