Used-book shopping has to be one of the most satisfying addictions anyone can engage in. Sure, heroin may have its high points as well, but book shopping is cheaper and lasts longer. More bang for your buck, if you will.
Sure, heroin addicts will break into your home to steal money to support their addiction, but is that any worse than dealing with someone who has read too much? For example, at the Friends of the Eugene Public Library book sale last weekend, I picked up a tome entitled “The Complete Guide to Hypnosis,” by Leslie M. LeCron. Soon you will all bow before me.
The annual Friends book sale has become a sort of pilgrimage for me. Taking place in the Wheeler Pavilion at the Lane County Fairgrounds, the sale consists of table after table of used books, filling up the entire building. The books are arranged by vague genre description and not much else. If the Dewey Decimal Classification system had been designed by an anarchist, this might be the result. This system might make it hard to find what you’re looking for, but going into the sale looking for something specific is a fool’s errand anyway.
You shop at the book sale using the old carpet bombing approach, which states that if you bomb enough territory you’ll eventually hit something important. Cover enough ground at the book sale and eventually, you will find something you want — even if you didn’t know you wanted it before you found it. And at $1 per book, you can probably afford anything you find.
This year’s sale was pretty much the same as all the others I’ve attended in my long and sordid life as a bibliophile. I spent about an hour happily shuffling through the aisles, filling my complimentary cardboard box with books I would never pay decent money for (“Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy” by Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski! Cool!). A few other bits of interesting literature I picked up: “The Complete Warren Commission Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy” and “Totem and Taboo” by Sigmund Freud. I have some interesting hobbies, as you can probably tell.
Eventually, I found a quiet spot in the government and politics section and took some notes on the crowd. It’s amazing how well the stereotypes fit into actual experiences. Middle-aged women with graying hair and glasses flipping through the mystery novels, science fiction is full of quiet-looking young men who don’t shower very often; the biography section is full of old people. Sometimes, a section will draw an odd array of people, such as the high number of freaks rummaging through the children’s book section, looking for kitsch items. Everyone makes a pass through the general fiction section and the more discerning shoppers scour the literature and verse tables.
This is where I spent most of my time, since it has the highest yield of oddball items and necessary classics. I keep a long list of books I want to own, and I usually find a couple every time I pass through. In fact, the whole sale is a great way to find cornball pieces of literary obscurity, while at the same time filling the holes in any collection of classic literature. Where else can you find a copy of “Wuthering Heights” right next to “The Works of Plato” right next to a collection of plays by Henrick Ibsen? Until the University’s English department finally goes broke and has a garage sale, this is about it.