The haul

The Save the Children booksale is on at the moment. It goes until Wednesday, if you want to pick up some bargains.

Like last year, we went three times.

The picture above shows part of the huge crowd that waited patiently to get into the hall where the books were. We turned up a little after 5pm (when the sale opened), and already the hall was full. The line snaked across the yard. We waited in line for about an hour before we could enter!

I got 92 books. This includes the six books that M bought.

I dunno, but it doesn’t look like a very large pile of books, to me. Still, there’s a lot of reading here.

Funny, before the booksale I was musing publicly (on Twitter) about whether or not I would enjoy it, given my newfound love of ebooks. Well, I am happy to say that once I was in that heady atmosphere of hundreds of bookworms all rummaging through piles of books, I forgot about ebooks. I must say however that I did find myself selecting books more on their feel and on the unlikelihood of a particular title being available in ebook format. This did mean that I avoided most contemporary fiction, at least in paperback. I bought a few hardbacks, and was pleased when I got home and looked at them closer, to note that they are first editions. I also bought books I have read and loved – and either didn’t own until now because I read a library copy, or only had in paperback.

The red volumes on the floor are Chinese language titles. The large stack is part of a series of biographies of various famous people, like the Tang poet Li Bai, Confucius, Rembrandt, Kafka, and so on. The other five books are part of a series of classic Chinese works.

Finds:
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Seven issues of Meanjin
Ballada orang bercinta by Rendra (Indonesian. Poetry.)
Crossing map by Liliane Lijn. I note this book because a) it looks unusual, and b) it is the first book in my collection to be tagged “prose poetry”.

Total spent: $246. (M spent $20)

The chis, trying to attract my attention.