There’s a weekly flea market near where I live. We dropped in there today. Flea markets generally don’t interest me much, at least not this one. While I know lots of people who love digging through mostly junk for that rare treasure (like my wife, for example!), I am not one of those people. I generally know what I want before I head out, and I don’t want to spend huge amounts of time pawing through junk looking for it.
However, it had been a while since I’d been to this flea market, and I quickly found something that I’d forgotten about: a fellow with used books. Lots of used books. About 26,000 used books, actually, by his reckoning. (I don’t think all 26K were there, because it was, after all, a fairly small booth, but I digress. The dude had a lot of books.) He basically has stacks upon stacks of boxes full of books. Each box has 2 rows of books, with the spine facing up (so you don’t have to flip books over, etc. etc. to see what they are). The boxes are also labelled correctly: sci fi here, fantasy there, food over yonder. Furthermore, his paperbacks are all priced exactly the same: $.50 a piece.
As an added bonus, while I don’t know where he gets his books (oh, how I wish I knew…), where ever he gets ‘em from, they’re taken care of. They’re obviously used, most of them anyway; but they don’t look like many used books I’ve seen. All of them have their covers. While the spines have minor cracking from being read, they aren’t split in half, nor are the pages falling off of the spine. They aren’t bent or warped terribly. All in all, they’re in very, very nice condition. I know, I know; for $.50 a piece I could afford to buy the book, read it, and then throw it away. But we doesn’t likes that preciousss… we wants them, we wants them all! I don’t throw books away, not if I can help it.
Seeing as the WordPress.com chaps haven’t yet granted me my wish about the LibraryThing widget*, I figure I’ll just have to write out what books I got for $3. 
- The Dragon and the Fair Maid of Kent by Gordon R. Dickson
- Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson
- The Ascension Factor by Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom
- Nemesis by Isaac Asimov
- Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
- Ender’s Shadow by the same
* Where’s my widget, folks? We needs it, preciousss!
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