Old Books, Cheap

My Take

 DiVoran LItes

At the SPCA thrift store yesterday I found four books to buy.Fortunately, I wasn’t looking for new and popular, but for old and loved.

Lately Bill has been helping me proofread the second novel in the Florida Springs Trilogy, Living Spring. He reads over it, chapter by chapter at my computer explaining his suggestions, and I lie on the couch with the back of my hand to my forehead thinking and discussing. That process reminded me of a writer who so thoroughly knew her material that she also lay on a couch to write, except she dictated to a cotillion of secretaries, and ended up writing a book a day or a book a week . I can’t recall exactly which one. Also, I could not remember her name, but lo and behold, from the depths of the SPCA bookshelf it sprung out at me and drew my hand to its lovely golden spine which said, Barbara Cartland’s, Three Best Loved, 1975. I bought it for thirty-two cents.

Too Soon Old and Too Late Smart: Thirty True things You Need to Know Now, 2004, by Gordon Livingstone, M. D, was also a hardcover and cost thirty-two cents. Living in a small German-based community as a child, I heard that saying a lot and agreed with it more and more as time went on.

I looked at all the old paperback Thesauri, a dime each, but the one I liked was Roget’s 21^st Century Thesaurus, 1992 with Tweety-Bird and Sylvester on the cover. I already have a huge one, that weighs 4.5 lb and I love it, but when I want a quick fix, I usually won’t haul it out of the bookshelf and find a place to look at it. The Tweety-Bird issue is an inch thick, and so beautifully arranged that I looked up words just for the fun of it.

No Promises in the Wind. by Irene Hunt, was one thin dime as well. It’s a children’s book about The Great Depression. The author is a relative of mine. She won the Newbury Award for Children’s Literature with, Across Five Aprils, about the Civil War. Irene Hunt is Aunt May Hunt’s daughter. Aunt May Hunt is Grandmother Marie Bowers’ aunt. Grandmother Marie Bowers is my grandmother. The miracle in all this is that I actually got to know my grandmother’s aunt May and, when our daughter was a baby, she met Aunt May who was her great, great, great aunt. Aunt May taught me how to sew a featherstitch for a quilt and also she told me that ladies didn’t have to shave their legs in the olden days because the homespun petticoats were so rough they rubbed the hair right off. I have a feeling they wouldn’t have shaved them anyway, don’t you? The sad thing is that when I moved to Florida, Grandmother Marie urged me to drive over to the west coast and meet her cousin, Irene Hunt, but I was too awed, too busy, too something. Now, of course, I wish I had. By the way, Irene Hunt’s, No Promises in the Wind received excellent recommendations from The Chicago Daily news and from The New York times. Oh please, let me have received a soupcon (pinch) of her talent in my genes.

Habakkuk 2:2

Tags: #amreading, Barbara Cartland