Book Binge

While up at my parents' house last week, I took a couple of hours to de-stress and visited the used bookshop that has been in Wabash since long before I ever came on the scene.  Opened as Mason's Rare & Used Books (best used bookshop ever!), it now goes under the name The Reading Room and still manages to produce some treasures.

Here's a list of the books I brought home:

Deep Lake Mystery by Carolyn Wells (fine Collier reprint edition)
Avalanche by Kay Boyle (VG 1st Edition; alas, no dust jacket)
Deep Lay the Dead by Frederick C. Davis (fine Crime Club Edition; alas, no dust jacket)
The Three Fears by Jonathan Stagge (VG, 1st Edition, dust jacket!)
Murder Has Its Points by Frances & Richard Lockridge (VG, 1st Edition, dust jacket!)
The Desert Moon Mystery by Kay Cleaver Strahan (G, 1st Edition; alas, no dust jacket)
Unholy Dying by R. T. Campbell (fine, Dover paperback edition)

The most exciting find of the lot was the Stagge book.  I already had one book written under that name  (Death's Sweet Song)--but that is a rather beat up old library copy.  The other interesting find was the Strahan book.  I've had Strahan on my list of To-Be-Found authors for quite some time, but had never come across any of her books when on my used bookshop hunts.  So...when John over at Pretty Sinister Books reviewed The Desert Moon Mystery, I bemoaned my Strahan-less state.  He very generously loaned the book to me (and I reviewed it earlier this year--HERE).  When I saw the book sitting there on The Reading Room's shelf mocking me, I just had to bring it home with me.  Deep Lay the Dead is also a nice find--Davis got put on the TBF list quite a while ago and it was good to find such a good copy (that blue Crime Club cover is just plain cool in my opinion).


When I returned home--just in time for my anniversary--my husband treated me to a trip to the Half Price Books outlet store here in town.  Who would have thought they would have one of the pocket-size Dell Map Back editions sitting there waiting to be snatched up for $1.00?  I grabbed it, five more mysteries, and a couple of vintage science fiction books and got checked out before they could figure out that such a nice Map Back edition ought to be selling for more.  


Here's the list of books that went home with me from HPB:

Red Herring by Edward Acheson (VG, hardback, no dust jacket)
Nobody Wore Black by Delano Ames (VG/Near-Fine, Dell Map Back)
The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey (VG, 1958 Pan Books Ltd)
Inspector Maigret & the Killers by Georges Simenon (1954 pocket size edition)
Red Threads by Rex Stout (Inspector Cramer's own case)
Three at Wolfe's Door by Rex Stout (1968 vintage paperback)




Science Fiction
Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison (1st paperback edition)
Asimov's Choice: Black Holes & Bug-Eyed Monsters by Asimov & George H Scithers (ed)