More books...

Where does a person who works as a bookseller full time go in the weekends?? To a book sale of course...

For those of you who live in Melbourne there is a crowd calling themselves 'dirt cheap books' and they advertise on the telly occasionally. Most of the time I show little interest but last night the ad suggested they had one of the books on my 'most favorite' list for $4.99. I have never purchased 'The Book Thief' by Marcus Zusak- as I had read by it by chance from the library and absolutely loved it. I found it inspirational and the fact that it was an Australian author just added to it. Ever since I have had it on my ' purchase someday' list as this was one of the few books I would like to keep - most of my books are 'when I read I shall pass on' list... There is a slight problem with this plan though as I keep buying books and not actually reading them. I rarely buy contemporary fiction before I read it first but I will buy modern editions of the classics though having just bought Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

But I digress, P and I set off this morning to Collingwood to have a look at the sale and hopefully buy my own copy of 'The Book Thief'... What I thought would be a few books and perhaps an hour turned into two large floors of hundreds of titles most of them $4.99... I would say that for the most part most of these books have passed through the shop where I work over the last 12 months. So while they weren't the latest titles they weren't that old either. Judging from the boxes they were all sitting on they were MacMillan and Penguin publisher remainders - which in book speak means - leftovers, whether it be in too large a print run or simple overstock. P & I set a limit to 5 books each - which translated into 6 for him and 7 for me. All told we bought $65 of books - which considering most of these titles started their life at around the $32.95 price range we did very well indeed- in fact the bookshop I work for as do most of the bookshop will have some of these titles sitting on their shelves now for this price.

I came home with my very own ' The Book Thief' and copy of 'The Memory of Running' - Ron McLarty plus a 'how to book' and a couple of chick reads when I just want to read without thinking too much. P is more into crime genre and so he has a few more 'bodies' on his bedside table.

I laugh to myself - yesterday I bought a 'new' top for myself at the op-shop and thought whether I really needed it - today, unashamedly I spent money on books... As I said in last post I am hopeless...