Friends Of The Library Booksale

The Friends of the Library's booksale is pretty much my favorite time of the year. It's held at the Central Library, which is the one in this awesome old building on the river in downtown Fredericksburg. It serves all of these places, so it is reasonably big.

Anyways, they have this amazing thing called "box day," which is where they are trying to get rid of all the leftover books on the last day, so you pay either 5$ or 1$ (depending on the day) and you fill up a cardboard box with as many books as you can carry. It's like heaven.

The great thing about it is twofold: 1) all of the crazy-ass random books that get donated to a library booksale. You can find some really wierd stuff there if you look hard enough. 2), which builds off of 1, is that all of the books are basically free, and then you pay a 5$ cover charge to get in. This lets you pick up stuff that you would never spend money on otherwise, and sometimes those things end up being really cool. Like I picked up a Clive Cussler book that I already own because, get this: it is written in Norweigan, or something, I don't know.

Does this book have an unintentionally funny title? Maybe it has a funny looking man on the cover. Perhaps this book was written by a gentleman named "Manly Banister" (see below). Well guess what: it's free!

Last year I found this really neat book called Let The People Know. It was written by a British guy during WW2, as a sort of open letter to America, trying to convince it to join the war against Germany. It was a really interesting book and it gave a lot of insight into what people were thinking about back then, and also (a big part of the book was devoted to this) why we needed to form a better League of Nations (later to become the UN). Anyways, I never would have known it existed, let alone bought it, without the glorious box day.

So this year Maura and I went and we shared a box together, which was very romantic. Below is a list of my new books. Hers are not listed, but she probably got around 15 more. Long live Box Day!

PS: For some reason that I don't understand, my table is showing up way down the page, even though it is right under this text in the editor. Oh well, just scroll down a ways to find it. Table was generated by Booxter, by the way.

Title	Authors	ISBN
The physics and chemistry of life.	Popular Mechanics
Automatic control.	Popular Mechanics
Galactic Cluster	James Blish
Het Goud der Inka's	Clive Cussler	9044927132
The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy	E.D., Jr. Hirsch, Joseph F. Kett, James Trefil	0395437482
The Joy of Indoor Plants	Consumer Guide
The universe; from flat earth to quasar.	Isaac Asimov
Ogre, Ogre	Piers Anthony	0345335090
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls	Robert A. Heinlein	0425093328
Childhood's end.	Arthur Charles Clarke
Existentialism and human emotions	Jean Paul Sartre
The new astronomy.	Popular Mechanics
Crewel Lye (Magic of Xanth)	Piers Anthony	0345345991
Treasure	Clive Cussler	0671671138
First book of animals	Popular Mechanics
Travels in Arabia Deserta	Charles Montagu Doughty, Edy Legrand, T. E Lawrence, Irvin Silvers, Edward Garnett
The Peace-Makers	Curtis W. Casewit
War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy	0451516613
German for beginners	Curtis C. D Vail, Dieter Cunz, Ulrich Groenke
Conversational German: A Complete Course in Everyday German	Genevieve A. Martin, Crown, Kathy Mintz	0517557819
Atomic power.	Popular Mechanics
Conquest of earth.	Manly Miles Banister
Dune	Frank Herbert	0425080021
How-to-do-it encyclopedia.
Great Books Collection: Readings for Discussions	Thoreau, Plato, Sophocles, Thomas Jefferson
I, Claudius : from the autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Emperor of the Romans, born 10 B.C., murdered and deified A.D. 54	Robert Graves	0140003185