The Life and Times of a Navy Husband

Yesterday, the Newport Public Library began its summer book sale. They arranged all the books people have donated and the books the library has taken out of circulation (for whatever reason) all along these long tables in the cramped lower lobby. Most of what’s on offer is total crap, but you can occasionally find a few things worth reading at these events.

It’s like telling a crack addict that there’s a big room with road salt all over the floor, but, hidden amongst all that road salt are a few nice big, practically free crack rocks.

The event started at 9:30 according to the flyers posted around the building, so I planned to get there at 9:25. We even tried to time Sean’s morning naps to work around our desperate need to score. Sean, however, had different ideas. He played with the stuffed animals and wiggled around in his crib for an hour and a half. In the end, Danielle fed him and we popped him in the stroller and headed out, hoping he’d sleep while we hunted.

I thought for sure we’d be amongst the first in the door. No such luck. There were already about 20 people packed into the lobby searching the endless rows of books that lined the tables. There was almost no organization beyond ‘fiction over here, nonfiction of there, trashy broken-spined thrillers and romance novels over yonder.’

There were three kinds of people there at the beginning: serious book addicts, used book dealers, and old people with nothing else to do. The book addicts were mostly going for fiction, and the old people were just kind wandering aimlessly, sort of half-heartedly looking for a book that was worth their dollar bill (hardcovers and softcovers sold for $1 apiece or 6 for $5; mass-market paperbacks sold 4 for $1).

The real spectacles were the used book dealers. They collected huge stacks of books, claiming sections of floorspace where they could hoard their findings until they checked out. They had to put little signs on their collections that read ‘Taken’ so the other customers didn’t raid their stores.

When I started getting worried that I hadn’t grabbed enough cash to pay for what we’d collected so far, and when Sean’s tired, plaintive moans became more serious (he had not, obviously, taken a nap), we reviewed what we’d found and paid the pleasant ladies who had volunteered for the day. We brought Sean home, and then I went back for more.

All told, we came home with 21 new books. The best find for me was a hardcover copy of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. I also grabbed a couple of Gore Vidal’s novels. Danielle found a nice collection of Herman Wouk novels.

But we also found Anne Tyler, Alice Munro, William Maxwell, John Hawkes, Neil Postman, Julia Child, Ruth Rendell, Oliver Sacks, Anita Bookner…