Wednesday, February 02, 2011

The Book Gods Adventure

I hope my last post didn’t seem like a rant, as it truly wasn’t that so much as it was an awakening. For so long I have felt a sense of desolation after returning from library sales, but this time I finally decided to do something proactive. I also don’t want to leave the impression that the weekend was horrible because it wasn’t. In fact, it was downright wonderful once you carve out the rotten library sale.

On the way back from The Very Bad Sale we decided to try to salvage the day. Both of us felt funky and needed a lift, so we took a detour by way of Akron and stopped at an estate sale we’d seen in the paper. We were late getting there of course, but it didn’t matter because they didn’t have any books we wanted. What they did have though was bookCASES – beautiful ones in a dark espresso color that would be perfect with the black ones already at the antiques mall. (Anything that keeps me from painting in the frigid garage is worth working for.) The cases dominated the side wall of the living room, and stood out not only because of their handsome color and arched top shelf, but because row upon row of Franklin Library classics sparkled inside them like the Jewels of the Nile. At $10-$12 apiece these were too expensive for resale and I really didn’t want them anyway, but the sight of them gave me a frisson of pleasure that was sorely needed.

But of course we were there for shelving, not for swooning over books we weren’t buying, so we quickly got serious and huddled in the corner for a little confab. Did we want to just take them at $95 apiece, for a total of almost $300, or did we want to take our chances and come back the next day in hopes of a bargain? I vacillated so many times Eric was about ready to write the check and be done with it, but I finally decided they weren’t the only shelves in the universe, so I’d wait. Believe it or not, I didn’t even obsess about them for the rest of the day either!

That might have had something to do with the fact that my friend Nancy and I sallied forth at 6:30 for a Girls Night Out at Sully’s Irish Pub in downtown Medina. My favorite Irish band, the New Barleycorn, were scheduled to rock the place at eight-thirty, but to get a good seat requires going for dinner and staking out your territory. Dinner was fabulous by the way– shepherd’s pie topped with colcannon – mashed potatoes and cabbage --which always reminds me of my Irish grandmother, Katie. We ordered a bottle of wine and settled in for a long, raucous night that had me so jazzed I could hardly sleep that night. ("No, nay, never! No, nay, never no more! Will I play the Wild Rover, no never no more!")


But the next morning found Eric and me headed back the estate sale in Akron with a phalanx of book gods rattling around in the back of the PT Cruiser all the way. It’s not that they deserted us at the library sale – they were just smart enough not to go in the first place. But in Akron they showed up with both a smile and a sly wink, the latter because we expressed our desire to buy the bookcases seconds before somebody else offered to buy them too. But here’s the good part. Everything under $100 was half-price, so we got them for $47.50 apiece. It did mean going back to get the enormous cube van which we didn’t bring originally because it was at the store which is ten miles in the wrong direction and it made no sense to go through all that when we didn’t even know if the bookcases were still available. So Eric dropped me off at home (what good is a hundred pound weakling with metal in both birdlike wrists anyway?) and set off on Operation Retrieval. He returned an hour and a half later smiling like the Cheshire Cat.

“Guess what? I got some books too.”

“Whaaaaaaaaaaaat? I didn’t want those even at $5 or $6 apiece! Please tell me you didn’t get carried away!”

“No, I just got around thirty-five.”

THIRTY-FIVE! I was about to keel over in a dead faint when I spotted the mischievous grin I always call his Sister Martha Mary smile because it reminds me of a nun I had in high school.

“You did NOT! I almost fell for it too, but I know you knew that I …”

He cut me off in mid protest, went out to the driveway, and returned seconds later hefting a good-sized carton. “ Yes, I really did,” he said, holding out the box for me to peer inside. “There are exactly thirty-five books in here. I know you didn’t want them even at half price, so I didn’t consider it. But when I was taking them off the shelves a worker asked if I wanted the lot for $25.”

Well now! That changed everything, especially once I saw that they had never been opened, and still had their original bookplates laid-in. Immediately I conjured up the sight of them back in their original nesting place, only now in our booth at the antiques mall.

I'm not sure, but I think the book gods giggled with conspiratorial delight.

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