This morning, therefore, a few of us went out to see what remained of the heavily-picked-over spoils. We found surprisingly a lot--not much of it good, of course, since anything of inherent value had long ago been bought up, but it's a lot easier to justify buying crap romnovs and the like when doing so will only set you back a dollar each, instead of eight bucks each. I did find a very few actual legitimate purchases; one was Diana Gabaldon's Outlander, which is supposed to be pretty legitimately good even if it is a historical time-traveling Scottish highlander romance, and another was Madeleine L'Engel's A Wrinkle in Time, which I have never read but which is, of course, supposed to be a classic. Most of the rest was just barely above crap level, including some Jeff Shaara American Revolution dramatizations and the requisite "we suck compared to Europeans"-type book, this one from 2010, so that it's actually fairly recent. The worst was some fantasy I picked up almost solely for its glitzy cover and the promise of griffins, my favorite mythological creatures besides phoenixes, but apparently these griffins tend to eat humans, and in the foreward the author thanks members of an internet messaging board, with their screen names, so you know this is just the epitome of internet-age derivative fantasy. There were lots of copies of Glenn Beck's The Overton Window, but I couldn't justify paying even a dollar for that, and apparently not many other Hyde Parkers could.
It's really strange, and slightly sad, to be in a closing Borders, with all these empty shelves, some of which have already been dismantled. The shelves themselves were for sale in many cases, and it was mildly tempting to buy a Borders bookshelf, but without plans to move into an apartment in the next year, it really was a pointless idea. Also, even though the genre titles still hung above, most of the remaining books and just been thrown onto any old shelf, regardless of classification, meaning that the cooking shelves were full of romnovs and some inspirational pet stories were cheek-to-cheek with the remaining manga selections. I particularly enjoyed noticing that part of the romnovs-in-the-cooking-section situation was the subtitle "crockery" below some of the worst romnovs I can imagine being published; I laughed at that. The people swarming Borders with us were also slightly scary; it really was, in many ways, like we were all the survivors of some terrible apocalyptic event, desperate for the few remaining books in the world, and tons of people had their arms full of random books, clinging to them as if they were the only books left to read. I tried to limit myself only to books that I had some hope of actually reading at some point, but my companions were not all so self-restrained; one of my housemates bought 15 books, and doesn't even really know where some of them came from or why, exactly, she picked them up. Apparently a few other housemates had gone earlier in the day, and one of them bought 30 books and a poster. I haven't seen her stash yet, but I'm curious as to whether she was able to pick up any higher quality stuff than what we, going only about an hour later, found.
I love bookstores, and lately I've been going hog-wild with books; last weekend we went to Belmont/Lakeview to a used bookstore, where I picked up four other books, of marginally better readability levels, but also for more money each. The world truly is a bit bizarre when it's cheaper to buy new books at Borders than it is to buy used books at a jank-tastic used bookstore on the northside. Also, they were still taking gift cards at Borders, so I didn't even have to spend my own cash- or debit-card-money at Borders, so really, it was almost like free, in a way. It does feel kind of silly to use people's gift money to buy crappy books; knowing the people who gave me those gift cards, they probably would have better appreciated me buying two or three actually good books rather than 9 relatively stupid books. I still have $15 left on the card, however, so maybe at some point in a few months I can buy real books with that. (Or, realistically, one real book.)
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| Books bought last weekend at Bookman's Corner (Clark and Wellington, Belmont/Lakeview area) |
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| Books bought at the closing Borders at 53rd and Lake Park |
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| I saved $105.88? Best/saddest book sale ever. |
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