all your books are belong to some old guy that yells at you if you go near his boxes

I busted out of work (with permission!) for a couple of hours today to go to another ultra-inexpensive used book sale.

Silverfish must have rejoiced at the sight of the (about) 70,000 books lined-up on tables in the Case gym. (Case is a school for brainiacs and from the looks of things, they're basketball team hasn't had many practices in there). I went for the last day of the sale: the no-holds-barred, all bets are off, awe-inspiring, jaw-droppingly inexpensive, box of books for 5 bucks. Yes, you got to choose the books that fill the box, but while doing so you had to fight your way through all the greedy re-seller types, weakling college freshmen and their inability to control their boxes and pedestrian old school folks whose power-walking group had taken an unexpected detail. Many of those 70,000 books were already gone, but there was still plenty to pick from.

My tact this time was to look for things I was generally interested in or authors/topics that "rang a bell," as it were. Problem being, aren't exceedingly crappy things, that I'd be best to avoid, just as bell-ringing as my vaguely remembering I once read of glowing review of Bruce Catton's work? As sometimes, the names are familiar, but the reasons for recalling them are nowhere to be found.

Well, I got me some Catton amongst other things and in the end I paid about 80 cents a book (I include the $4 parking). So, I got me some free knowledge - just like the internets only nicely bound.