Book Hunting

Adam and I have a hard time buying books at full price. See our problem is, that we are collectors and therefore because of the sheer amount of books that we own we cannot justify spending the full amount they are sold for. So we frequent Half Price Books on a fairly regular basis in order to fulfill our pack rat desires. We have a system that we follow almost every time we go.
We start to the right of the front door and walk towards the crafting section. Here's where I end up with most of my books to glean ideas from. In order to get to this section we have to walk through the antique books section. Normally we avert our eyes and keep walking, (these books can be very expensive, but I love them so much) as to not lose ourselves in the endless aisles of barely discernible titles on the spines. Our trip on Friday night however, had a different twist. Walking down the aisle to the craft section an older book basically jumped into my hands. Entitled, Thurber, I instantly knew it was related to the author James Thurber, writer of wonderful short stories, illustration sketches, and fellow Columbusite. He just happens to also be one of my favorite authors because of his timeless humor and wit. It ended up being a compilation of stories that appeared in the New Yorker and it happened to be only $5. I knew the book belonged to me and wanted to come home with me.
We made it to the craft section and I perused through the knitting, crochet, embroidery, and textile books (no I still can't knit, but I like to get ideas from knitting). It looked like it had been completely revamped since my last visit (it had become a little disappointing), but still nothing that I couldn't live without, until Adam exclaims, "Look!" He saw a coveted item that had long been on my Amazon wishlist. The Happy Hooker. It is a current book of which I had been wanting to make quite a few patterns out of. (Crocheting friends, you may laugh that I don't own this book already, but as stated before, I hate to buy books at full price, so I've been just waiting for it to show up at HPB.) He feebly made an attempt to make me choose between my old love of James Thurber and my new love of crochet, but I resisted and happily walked through the rest of HPB without adding any new paper. On our normal route we then go from the craft section to the children's section in the back of the store. It is the bridge between our interests. We both love children's and young adult literature. I can normally find old copies of Laura Ingalls Wilder or The Babysitter's Club to fondly reminisce over while Adam looks for newer books in the fantasy realm. I normally get bored of that section before he does, so we split up and I head to general fiction while he finishes up in children's lit, makes a stop by science fiction and fantasy for adults, and then meets up with me in fiction for the last remnants of that. We easily spend an hour or so walking through all the books and both often have to pare down our pickings by the time we hit the cash register.

Just thought I would share with you a little piece of one of our favorite things.