The Friends of Seattle Public Library Book Sale is going on this weekend, and I took my young bibliomanes for an expedition. We did pretty well, even finding something useful in the Better Books area.
The overwhelming bulk of the books are cheap (like $1/hardback, $.50 paperback cheap) but the newer and/or nicer books, art books and the like, are priced a bit higher. I scored a bound set of Escher prints, 29 of them, for $5. The younger set bagged a bunch of Babysitters Club and Hardy Boys, I grabbed 2 Margaret Atwood [1,2]novels for their mom’s book club reading list, and I found Stereolab’s Margerine Eclipse (CDs are a buck as well). So more than a dozen books and a CD for $18. Not bad. The quality seemed much higher than on previous visits, either it wasn’t as picked over or stuff is being rotated out more aggressively.
And the young book lovers were so pleased with my recent foray into bookbinding they’re making their own. I made a small book press yesterday to make this easier, and we went to pick out cover materials for them. Now we have a couple of additional sheets of Naugahyde, one a deep blue, the other a faux rhino skin. And we got some lengths of ribbon to add bookmarks. One is in the press now, all 96 pages of it, we’ll cover it tomorrow, then do the other. My son’s stitching came out better than mine, and he showed a considerable amount of patience/independence on this. At 9, I would have made a bigger mess, even with help, if I even persevered to the end.
Now playing: La Demeure by Stereolab from the album “Margerine Eclipse”
Now playing: La Demeure by Stereolab from the album “Margerine Eclipse”