Sunday, April 24
Purchased at the Friends of the Loveland Public Library Book Sale, for $5 in total:
- Frontier Earth, Bruce Boxleitner. Possibly a sequel to something. Features the author in character as Babylon 5’s Captain John Sheridan on back cover.
- The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard.
- Cloud Cry, Sydney J. Van Scyoc. A Book Club edition. One of those 1970s small-format hardbacks with a dust jacket in terrible vague pastels. Sample sentence: “Aleida hunched in the dark mating bower.”
- Fireship, Joan D. Vinge. Similar format to above. Cover art is less abstract: features some tape drives, a menacing bald guy, a a dude with some kind of implied brain implants and giant sunglasses, and a woman with a remarkably plunging neckline and unrealistic shoulders sitting in a bar or casino of some sort.
- Commerce of the Prairies, Vol. II, Josiah Clegg. A facsimile edition in the “March of America Facsimile Series” published by University Microfilms, Inc., “A Subsidiary of Xerox Corporation”.
- Went to Kansas, Mrs. Miriam (Davis) Colt. Same series as above.
- The Gila: River of the Southwest, Edwin Corle, illustratd by Ross Santee. A Bison Books edition from 1967.
- The Gold Cell, Sharon Olds. Poems.
- Nebraska Moments: Glimpses of Nebraska’s Past, Donald R. Hickey.
- The Great Crash, John Kenneth Galbraith. A paperback reissue from 1961 (I think) in remarkably good shape.
This is a reasonably good encapsulation of the experience of showing up at the end stage of a book sale, when you can fill a bag or box for pretty much no money. I rarely know why I bought half of what I did, or I know my reasons but they’re obviously bad. Then again, there’s usually something in the mix worth having anyway.