After a half-hour of feeding estuary turtles and baby ducks, a quick trip to the Mexican bakery downtown revealed wondrous sights to behold. Not just the cookies… the store two doors down. I ventured forthwith into the emporium which contained old textbooks, raggedy-ass furniture, dirt-encrusted fishing poles, and numerous other treasures which were almost too incredible for my mind to embrace. Granted, my purchases were not overly fantastical — a decent copy of my absolute favorite book when I was in the fifth grade (really, I was a weird kid) — The Thurber Carnival. And a couple old textbooks, one with a wonderful protective cover and one a geography book with old maps for my living room wall 3-D project.
All in all? Good day for digging. When buying old books, ya’ll, it’s good to have a bit of knowledge as to what is valuable and what is just art-collage worthy. People seem to think that because a book is old, it is valuable. Many things affect a book’s worth. Brown spots, mildew, torn pages… the shopkeeper wherein I purchased these books did not have a good grasp of how to figure worth, but I did not begrudge her prices on these. It’s just — when you hear someone say “Well… this was published in 1931 so…” remember that probably doesn’t mean the book is necessarily valuable. It just means it was published before you and I were born. I’m assuming my readers are under 80 but hell… if you’re beyond McCain’s age, drop me an email and we’ll chat. vmac at macewan dot net