Wowzers!

Today was the annual Spring Time Toddler Wipe-Out aka Day Light Saving Time Eve where our main goal is to tire out Miss B. and push through naptime so that we can readjust her bedtime schedule to "springing ahead".

How do we accomplish this? By heading to downtown Princeton to wander around and shop and have a nice lunch at Panera. Then we check out the Princeton University Store (children's book department) and Jazam's toy store. Then we headed back to the West Windsor Library Book Sale. Then we went to get ice cream at the local Dairy Cream in East Windsor and then we hit up the park in Cranbury (otherwise known as circumnavigating central New Jersey). Finally we returned "Australia" to the Redbox at the Stop N' Shop (or it could be a Shop Rite, I'm not quite sure which) on 522 and headed home for pizza bagels.

Did it work? It seems to have. Miss B. was pretty worn out after all of that activity. Now we're pretty worn out too.

In other news. The book sale. What can I say, I had to go back. Today was half-price day. That means all the hardbacks were $.50 (yes, that's right, Fifty Cents). What did I get? Well, I paid $8.50 for 17 books. Out of those 17 books I got the following:

1) The Reivers by William Faulkner, First Edition, 1962. Alibris shows this book's value range being between $200-$1,000 in the condition of our copy. (Makes that $8.50 tab look not too bad, huh?)

2) A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene, First Edition, 1961 with original store receipt from April 1961 in Dublin (in Gaelic!), this book's value range is between $45-$150 in its current condition. The other neat thing about this book is that the original store receipt (in Gaelic on one side) has an ad for "Knitters!" on the other and indicates that cash will be paid for handknit items... strange, but I liked it since I'm a knitter!)

3) A Treasury of Gilbert and Sullivan, 1941, First Edition: $140

4) The Oxford Pocket Dictionary, an edition from the 1920s about $50

5) Harvard University Class of 1916 25th Anniversary , 1941, about $30-$35

6) Seven volumes of The Yale Shakespeare, 1957 editions, Yale University Press each between $5-$10

I also got a first edition Pearl S. Buck and an anthology of New Yorker Short Stories from 1950-1960 (which includes Nabokov, among other authors) First Edition-- worth about $20.

All in all, not a bad haul. I love book sales (especially when the books are Fifty Cents!!!)

I have to say though, I kind of felt bad because the woman who rang up my sale was really excited about the books that I found. I almost thought she wasn't going to let go of the Gilbert & Sullivan treasury. I still am amazed at the Faulkner. It wasn't even in the old/rare book section, it was just sitting out on top of a pile of Fiction books, next to the Pearl Buck, just sitting there as if to say: "Buy me! Take me home!"