Yesterday while we were waiting for our lawyer to review our thingamajigs for the new house, we went to Half Price Books to pass the time. What a wonderland that place is. I felt like the selection was much better than at an ordinary bookstore or even the library because they had plenty of shelves for old books. The section for science fiction and fantasy (which is just called science fiction) was much more immersive than in other stores I have recently visited. They even had a whole western shelf for everyone to bring their grandpa’s books. I refrained from buying anything although I saw some really cool things. I could have walked out with a stack of books for just $10 but then I would have just felt guilty about not finding the time to read them. Note to self: check out Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkser series and his shit about swords.
It made me wonder if I ought to reconsider the sizes of my paperbacks to be mass-market size: 4.25″x6.87″. Man that was a weird sequence of punctuation marks just now.
There were some bizarre cultural artifacts available at Half Price Books as well such as some preserved SNES instruction booklets for $8 and a couple Insomnium LPs this crazy ’90s Christian videotape about how technology was going to end the world; even though the subject matter was of the utmost urgency and importance, it still mattered that the videotape was “exciting.” Also they had a huge section of DVDs, CDs, and… cassettes! I could pick just one row of DVDs and have a bunch of worthy movies in it, just from a small sliver of the alphabet. I like to believe that there are a bunch of people out there snapping up physical media. What if you weren’t allowed to experience media that wasn’t from Half Price Books? I feel like you’d still be eating pretty good.
Luckily this wondrous place is pretty close to the house so I will get to go back soon.