Random Used Books I found today

[heydaralon]

Every once in awhile, I stop by used bookstores to see if they have anything good. Today, I saw one that I'd never seen before, and ended up buying a few books for a good price.

I found The Gangs of New York book by Herbert Asbury. This is the book the film is based on. It is illustrated with mugshots of various gangmembers who were arrested during this time. It also has a very short foreward by Borges oddly enough.


I found 2 relatively new books as well. The Pike and Red Famine.

The Pike is a biography of Gabriel D'Annunzio. I had this one on my amazon wishlist for awhile, but I only ended up paying about $3 for it as this store. D'Annunzio was the Italian proto-Fascist who led an army of disgruntled European misfits after the war ended and siezed the city of Fiume and held onto if for awhile. He inspired Mussolini and led a wild life, full of poetry writing, banging women, and doing more cocaine than Freud. Crazy guy.

Red Famine is Anne Applebaum's book about Holdomor. It actually came out in the last year or two so I was surprised to find it at a used store. It details the famine in Ukraine, and the mass starvation/Soviet coverup with the complicity of Western reporters that ensued.

I also ended up getting BattleCry for Freedom by James McPherson which is about the US Civil War.

Anyway, if you like collecting books, check out used stores in your area. For the best price, go to your local library and see if they are getting rid of any books. Often you can buy books from them for as cheap as a quarter. No one in this country reads anymore, unless it involves Wizards, vampires, or Trump hatchet jobs, but there are resources available...

[TheReal_ND]

Pro tip: search the dumpster behind the used books store

Free books nigga

[heydaralon]

Pro tip: search the dumpster behind the used books store

Free books nigga

lool cut out the middle man. If it works, it works. What does kind of piss me off is the fact that bookstores would throw out books that are in readable condition. If you can't sell them, fine, donate that shit to Goodwill or the library. Someone will get something out of it. Some of my fondest childhood memories are visiting the library.

[DBTrek]

That must have been before libraries were homeless porn-viewing camps.

[heydaralon]

That must have been before libraries were homeless porn-viewing camps.

Libraries attract the homeless, like a moth to a flame. From the perspective of those folks, it is the perfect place to be. You can wash up in the bathroom, you can sit in a quiet air conditioned building, you can avoid being bothered by your cohorts and law enforcement, and you can use their wifi (since everyone including the homeless have a smartphone now. Shit, I've seen hobos with nicer phones than me) and/or their computers to view pornography. The downtown Orlando library has always been filled to the rafters with the homeless, since it is right around a homeless shelter and Lake Eola, which is where they love congregating. Even still, I used to love visiting that library as a kid. The shape of the building and its layout fascinated me. I've noticed that smaller libraries outside major metropolitan areas do not have this problem. The homeless mainly chill in the big metro libraries, not the ones in the suburbs. Anyway, a vast majority of my books were bought used at Friends of the Library Sales (I think these are nationwide). These sales resemble a Flea Market, but only books and cds are sold. This is another great way to buy interesting books for pennies. I used to go to the Alachua County one in College and buy 30-50 books for about twenty bucks. It still goes on I think...

[Speaker to Animals]

Even when I was a child the downtown library was filled with homeless people.

[heydaralon]

Even when I was a child the downtown library was filled with homeless people.

Same. Winter Park has various homeless ordinances, and I used to go to their library near Rollins, and I would always enjoy watching the feuds between the librarians there and the homeless. The librarians would try to get the bums to leave, and it would get ugly from time to time. Some of these verbal spats were worthy of World Star Hip Hop. As long as our civilization has libraries, the homeless will be drawn to them, the same way having cold dark spaces will attract mushrooms.

[DBTrek]

Largo Library was great, when I was a kid. But Largo is just that speck of a town next to Clearwater and across from Tampa. We didn't have homeless in the library, just tons of Choose-Your-Own adventure books and texts on UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and other shit a young kid could spend days reading about.

I went into the Seattle Public library, and immediately booked an appointment to get my MMR shots, the plague-3 series, and a blood transfusion just to be on the safe side. Throw some book shelves up in the nearest rest stop bathroom and watch people wander through, that's the Seattle Public Library.