I continue to find quality books at Goodwill and Value Village, books overlooked and unwanted by the public. My goal is to accumulate these treasures while they are still available. Before TSHTF, I am stackin' ... books.
Here's what I found this week.
I had some time to kill while waiting to pick up my daughter from a birthday party in Ballard, so I dropped in the Goodwill at 65th and 8th NW. Good thing I did, because I stumbled across someone's old collection of
Grosset & Dunlap books, of which I am an avid collector.
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G & D, "The Story of" series |
These date to the late 1950s and early 1960s, and are in excellent condition, with dust-jackets. I need to order some more vinyl jacket covers from
Demco soon (I order batches of 100). Sometimes bibliophiles call these jacket protectors "Brodarts," but I don't order from them because Demco has them whipped on prices.
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more "The Story of" series |
These will look great with protective sleeves on the jackets. I would have been pleased enough to find these, but also found six books in the "We Were There" series from Grosset & Dunlap. These are historical accounts where the author weaves a story involving a couple of kids into an event, to help explain it to the reader. An historical consultant keeps the narrative honest.
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G & D "We Were There" series |
I'm kinda curious to see how the author gets two
kids out in Bataan, and whether they are bayonetted at some point by the vicious Japanese, their frail bodies dumped by the side of the road.
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more "We Were There" series |
Value Village had this from Rodale Press, could be useful.
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Rodale Press, Growing & Using Healing Herbs |
And so could this:
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The Chronicles of Amber |
Value Village had this book, the first of a series meant to accompany and update the
Great Books of Western Civilization produced by Britannica and the University of Chicago, Mortimer Adler's grand project. Once in a while I see a
Great Books series or individual volumes at thrift stores, even though I don't have a set or much interest in owning one. My library has plenty of classics and overlap with the set, and professor Allan Bloom used to make fun of the translations used for these books.
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The Great Ideas Today, 1961 |
I bought this because it contains a length essay by an old friend of mine, the late professor Edward Shils of the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago. In his essay, in the inaugural edition of this series, he summarizes the condition of the social sciences and the world in general in 1961. As soon as I started reading it, I realized that this was an amazing time capsule, which deserves further study. Shils's writing here is like a letter from
another planet, and I'll give it a good read and post more about it up here.
Deflation Land trivia -- my comments on charts are always in
green text, a secret nod to Shils. Anyone who has been his student understands why.