Book Sale Reading
Dear Reader,
Today’s piece has a tinge of nostalgia to it. Not only am I a regular attendee of book sales—too regular—but I’ve volunteered for one nonprofit’s quite regularly over the years. It’s a real delight to sort the books, knowing many of them by hand, and then being able to help readers young and old find treasures for a dollar or less.
Yet I won’t be writing about recommending reads to others today—that essay still waits. Today’s piece is about the books you yourself find at a book sale.
Now book sale finds aren’t too different from used bookstore finds. But the book hauls from a book sale are much different than those from a bookstore. The two-to-fifty dollar books you might leave at a used bookstore are merely a dollar, maybe fifty cents. (I first read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell as a fifty-cent “oh why not?” purchase.)
At a bookstore, one’s budget comes up in seriousness. Indeed, many people budget beforehand so that they know roughly how much they can spend on a day of book hunting.
At a book sale, the budget isn’t typically financial. It can be so, as dollars are sometimes extremely tight. Still, the extreme deals at many book sales fit into most financial budgets. What you end up needing to budget for is your arm strength, even if it's just waiting in line to purchase your haul.
Book sales have such strange offerings. It’s a mad collection of idiosyncratic material—highbrow, lowbrow, disintegrating, mint condition. You often leave a book sale the same way you leave a store that’s closing for good: with some random object you’d never have purchased otherwise. This, of course, adds to the fun of a book sale. My grammar collection now includes Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer's Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears and Outmoded Rules of English Usage because of a book sale, and that is perhaps the best titled book in my whole collection of books on writing. (I still haven’t read it for fear the rest of the book won’t live up to the promise of its two-breath title.) That collection, I might note, is a rather healthy one at this point.
I’d never have purchased that book new; and I’d probably not have purchased it at a used bookstore. But for a buck? Oh yes, I’ll take Miss Thistlebottom’s hobgoblins for a whirl. The difficulty of book sales is that you do end up with a few reference books you don’t quite make use of. You generally end up with a few other books you don’t quite make use of as well.
This newsletter, though, is on reading, not the unread books that haunt us. (Okay, those too, but they aren’t our regular topic of discussion.)
And book sale reads are glorious. For some reason, the bar is so much lower with a collection of book sale books. You’ll find one-sitting reads. You’ll find poetry collections that you read in several sittings. You’ll find books, like my Stephen Vincent Benét anthology, that you work your way through slowly.
The idiosyncratic material you can find often creates a reading journey like few others. I’ve left one book sale with a full box each year—at least 30 books ready to go. A few of those will become gifts, but the rest are for reading in various pockets of time.
Because of the tiny financial investment, you leave a book sale feeling like a king. And like a king, you can be a bit wasteful in your reading, just as you were extravagant in your acquisition. A full quarter of those books I acquire from a book sale end up in in the next year’s sale—and these are ones I’ve read. Others, however, languish partly-read or half-flipped-through, waiting their turn for a keener glance.
The very best joy of book sale reading is when, once more like a king, you decide to glory in the richness of your finds. (I personally feel more like a pirate delighting in his booty, but that’s because I leave feeling like I must have done something illicit to have acquired this many books for so little.) If you have a day or two days, you get to start one or two of the reads, often three. And you keep working your way through them. The stakes are low, because the books didn’t cost you practically anything. And yet they are yours, so you can stack them and read them however you like.
This is when you get to try out some of the weirder finds from the book sale. Island mysteries? Check. Ghost stories of Appalachia? Check. A 1993 book on magazine writing? Check. A dictionary of idioms? Check. The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation? Oh yes indeed.
Happy reading to you,
Kreigh