I cast my nets

This weekend was lovely and called for some semi serious book hunting. Pictured is my haul. I did alright for my first time out this spring. There were a few advertised sales here and there around the region to choose from but none of the ads gave me that lucky feeling so I decide to take the shotgun approach and hit a neighborhood sale in a not wealthy, but middle/lower class area with tiny one story starter homes on small plots. Not old Utica. No sidewalks. Detached garages. Decade built circa 1970.
Very generally, the kinds of people in these neighborhoods are not readers. Reading is for children and old women so what is mostly on offer are scruffy kid's books, ratty paperback romances and James Patterson in hardback.
The big draw for most shoppers here is 'kids clothing'. Nearly every house had two or three folding tables set up with eight metric tons of clothing. Under the tables were boxes full of plastic toys and cheap junk. Every garage was packed to the ceiling with stuff which was not for sale. In fact, while browsing along line of plastic kitchen implements in tubs, I got to close to the open garage door of one gentleman who sternly ordered me away. Glancing inside I could see a wall of cardboard boxes marked 'kids clothes-storage'. Who knows what kind of Wallmart dragon's horde of treasures lie within! I shiver to think.

I come to these when I have limited time because I can hit ten to fifteen houses in quick succession. I am hoping that someone will decide to finally get rid of granddad's old worthless civil war reference books or train books or Aunt Mabel's crazy alternative medicine manuals. I'm just sayin, its happened before. However, the books on offer were mostly as described above and no antiquarian gold mines were struck.
I did hit one house that had a box full of recently printed text books and culled out the keepers. These are fairly advanced biology text books indicating that someone was doing some serious book learnin. I probably should have asked after more. Once I talked my way into a house of a nurse who was selling medical books and emerged with several hundred dollars worth of texts. It helps that I don't look like an ax murder. Also I impulse bought two vintage magazine ads which are both seductive and irresistible so clearly I had no choice. OH! and the book on knitting your own farmyard. Not just the animals, not just the farmer, but the houses and landscape too. That one is going to be hard to part with even though I have no intention of knitting, not ever.