Book Grabbing and Gorging: A Cautionary Tale

We went to the Strand bookstore this weekend. We frequently go and end up with bags and bags of books and auction catalogues.  Saint Jerome goes in and starts upstairs in the art department while I hit the $1 and 48-cent books outside. Well, my usual MO for outside it to grab and look later, which is exactly what I did. I grabbed a book about a true-crime that took place in Seattle in 1911, Rudolf Bing's memoir 5,000 Nights At The Opera (which I'm surprised I haven't read or owned already), a gem-cutting and jewelry-making book from 1938 which has very cool jewelry and metalwork examples and I grabbed a biography called E. Nesbit. I checked out the dance books looking for Guerrero and then went upstairs to hit the Fashion History section and find Saint Jerome. We leave relatively unscathed (though the Neue Galerie catalogue Brücke set us back some). We go to Little Poland to have lunch as we always do when we go to Strand and I pull out E. Nesbit. It is not a biography on Floradora girl, Stanford White lover Evelyn Nesbit but a bio of an author named Edith Nesbit. We walk along 12th Street on our way back to the 1,2,3 train and when we pass the outside carts at Strand, I carefully replace the book on one of the carts. It was only a $1 and I really didn't want to drag it home, only to drag it to the church thrift store. This will teach me to grab and go without looking at the content. And, no, you can't judge a book by its cover after all!