Today's Book Trade

Well, in searching through my pyramid of boxes of books, I amassed a whole separate box of duplicates (3 copies of Walden, 3 copies of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 2 copies of several Dostoyevsky novels, and 2 sets of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy—plus, lots of odds and ends that I decided aren't worth holding onto anymore. I took the whole load over to The Book Rack ("Holly's Book Rack" for us locals who know that it is the only such book-place with a 50-mile radius) and browsed their small section of CLASSICS, nestled in the back behind INSPIRATIONAL FICTION, MYSTERY, and short, squat ROMANTIC bricks as far as the eye can see. They had a surprising amount of treasures there on the "literature" shelves. I actually had to choose between an older edition of Thoreau's Cape Cod accounts, fittingly titled Cape Cod and a strangely neon and pink edition of Hannah Arendt's On Violence. Also, I had both Thomas Pynchon's Vineland weighed against a potentially fascinating piece of agricultural travelogue by the USDA's chief soil conservationist in the 1900s entitled Farmers of Forty Centuries, which details the sort of sustainable, long-term farming and social practices he encountered in a sweeping tour of rural and urban regions of Japan, China, and Korea. Lastly, I had Gary Snyder's Turtle Island set up against collected essays by Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, and a few other choice selections.

What to do?

Well, in case you couldn't tell in my epic description of this brief shopping trip, I ended up with the following:

Gary Synder - Turtle Island (with "Four Changes")
Henry David Thoreau - Cape Cod
F. H. King - Farmers of Forty Centuries

Next up: pulling out and chronicling the heap of books I read/collected on my bike journey out west.