And yet there we were on Saturday, pouring over old copies of Strunk and White, a seemingly complete set of Sara Paretsky’s novels, and pretty much anything else you could think of, all for five dollars a Trader Joe’s bagful. You can get most of it on Kindle, but not at that price, and not in this company. Fifty people were waiting on the sidewalk at ten. Half broke the line and bolted for the tables at the first sign of the checkered flag. Dealers, people shopping for friends, and people who just love books. I sneezed all the way home from the dust. You won’t get that kind of lived out experience from a Kindle.
Elder granddaughter Frannie, seven, was a dogged shopper. Seeing her side by side with people in their seventies, poking through boxes with exactly the same expression on their faces, gave me a deep feeling of contentment and hope. She is coming into the time of the Babysitters Club and added a few volumes to her collection. Her aunt Valerie could’ve told you the title of every book in the series if you said the number. Frannie also got a book about brain farts.
Kathy always buys Mr. Nixon’s books if available, and one was. She also got Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” I couldn’t resist “A History of the Arab Peoples” by Albert Hourani, widely praised when it came out in 1991. It was both the book and its prior owner’s meticulous underlining and annotating. They put stars next to passages they underlined, the way I used to before I became one of the first adopters of Kindle reading in 2007. If I’m to keep my promise to omit unnecessary books with mathematical precision, I’ll have to give away one more I owned already. A book that has been read and loved as well as this one deserves safe harbor.
