A Midweek Haul at a Book Sale

One thing that hadn’t at all happened all of last year was a second hand book sale which had me terribly disappointed. Usually there would be at least two sales of second hand book sales organized by the big names in the trade every year but somehow last year there wasn’t a single one because of various reasons. Best Book Centre and MR Books have such sales regularly where a large number of books are put on sale and from where I usually net some good titles. However the prices are on the higher side but on the whole it is a good haul that I have gathered over the years from such sales. Anyway, after a long gap there is another such sale by Best Book Centre at YMCA Secunderabad.

The day before yesterday I got a pleasant surprise when I read in the papers about a book sale at YMCA. I had not got any hint of it when I was at Abids on Sunday because usually the BB guys give out handbills or tell their regulars about such sales. I checked it out the same evening and returned with a small haul of only two books though there were several titles I would have loved to buy if only I had got a bigger raise. I saw two books by Dave Barry- Dave Barry in Cyberspace and Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need. I also saw Elmore Leonard’s ‘Maximum Bob’ that I have. There was a book of short stories by Daphne du Maurier but I did not buy it. There was a wonderful book on travel writing over the years compiled by Eric Newby but I gave it a miss.

Sometime last year I had found Joan Didion’s ‘Run River’ that I am yet to read. At the sale I found another of her book- The White Album, that I got for forty bucks. It is about California, other women writers like Doris Lessing and a lot of interesting stuff written in exquisite prose. I am glad I found this book. Surprisingly, the other book I found was also one such kind of memoir and also about the same place- Big Sur which I read somewhere is in California. The second book I found was Henry Miller’s ‘Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch,’ that I got for ninety five bucks. It is a four hundred plus pages book.

A long time back I had found Henry Miller’s ‘The Books in My Life’ and I was so thrilled that I simply grabbed the book and headed home. Afterwards, I opened the book and got the shock of my life. More than half the pages were missing. I had thought it was a slim book because the seller had bound it in his way so I did not really think it was an incomplete book. I was terribly disappointed because I was looking forward to Miller’s take on the books that have influenced him. I have not opened the book again after realizing it had too many pages missing to make sense of it. By the way, there was Arthur Miller’s ‘Time Bends’, his autobiography, at the sale which I did not buy because it appeared too detailed with too many pages. If it is there when I visit the sale again soon, I might pick it up because - god knows when the next sale would be.