There's no place like home...

Wednesday marked the first official Get a Spine visit to the local used-book store where I grew up, Willis Monie Books in Cooperstown, NY. As Deborah talks about here, we had one very interesting experience on our visit, and as she also mentions, the stop was kind of a quick one due to our daughter's need to nap. Thankfully, many more opportunities to browse at Willis Monie await us in the future.

So in addition to what Deborah discusses, we were able to quickly round up a few nice "new" works for our library in the short time we did spend there:

• a 1953 edition of Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway. I know it's nonfiction, but Hemingway is second to none for me, and good older editions of his works are pretty hard to find at reasonable prices, so getting Green Hills for $5.00 was just fine as far as I am concerned.
• an illustrated Modern Library edition (1944) of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. This one is in great shape, and appears to have been a Christmas gift from a student to a teacher in 1944.
• a 1925 copy of The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington. This is one Deborah highly recommends, and we hadn't yet owned our own copy. As an aside, this book smells great.
• lastly, an upgrade over our current copy of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. The one we had already was a flimsy paperback, and this is a hardcover published sometime around 1950.

Like I said, it was a brief visit, but we'll have tons of opportunities to keep going back.

Books added: Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway; The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington; Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman; Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Publishers (in same order): Charles Scribner's Sons; Doubleday, Page and Company; Random House Modern Library; Harcourt, Brace and World

Years: 1953; 1925; 1944; 1950(?)

Where obtained: Willis Monie Books

Price: $18.00 for the four

Books for every variety of taste and opinion

We had big plans for this Saturday morning. A leisurely trip to our farm for some fresh veggies, then off to the SPCA Rummage store! The first Saturday of the month their books are half-price (regularly $3 hardcovers, $1 paperbacks) and we've been meaning to hit up the sale for awhile now, but kept missing it. Well, a few exciting home improvement projects and an eight-month-old who refused to nap without her mama meant we got a much later start than we had planned, which in turn meant I was hitting up the sale solo (with the baby) since Kristian had to work this afternoon.

We've been to the Rummage store many times -- it is a great thrift store all around -- but I had never really checked out the book section before. There was a small classics shelf with a mix of paperback and hardcover. On first scan, I didn't see much to get excited about, but as I examined more closely -- in between picking up dropped toys -- I came away with a few pretty good ones. On a prior visit, Kristian saw that they had the same 1964 paperback edition of The Awakening that we have, only without the sun-bleached cover, so that came home with me today. In addition to that, I found a funky paperback copy of Death in Venice by Thomas Mann that I liked, and a 1953 hardcover edition of The Magic Mountain, also by Thomas Mann -- nothing super special about it, but I've been wanting to read it and for $1.50 I figured, why not?

I also came home with a small hardcover Modern Library of "The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker". But what I was most excited about was the copy of "The Best Known Novels of George Elliot" -- those being, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Romola. A big book, published in 1940, it is a Modern Library Giant. The dust jacket is in pretty rough shape, but it is one of the best parts about this book. The inside of the jacket has a complete list (as of 1940, that is) of titles in the Modern Library and also seems to be the marketing medium. Printed across the top of the list it reads, "Which of these 334 outstanding books do you want to read?" And along the side is printed "Books that appeal to every variety of taste and opinion".

Books added: The Awakening, Kate Chopin (1964); Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories, Thomas Mann (1964); The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (1953); "Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker," Dorothy Parker (1942); "The Best Known Novels of George Elliot," George Elliot (1940)

Publishers (in same order):  Capricorn Books; Random House, Vintage Books; Alfred A. Knopf; Random House, The Modern Library, Random House, The Modern Library

Years: see above

Where obtained: SPCA Rummage Store, Charlottesville, VA

Price: $5.50