01/28/06 SAT:
---Went to remainder-book liquidation sale in Des Moines. I do not go out of my way to buy remainders, but a friend thought I might find some books I liked there. So we went. This was one of those “up to 80% off” deals that camp out in abandoned storefronts for a while in various places at different times. In this case they were getting ready to pack up and leave for a new location, so there was a liquidation sale going on. I wasn’t thinking that much to buy books to add to inventory, mainly looking at books that I thought I might like to read myself. But I did find a few that I think people might want, as well as ones for myself that I might still offer anyway. I’ve taken their covershots and put them in a couple folders ($2 tpbs and $3 hcs) on the latest iteration of my Catalog Data CD-R. It was exciting to find all these books that I was mainly oblivious to when they first came out five or six years ago, at least in these particular editions. Authors I like or whose work I knew by reputation and would like to read--like (in this case and in no particular order) André Gide, Doris Lessing, John Hawkes, Bruce Sterling, Iain Banks, Joseph Heller, Angus Wilson, Denis Johnson, James Lee Burke, James Salter, Kit Reed, Stuart Kaminsky, Richard Ford, Francine Prose, Michael Swanwick, Cornell Woolrich, Frederick Barthelme, Alfred Bester, Rebecca Ore, Russell Banks, Richard Powers, John Hawkes, Mark Costello, Steve Erickson, Thomas McGrath, Alexander Pope, T.C. Boyle, Michael Moorcock, Henry Roth, Eric Kraft, William Gibson, Richard Dooling, Jack Finney, Melissa Scott, Bradford Morrow, Robert J. Sawyer, Roddy Doyle, Roger L. Simon, Robert B. Parker, V.S. Naipaul, Martin Amis, Guy Davenport, Walter Wangerin Jr., Penelope Lively, Pat Frank, David Long, John Saul, David Means and Frank M. Robinson; published by the likes of Picador USA, Counterpoint, iBooks, Hyperion, Fourth Estate, Thunder’s Mouth, Perennial, Vintage, as well as the usual bigger names--so many books that looked pretty good at this place (former home of belly-up Ultimate Electronics), that I’m sure I could have kept finding books at the rate I was finding them if I had stayed twice or three times as long. As it was I came away with 44 tpbs, 11 hcs and one six-hour and six-CD reading by Tom Wolfe of “Hooking Up”. They are a lot of fun to browse through, even if the author’s won’t be getting too many royalties from this sale.