more books!

I have found it. The book bonanza!! I discovered the sale where all the books culled from local school libraries end up. And they don't have this sale once a year like the one I used to frequent back in Seattle, they have it once a week. The prices are fantastic (if you buy a lot) sixteen cents a book! I simply cannot resist, and yesterday my personal collection groaned to a whopping total of 602 (yikes). I've vowed not to go more than once a month... Here's what I hauled home recently:

The Summer Country- It looked Arthurian. So I picked it up.
The Quiet Room- Never heard of this one, but I do find books about kids with mental illness interesting.
Love, War and Circuses- about "the Age-Old Relationship Between Elephants and Man."
The Dolphin Doctor- Dolphins are fascinating, and so are veterinarian books (to me).
The Secret Language of Life- "How Animals and Plants Feel and Communicate." Plants can feel? Hm. This should be interesting.
Liquid Land- "A Journey Through the Florida Everglades." That's all I know.
Return to Wild America- "A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Natural Soul" Ditto.
Beasts of Eden- I've had an abiding curiosity about prehistoric mammals since reading Ratha's Creature and its kin.
The Lost Years of Merlin- This book caught my eye because I had Nymeth's review in mind.
Seaworthy- Another book about an adventurer who took a raft across the ocean! This guy followed the fame of Kon-Tiki, just to see if he could do it.
Infidel- This one has been on my list a while. I don't remember where I first heard of it.
Raccoons: A Natural History- Hopefully better than Raccoons Are the Brightest People.
Wolf Totem- For some reason when I read the flyleaf on this book, it makes me think of Ordinary Wolves. I hope it's as good!

And I always drool over coffee-table type books about nature, so I grabbed all these. I really hope the reading is as good as the pictures look:
About pandas, orcas, alligators and crocs, lions, penguins, greylag geese and siberian tigers!

My only dismay was the condition of some of the books I found. True, most are library discards- only a few are clean, donated books. (They have tons of other stuff at the sales, too- old computers, office furniture, we brought home a standing kid's easel for my daughter). I'm used to buying ex-library books, so I don't mind the eyesore of library stamps or the task of removing the stickers. And many of the books aren't worn-out or broken, but in excellent condition (I'm guessing discarded because of low demand- just not popular). A lot of them had the library barcodes blacked out with fresh ink- that I can also deal with. But some had been deliberately damaged in order to remove the library labels. I found lots of hardbacks with gaping square holes cut out of the bottom of the spine and a back piece of the cover. This isn't too bad- you can just remove the dust jacket, after all. But there were some paperbacks with the stickers cut out of their covers, too! To me, that's just as bad as having the cover torn completely off- the book might as well go in the recycling bin. I don't mind a book on my shelves that has library stickers, or "discard" stamps or old card pockets inside- they're still perfectly readable and look nice on the shelf. But I can't imagine who would want to keep a book that had a hole in its skin like this:

Would you?