Musings from Brian J. Noggle: Good Book Hunting: April 20, 2007

Good Book Hunting: April 20, 2007

The Kirkwood Friends of the Library holds its annual book fair this weekend, and last year, it proved to be the biggest event for us. Sure, the Greater St. Louis Book Fair occurs on the same weekend, but I'm not fond of the big one. It's held in a parking garage in West County Mall, it's ill-lit, it's crowded, it has just too many books to contemplate, and the parking is awful. So I prefer the Kirkwood one.

The Kirkwood book fair is held again this year in empty retail space on the bottom floor of one of those mixed use developments of which municipalities are so fond; the fact that this is the second year running that the expensive retail space has not been pouring the prophesied sales tax revenue into Kirkwood's coffers will not discourage other municipalities from doing the ousting families to provide cavernous locations available for charity events.

The book fair itself offers a good number of books, just about at the edge of my limit; if a book fair has too many books, I know I won't get to see them all, so I will go much faster and will browse more quickly. I started in the old/rare books section, but the selection favored children's books and Civil War treatises. By the time I got through Fiction section, I had set two stacks of books at the counter to wait for me. Heather finished up earlier than I did and entertained the counterspeople while I quickly worked the nonfiction section. Because frankly there's just not many travel books I need.

Here's the damage:

Kirkwood Book Fair haul

That's 37 books; 22 for me, 15 for Heather.

A couple things I picked up:

First British printing of Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger.
A Danish rendition of Ridley Pearson's The Seizing of Yankee Green Mall.
A number of plays, including Sight Unseen, one of the best plays I've ever seen.
A hardback without a dustjacket called 24 Girls in 7 Days. I liked the title and actually read the first couple of pages.
Another Harry Turtledove book because a former co-worker raves about him; Ruled Britannia was okay enough to warrant another buck or two to try substantiate the praise.

The book fair also included a number of advance copies of books, but nothing that I recognized or would bother trying to collect.

This book fair runs today and tomorrow still at the empty retail space on South Kirkwood Road if you're interested; it's close to the Greater St. Louis Book Fair if you want to make a day of it.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:32 AM