Pretty Bleak-ing awesome find

For a while now, Deborah has been telling me that I should read Charles Dickens' Bleak House. She believes I will like it. I don't have any reason to doubt her. But in addition to having some other planned reading to get through before I am ready to get my Bleak on, there was one small problem we were finding: despite the abundance of Charles Dickens works out there, for some reason, we were coming up empty on Bleak House.

Enter The Book Room in Richmond, the first of the booksellers we visited on our trip Tuesday. We arrived at around the same time that our daughter was a bit hungry, so I suggested that I go in alone to scope the place out, to see if it was worth us all piling out of the car.

On first glance, once I entered, I wasn't so sure. Not that there weren't a lot of books there, but it didn't appear that we were going to find anything on our unwritten list. I wandered through the shelves of current fiction, mostly the kind of stuff you might find at an airport bookstore, until spotting a single, narrow yet tall bookcase in the back. It was marked "Classics" and had a small sign on it saying "Minimum $1.75." 

They were all paperbacks on these shelves, and many were fairly recent editions. As I scanned, I believed I was closer and closer to leaving and moving on to the next bookstore, but then I saw it. I couldn't believe it. I did walk out, and went straight to the car to tell Deborah she needed to come in.

I brought her to the same shelves, and picked up my discovery. I don't remember exactly, but she may have squealed when she saw that not only did I find Bleak House, but it was a Riverside Editions Bleak House in the style of Riverside Editions that we have been slowly collecting as we find them. And I think it's the earliest-dated one in our collection.

Bliss at The Book Room in Richmond. It was our first stop of the day, but already the trip was a rousing success.

Book added: Bleak House, Charles Dickens

Publisher:  Riverside Editions, Houghton Mifflin, B4

Year: 1956

Where obtained: The Book Room, Richmond, Va.

Price: $2.00