What efficiency!* You want a book? You get a book. You return a book, someone else gets the book. When the book is no longer popular, excess copies are sold to nerds like me for a fraction of the original price. Those copies eventually make it to the end of line:
fascinating discount bins where thrifty and adventurous readers decide they need to get "Completely Piste", or that "Straight Jobs, Gay Lives" might make interesting bedtime fare.
Indeed, books have been the least of my worries this year, what with my card-carrying membership to the SFPL and my addiction to buying and selling at places like Dog-Eared:
(I'm still enjoying a whopping $125 credit from purging my duplicate copies of "Stretching and Relaxation", "Television in Modern Society" and "Econ 101 for Dummies" when we moved last year. Ridding oneself of the literary nonessentials can be very freeing. And surprisingly lucrative. And good for you sex life, if your boyfriend has anything to do with schlepping your personal library to a new apartment.)
I have, however, encountered my first obstacle. I am completely obsessed with Philippa Gregory's rollicking Tudor fiction (the drama! the Feminism! the sables!), and have successfully gotten my ink-stained mitts on all of them BUT The Other Boleyn Girl. I can't seem to find it used, and the library can't keep it on the shelves.
I'm dying over here! I already know what happened to Katherine of Aragon, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr. Okay, we all already know what HAPPENED to all of them, but I need to know what they were WEARING!
Anybody have a copy they can loan me?
*Go ahead eco nerds. Hit me with the obscure sustainability study exposing the wanton wastefulness of the public library system. I would do it to you.
3 comments:
dude, I got you a copy - literally seconds ago at my colleague's desk, she had it sitting there, in glorious used condition. she done with it, says it's mine.
I just gave mine away!
I paid off $10,000 in credit card debt a number of years back by simply not buying any more new books (public library or used/trade only), cutting down on mani-pedis, and only buying beauty products - especially soaps and lotions - when I actually ran out of the one I was using. It was unbelievable, yet here I am now, debt-free, with significant savings and I live with my boyfriend that doesn't care if my toes are painted regularly.
My point - that is relevant - is the SFPL is the best thing ever. You can order books online, they email you when they are at your local branch, you can renew online! I LOVE it. Plus I can read books I would never buy but am secretly curious about or guiltily want to read but would never show them outside secret privacy of own home. Yay! Here's to the simultaneous rise and decline of my literary-ness.
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