First off I would like to remark: Imagine my bemusement when I went to a city library sale & discovered they were sellin library books. Thousands of them. Ack! Smalltown libraries dont do that, in my experience. How it works in our town these days, ferinstance, is that all through the year the librarians accept yr donated books and stash them around various hideyholes till some behind-the-scenes helpers pick them up & truck them to the holding area — usually a rented storage unit these days. Then when the week of library sale arrives, helpers convey books to the wherever the sale is being held that year (always a donated place, of course), & arrange them in somewhat sweepingly generalized categories, & open up the doors. The prices are a quarter to two dollars for all the books except the newest published within the past year books, which range from two to seven dollars.
Meanwhile, on the capitalizm side of book-readin, there was for many years on the town square Shelley’s usedbooks store, which I frequented with regularity & delight. And when the bookpiles started crowdin my rugging elbow, I would take them off to the library for the fundraising sale (where sometimes Shelley would buy them back & put them on her shelves again).
And then last fall, Shelley threw a 3month goin outta business sale & shut it down. I was havin a crabby time & was irked about losin my bookstore. However it was a true gob sale — in the last week she was sellin any/all books for a dime apeice so — I bought a lotta books. And that turned out to be good timing because another grrr that season was that I couldnt use the woodstove so hadda shrink the space I was gonna heat to a size an electric radiator could heat.
First I stapled a sheet of plastic floor to ceiling around the winterquarters area, then lined that with quilts & blankets, then realized hey! Books are great insulation! So I started stoppin off at the liquor store on the way to Shelley’s sale to select good stackable wall-boxes, and meanwhile the prices were goin down down down, & I just kept buyin more more more books — though I gotta say I couldnt quite bring myself to buy books I had no intention of reading which was kinda eccentric of me…So that by the time bigcold winter came, I had a pretty snug plastic bubble walled high enough with boxes o’books to make life doable. And then I prettymuch spent the winter ruggin & readin.
So of course, Phoenix, by the time June rolled around, I had a many anda many boxes o’books for which I had no further use — on account of, though of course I kept any books other dragons might wanna read, none of them is a ferinstance TravisMcGee fan, nor John LeCarre, that sorta thing.
Okay! Now we are back in the present rollin on into town going directly to the library sale, which unfortunately has a pretty flat parking lot, especially by the building which’s where Pokey parks because hey we have a lotta books to unload here — but aha! There’s a dolly! But aha! Badger first pushes the dolly up the ramp & it tips & dumps all the boxes! But aha! Pulling it up backwards works fine! Pokey & Badger trundle the books in and I wander off into the wonders of this years’ library sale, my money tingling in my pocket.
Then, unbeknownst to me, the truck wont start again. So Badger’s pushin the truck across the parkinglot and Pokey’s …hmmm, what’s that technical term? poppin the clutch, is it? — well anyway it wasnt workin. So then a kindly helpful came over & started pushin the truck with Badger but irk, nothin. So kindly-helpful got out his jumpercables & they did that, durin the course of which, kindly-helpful told Pokey the battery doesnt actually start chargin when you drive until you are goin 50mph or faster. Which Pokey hadnt done on the way in due to the FridaKahlo experiment.
Very well then! Pokey blasted off to roar up & down the highway awhile, & Badger walked to the hardware store for current project supplies and by the time she came back I was lyin in the grass by the parkinglot smokin, on account of grr although there was a giant scifi section this year, believe it or not every singledingle one of the scifis were startrek books. But aha! I had found the complete unabridged Stranger in a Strange Land in the hardback fiction, so was very satisfied. Badger filled me in on what’s happenin with the battery & we admired the treetops for a while, & then Pokey came boomin along, lookin a bit sheepish…Oy says Pokey, um the lid of the tupperware for the laundry blew outta the back somewhere along the highway — I looked for it but I couldnt find it. We tease her a bit & resume our truck positions, and we’re off, next stop lunch at Lulu’s.
