Concordia book fair

Concordia University held a used book fair yesterday and today. I went not expecting much, but came away laden down with books. They had a lot of fine stuff which I already had too, including John Myers Myers' Silverlock and a collection of the first three novels by John Crowley.

So what I bought:

Iain M. Banks / Inversion

Iain M. Banks / Look to Windward

John Barth / The Tidewater Tales

Christopher Brooke / The Twelfth Century Renaissance

R.H.C. Davis / The Normans and their Myth

Philip K. Dick / Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

Eleanor Shipley Duckett / Carolingian Portraits

Linda Haldeman / The Lastborn of Elvinwood

Tanith Lee / Black Unicorn

Tanith Lee / Days of Grass

Madelaine L'Engle / Walkng on Water

Iris Murdoch / The Nice and the Good

Ignazio Silone / Fontamara

Judith Tarr / Ars Magica

Lynn White, Jr. / Medieval Technology and Social Change

Austin Tappan Wright / Islandia

Douglas Young / Edinburgh in the Age of Sir Walter Scott

Three Greek Romances (Daphnis and Chloe, An Ephesian Tale, The Hunters of Euboea) trans. Moses Hadas

Eighteen books, plus two more bought as gifts; twenty books for twenty dollars. Not bad.

Another Book Sale

Last week the Friends of the Westmount Library had their autumn "Quality Book Sale". I picked up a bunch of stuff:

Stephen Baxter / Deep Future

Michael Chabon / Gentlemen of the Road

John Clare / The Wood is Sweet

Candas Jane Dorsey / Black Wine

J.P. Eckermann, translated by Gisela c O'Brien, selected and edited by Hans Kohn / Conversations with Goethe

Lev Grossman / Codex

Kathryn Lindskoog / The C.S. Lewis Hoax

Iris Murdoch / Under the Net

Patrick Rothfuss / The Name of the Wind

Dan Simmons / Darwin's Blade

Alfred Lord Tennyson / Poetical Works

So that's 11 books for $15. Not bad, and some very exciting titles in there. The Tennyson is intended as a gift, so that's 10 new books added to the apartment. Interesting to me to note that between this sale and the spring sale put on by the same people, I end up with 22 books, 21 to be read, while the McGill book fair this year gave me 35 books, 26 to be read. So these Westmount sales are kind of catching up to the McGill sale, if only for me personally. Fewer older books to be found at the Westmount sales, though, and generally less idiosyncratic and not as varied as the McGill fair; but the prices at the McGill sale this year were actually slightly higher than in the past, so the Westmount sales actually have the edge there.

The main concern for the Friends of the Westmount Library has to be the amount of space they have to work with, though. There just isn't anywhere near enough space in their current configuration, given the number of books available. It's one thing to have boxes of books under the tables, even boxes on top of boxes, but when the books fill the boxes such that they can't be easily examined, as far as I'm concerned you risk losing a sale. Still, between the Library and Victoria Hall, there are probably answers to these problems. We'll see what happens in future.