52nd City

Used Book Fantasia!

The Carondelet YWCA is running their annual book fair 'til Wednesday the 31st. The hours are 9am to 9pm, with a $6 per bag or box night on Tuesday. (For those who've never been to the Carondelet Y, it's on 600 Loughborough). We just returned from a three-hour stint there, where we wandered around the basketball gym, basement and upstairs offices. The rooms runneth over with books, records, tapes and paper ephemera (& there's two outdoor tents as well).

Really, if you're looking for a great used booksale, I don't think you can do better than Carondelet. The poetry table at most booksales is lousy with Rod McKuen and vanity press, faux-beatnik doggerel, but I found two or three fantastic poetry titles today. Also great is the "Special, Rare, or Old" room. That's where I found "The Eclectic Shopper," a round-up of shopping columns published in the P-D in the early '70s; it's full of descriptions of the milliners and watch repairmen who plied their trade in the city 30-odd years ago. Here's an excerpt from the "Pipes" chapter: "Mrs. Henry A. Jost, proprietor of Jost's Pipe and Tobacco Shop, is one of the 60,000 American women who smoke pipes. Mrs. Jost believes that that many men and women pipe smokers don't know how to smoke a pipe - 'even if they have smoked for 35 years.' She and Harvey Raspberry give lessons in the shop. There are two comfortable chairs in the corner of the shop where a smoker can sit and have his smoking progress checked under the watchful eyes of Mrs. Jost or pipemaker Raspberry."

So here's what we scored:

VINYL
The Unknown Dvorak (Czech, Croatian and Serbian folk songs)
Gregorian Chants by the Vienna Hofburgkapelle Choir

BOOKS

Goethe's Faust, translated by Randall Jarrell
Wolf, Jim Harrison
Dust of Death, O.S. Guinness
Heartlands of Today, Art & Society, Vol. 3
The Book of Powerful Secrets
Addiction to Perfection, Marion Woodman
Encyclopedia Brown Shows the Way, Donald Sobel
The Ceremony and Other Stories, Weldon Kees
Memento Mori, Muriel Spark
Taxonomy and Nomenclature of Fungi, GR Bisbee
The Gregg Shorthand Dictionary
The Poetic Mind, Frederick Clarke Prescott
View with a Grain of Sand, Wislawa Szymborska
The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeez, James Thurber
Truth, Emile Zola
Joe Hill, Wallace Stegner
Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl
Pictures of the Gone World, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Young Pillars, Charles Schultz (pre-Charlie Brown comix w/ spooky stretched-out Peanuts characters as college students)
The Eclectic Shopper, Patricia Rice
All Quiet On the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
On Becoming a Musical, Mystical Bear, Matthew Fox
Strange Women of the Occult, Warren Smith
CIA and American Labor, George Morris
A Short History of India and Pakistan, T. Walter Wallbank
Plunkett of Tammany Hall, William Riordon
Pac-Mania! Haller Schwartz
The Partridge Family No. 5, "Terror Night," Vic Kroom
Dr. Eichenlaub's HOME TONICS and REFRESHERS for Daily Health and Vigor
What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Noam Chomsky
Spoon River Anthology, Edgar Lee Masters
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
Life of Ben Johnson, James Boswell

Total: $28.00 (which included two hot dogs and two bottled waters). Not bad, I say. Especially that Powerful Secrets book - it smells like cigar smoke (or maybe Mrs. Jost's pipe smoke?), but it was only .75, and it really is full of powerful secrets - like how to meditate effectively when you're extremely busy, how to win at Blackjack and how to get your FOIA requested expedited.