I allotted my lunchbreak poorly today and found myself back at the law school with about half an hour left until my next class. So I decided to wander northward. Two blocks north of the school I found a small used bookstore which, sadly, is closing forever on Thursday. The upshot of this is that they're having a clearance sale, 50 cents per book. I felt really bad because I had never shopped there and was now sweeping in to pick over the last remnants of their shop, like a vulture. Still, cheap books are nice. I ended up 5 minutes late to class after spending more time than I should have selecting 20 books.
I had to run back to my locker to grab my laptop, and figured it would be a lot of trouble to take the books with me. Unfortunately, the crate I had was too big for the locker, but I figured, if I put it off in the far corner (because my locker is in the far corner of the locker corridor) it would be safe. I went to Civil Procedure, and when I returned discovered that some person or persons unknown had absconded with four of my books. I mean, it's not too great a loss, I can't exactly figure out which books were taken, since I gathered the books in such haste, and in any case it's just $2. Still, it's annoying. I suppose it's vaguely plausible to believe that these were derelict books, free for the taking, and if I hadn't been 5 minutes late for class already I'd have made a sign for them, but still. If you saw a crate of old books on the street, you would be justified in thinking them abandoned. But who goes to the far back corridor of the locker room of a law school to abandon books?
Still, now I have 16 new books to read. They are: The Living City, by Roberta Gratz, The Innocents Abroad, Pudd'nhead Wilson, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, Vannity Fair by William Makepace Thackeray, The Fixer and The Assistant by Bernard Malamud, Anthropology Today by Alfred Kroeber (of Kroeber Hall fame), The Romance of an Empress by Catherine II of Russia, Explanatory Models in Linguistics by Pere Julia, Eternal Lawyer (a biography of Cicero) by Robert Wilkin, The Barbary Coast by Herbert Asbury, The Story of the Irish Race by Seumas MacManus, Imperial Sunset, Volume 1: Britain's Liberal Empire 1897-1921 by Max Beloff, Medieval Panorama by G. G. Coulton, and The Rise and Fall of Civilization by Shepard B. Clough. I'm fairly certain the four missing were on Rome and the classical world, the last few that I picked out.
I started on The Barbary Coast during Contracts. It seems entertaining, though slightly dubious in historical method. I believe, however, that I was fated to own this book; according to the inscription on the inside cover, the previous owner was one Muriel Sharpe.
I already own a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Maybe if you'd asked me about it beforehand I could've saved you 50 precious cents.
Wonderful idea. And you could have shipped it to me via Kelsey Express, the magical delivery service that ships your package from San Diego to New York City for less than 50 cents.
Oooo! Snide!
Hey, alls I'm sayin' is that you noticed that I had that book when we were in Lake Tahoe and showed no interest in it. So if you didn't care enough about it to pick it up when it was sitting there, for free, mere inches from your fingertips, then what's the point of paying for it?
Excellent. I'd ask if you want to trade some for a couple weeks, but that would raise the question I ask every time I walk out of Labyrinth: why do I spend pocket change on paperbacks when I'm two minutes from a world-class university library?