Books!

So what did you get at the book sale? I walked out of there wheeling a C-140. I bought everything from a 1944 penguin edition of The Maltese Falcon, emblazoned with: THIS IS A WAR TIME BOOK...IT IS PRODUCED IN FULL COMPLIANCE WITH THE GOVERNMENTS REGULATIONS FOR CONSERVING PAPER AND OTHER ESSENTIAL MATERIALS. On the back cover it suggests that the reader "Send this book to a boy in the armed forces anywhere in the U.S for only .3". I guess the boys in the armed forces overseas were too busy in ‘44 killing Nazis to be reading Dashiell Hammett, to A Southern Bell Primer or why Princess Margaret will never be a Kappa Kappa Gamma. Told ya, I bought e v e r y t h i n g.

I also picked up two other vintage paperbacks but they are post war I, The Jury, Mickey Spillane from 1952 and No Entry Manning Coles' circa 1958. It concerns itself with a “Brilliant intelligence agent, Tommy Hambleton, who goes to West Germany to rescue a wandering Oxford student who has vanished over the border into East Germany. Since he’s the son of the Foreign Minister it’s up to Tommy Hambleton to bring him back” . If nothing else, the pulpy cover art is worth the price of admission. I also got Silent Spring, which I think now, I may all ready own - it sits up with It Can’t Happen Here in my in my Too Scary/Angry Making to read section.

I also got some run-of-the-mill paper back thrillers by writers who probably started out wanting to be this generations Mickey Spillane and Dashiell Hammett or Manning Cross, but didn’t get there. Love ya Jonathan Kellerman, but Mickey Spillane you are not. And what happened to cover art? I saw lots of staircases and head lights and lawyer props, but no terrified Frauleins with Kalashnikov, no shadowy gun toting tough guys in fedoras and no steely half naked broads staring down shadowy, gun toting tough guys. Back then cover art meant something!

And where are the broads? I picked up It’s a girl thing - The Hilarious truth about women, Nora Ephron's’ I Feel Bad About My Neck, and other thoughts on being a woman, Lauren Weisberger's’ Everyone Worth Knowing, two Alexander McCall books from the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, another Alexander McCall not part of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. Lots of girls, chicks, ladies and women but not a lot of broads. Pity.

I did get Jean Kerr's Please Don’t Eat The Daises from 1957, but I don’t think she would have felt a lot of sisterhood with the broads in Cole's pulpy ourve’, but fortunately for her, she also wouldn’t have a lot of common ground with Weisbergers’ chicks either.

I also want to mention that I took home some non-pulpy, non-vintage, and non-chick lit as well, I also carted home: The Dilbert Principle, and The Crack at the Edge of The World, The Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, and Peace Kills, by my favorite Republican P.J O’Rourke, and The Search for The Pink Headed Duck, a Journey Into The Himalayas and Down The Brahmaputra and Idyll Banter, Weekly Excursions to A Very Small Town. And that’s not even all of them!

I did some arithmetic, I brought home 25 titles, which should have ran me $348.97 retail (not even counting the time machine to get the vintage paperbacks), my bill? $42.