I'll trade you Plato's Republic for the Milton. Then we can not read each other's books.

:)

This is fun.

I talked to Matt (the Ipod guy) and he'd be glad to have Milton between covers -- kinky boy.

 :)

Rick

I was in the attic yesterday afternoon pushing boxes around and found a plastic tub of paperbacks I read probably 15 to 20 years ago. I had forgotten they were there. At least two of them, I know I bought again at some garage sale or another.  Hermetically sealed in that tub, they were yellowed but free of spiders, beetles, wasps and mouse nests. I feel like I had a private Christmas.

A few of the titles:
A Guide to Non-flowering Plants
Fossils (one I bought again)
Scenes and Monologues from the New American Theater
50 Great Short Stories
The Jungle
The Mender's Manual Repairing and Preserving Garments and Bedding
As I lay Dying
Byron's Hebrew Melodies
Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (another one I bought again)
I am Third (by Gale Sayers)
A Season on the Brink: A Year with Bobby Knight and the Hoosiers

At garage sales and library sales, I am a sucker for textbooks, biographies, guides, poetry, plays, cookbooks, how to books, art books, craft books, histories.... Once I got a beautiful Audubon book for $2.00

Wait, that's everything isn't it?

If it's fifty cents orless and in English - I guess I'll buy it. 

Lavonne, I'm delighted by the ecclecticity of your mind.

Rick

On the subject of old books. I am a real sucker for them!  I buy the old ones that aren't worth saving (for anyone else.)

Audubon's America - edited by Donald Culross Peattie, published 1940 - paid 2.00

I got all these for 1.00 or less:
Little Men - Louisa Mae Alcott, copyright 1940
Der Fuehrer - Konrad Heiden, published 1944
Practical Home and School Methods Volume X - Bernhart P Holst, published 1926
East of the Sun and West of the Moon - Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt, copyright 1925
Jo's Boys - Louisa Mae Alcott, copyright 1957
Earth Horizon, Autobiogrphy - Mary Austin, published 1932
Short Stories from the New Yorker, published 1940
Knights of the Range - Zane Grey, copyright 1936

and I have so many, many more.

It is interesting to note that the older the book is, the better the condition, usually! Newer paper-making processes use much more acid that the original process. Acid is what makes older paper become crackly and brown.

I had a volume of history which was passed down in my husband's family for generations and was published in the mid 1700's in Edinborough. It refers to the colonies and is printed using those wonderful, old-fashioned f-s's! It has hand-written annotations made by someone who was proof-reading the book. It is freaking marvelous! I gave it to my son when he obtained his graduate degree.  The paper is pristine - almost. Just the barest, tiniest hint of foxing - you wouldn't even notice it really. The ink from the annotations is a beautiful walnut brown compleat with all the swashes of the times.

Tell me about your old books, newspapers, magazines, ephemera.

I have a lot of old plays that ee cummings wrote, my ex gave them to me as anniversary gifts, he also gave me a whole bunch of medieval school books, if you can imagine such a thing. I usually bring them in to show the students that, no, I'm really not that hard on them. ;)

How cool is that!

"May I express thee unblam'd?"  :)