Usually in this space I talk about books that I’ve read. This week, I’m going to talk about books I’m going to read. The reason is that I recently went my local library’s annual book sale.

I’ve been going to the Oak Park Public Library’s book sale for about 20 years. The library advertises each year that it has over 100,000 books to offer, and I can believe it. Books fill the school cafeteria and an enjoining gym.

When I first started going to the sale, I had babies in the house, so I spent a lot of time in the children’s section. When my kids got older, there were a few years when they enjoyed going to the sale as much as I did; they couldn’t believe that they could pick whatever they wanted. At a dollar a book, and 50 cents for paperbacks, it was easy not to say no.

I always found time, however, to look for books just for me. Twenty years ago, I was a very diligent book sale searcher. I would carefully look at every table: fiction, mystery, history, biography, sociology, business, humors, plays, poetry, essays, cookbooks . . . well, almost every table. I really didn’t spend much time at the horror or science fiction tables. In the early years of my book-saleing, I also was much more attentive for the bits of book collecting gold you would often find at a library sale—the rare first edition, for instance, or just an unusual edition of a book (the paperback version of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury featuring Yul Brynner with a full head of hair is a particular favorite find).

When my kids got older, they were less patient with my diligent searching habits and were satisfied with whatever I brought home. I also find myself doing a similar exercise in neutral housecleaning every year; I would bring three or four boxes of books to the drop-off site for book collections, and then bring back a box or two of books.

My attitude toward the sale started changing a couple of years ago. That was the year I decided to make a little side money by selling off books in my collection. I had a very successful one month, selling my own books at Amazon. At the start, I had just enough unusual books that I was able to price them fairly high and get enthusiastic and happy buyers online. But I soon discovered that for every book I could sell for twenty or fifty dollars, I had many more books that lots of people were selling online, often for only a penny.

I thought, however, that if I could find enough fifty cent and one dollar bargains at book fairs, I could build back my stock cheaply. So I was particularly looking forward to the library sale that year. Little did I know that the technology of the used book market had already passed me by. The opening night of that year’s sale featured a dozen or so determined book dealers, who were scanning every single book with a portable bar code scanner, hooked up to a direct line to Amazon or another online dealer. These people could instantly see the current price for particular editions online and decide whether or not they were worth buying. My interest in big time online selling plummeted. The following year was the year I gave away half my book collection—over 1,000 books—to the library sale. (Believe me, I didn’t offer those book scanning professionals anything exciting. Anything of value I had, I either sold on my own or kept.)

Since the great book giveaway, I’ve become much more restrained at the annual sale. This year, I bought about 20 books, almost all paperback mysteries. I’m not looking to make a killing in the used book market. I’m just looking for a good time reading.

This year, my purchases were mainly books I had not read before, but I did buy a couple of books that I had read long ago, no longer had in my collection, and wished I did again. My favorite find in this reread category is Charles Willeford’s The Burnt Orange Heresy. Yes, that is a very lurid cover. But Willeford’s book is a delightfully sardonic look at the modern art world, in the guise of a mystery.

I also bought Oliver Bleeck’s Protocol for a Kidnapping. Bleeck is much better known under his real name, Ross Thomas, although I’m sad to say that Thomas is one of those late twentieth-century thriller writers who is always going in and out of print. Still, I was happy to find one of his early books in an edition I had never seen before.

Of course, most of what I bought were books that were new to me. Margaret Millar had a long career as a suspense writer. As you can see from the cover, she also was often pigeon-holed in a sort of twentieth-century gothic category. But I’ve always enjoyed everything of hers that I read. (Millar was married to the mystery writer Ross MacDonald, of whom I wrote about earlier this year.)

As I’ve noted before, I often will by books not because I know anything about the book or the author, but because I know the publisher and trust its judgment when it publishes anything. Such is the case with British-published Penguin mysteries of the early- to mid-twentieth century. In their earliest incarnation, the covers were extremely uniform, as seen on the left (below). Later in the century, the covers became slightly more unique (right, below). Now, I know nothing about either Gladys Mitchell or Clark Smith; no matter, because I trust the publisher.

For the last several decades, Penguin has kept the green spines for its mysteries, although the covers themselves now include individual pictures or illustrations. But whenever I am at a library book sale or a used book store, I always look for the more faded Penguin green.

So now I have 20 or so new “old” books to fit into my still overcrowded shelves. No matter. There’s nothing more satisfying to do on a late summer afternoon than to pore over a box of equals, trying to decide what I will read next. 


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he writes for pleasure. Over the last several months, he has re-read some of his favorite books and written a series of essays about why these books remain important to him, even decades after the first read them. Contact Paul.