This Fall's Book Sale Finds

A year has passed since Liz and I took the challenge to fill a box with books for a mere six dollars. Unfortunately, we can't make the $6 sale this year, so we did the next best thing: yesterday, we stopped by for the half-price sale that precedes the box sale. Our purchased quantity was smaller, but we appreciate them no less. 

The find of the day was procured by Liz:

A four-volume set of 1887 encyclopedias for ten dollars total?! We pored over two volumes of these gems at my kitchen counter. The Dakotas were still Dakota Territory, Cobb County, Georgia only had a population of around 20,000, and the term "lunatic asylum" was normal. 

My 1912 book of James Russell Lowell's poetry came in second: 

Someone I greatly admire, Ravi Zacharias, often quotes entire stanzas of poetry from memory in his talks. Shortly after I heard him say that he enjoys Lowell's poetry, I noticed Lowell frequently in The Cloud of Witness. I'm glad to have gotten this volume for just two dollars. 

Our Friends of the Library group has it's big book sale every September. The sale lasts over three weekends: a regular sale the first weekend, then a half-price sale, and finally the $6 a box sale. It's easy for book "nuts" like us to get carried away, but Liz and I behaved well this time. We might have gone a little more crazy given the chance to fill a whole box like we did last year, but for $6, who can help it?

Here are the books that Liz got:

Other Worlds Than Ours / Light Science for Leisure Hours -1904

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
1941

Grimms' Fairy Tales - 1900ish

Norse Stories - 1900

Graded Literature Readers- 1900

Reading Literature Sixth Reader - 1918

Chatterbox Wild West- 1896

The New People's Cyclopedia of Universal Knowledge 4 Volumes - 1887

Seat Weaving - 1940

Renaissance Patterns for Lace, Embroidery and Needlepoint - 1971

How to Sew Leather, Suede, Fur - 1966

I love this excerpt from Jan Karon's At Home in Mitford:

"The weather was making it possible for Andrew Gregory to do a thing he liked very much indeed. And that was sit inside the open double doors of the Oxford Antique Shop, on an eighteenth-century bench that was not for sale, and let the breeze drift in while he read from his rare-book collection.

When customers came in, he preferred them to sit on the matching bench as a kind of prelude to the sale, and talk about politics, golf, the gold market, the royal family, Winston Churchill, Italian old masters, and a dozen other subjects that intrigued him."

Here are the books that I got yesterday:

The Old Peabody Pew by Kate Douglas Wiggin, 1907

A Call to Adventure by Guy L. Bond, 1957

Stories to Remember by Guy L. Bond, 1962

Speeding Away, Open Highways Readers, 1968

The Mystery of the Missing Marlin by John & Nancy Rambeau, 1962

Helen Keller's Teacher by Mickie Davidson, 1968

Face-Off by Matt Christopher, 1972

Hitty, Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field, 1957

Star Spangled Summer by Janet Lambert, 1941

McGuffey's Fifth Reader, Revised, 1920

The Mansion by Henry van Dyke, 1926

Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes, 1906

Poems of Lowell, 1912

A Day in the Life of a Nurse by Connie Fluet, 2005

Last year when I posted on this same subject, I mentioned that some might wonder if we actually read all the books we get. The answer then as well as now is, yes! I have spent much time this year in the pages of books that I got at this sale last year. For me, it's ideal to have several books (maybe five or more) going at a time. I go to the "banquet" and take what I feel like having at that particular time. The morning seems better for meatier reading, while I like to save lighter reading for before bed. 

One more thing: Liz spent under $30, and I spent under $20. There are few things more thrilling than treasures on the cheap!

"Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life."--Charlotte Mason

"Be renewed in the spirit of your mind." Ephesians 4:23