Sucker for a Good “Book”

First off, anyone and everyone who would even read this have heard this story already. But still, I’ve got to record it for posterity…or as long as I pay for the server that hosts this blog.

Quite some time ago, I discovered Winston Churchill’s set of books on the Second World War in the Osan Air Base Thrift Shop.  I wasn’t desperate for them, but they did catch my eye. The problem was that only the first five volumes (of six) were there.

Still, when a friend called me and said, “Hey, the thrift shop has all of their books on sale for a quarter apiece,” I couldn’t help but think that the buck twenty-five investment was worth it. I figured that as usual I’d never read them anyway, but even if I did, I had a good year or two of picking them up and putting them down before I’d come to the problem of not having volume six.

So when I spent a a couple of weeks in the States recently, one of my priorities was to go to used book stores and thrift shops with my sister — a professional at this kind of thing. And bonus — it wasn’t even primarily about the going, it was more about spending the time with my sister. And double-bonus, one day with my brother, and another with my sister’s friend (whom our entire family adores, and with whom I saw a movie nearly half a century ago and apparently only I remember this).

Day one, we went to a pretty cool book store. They had volumes four and five of Churchill’s work in hardcover (my set was cheap paperback), but no six. Day two, we went to a thrift store, and there’s just no way to drag this out for the drama — of course I found the exact copy of volume six I was looking for sitting on the shelf in the “History” section.  It was the only volume they had. Same set. I like to think that some guy “lost” it at Osan Air Base, and when it was time to go he just dumped the five volumes he had at the thrift store only to find volume six in his household baggage while unpacking in Oshkosh, Wisconsin months later. “Oh well, I’ll drop it off at Saint Vinnie’s when I get a chance.” Little did he know that I’d show up from Korea years later to reunite the set.

That’s a cool story, and I’m sticking to it. I can even account for the fact that volumes one to five are in worse shape because he’d read them before losing six. That’s gotta be it.

But the story doesn’t stop here. In a roundabout way, I can bring it to the latest addition to my “library.” Because when I was in that thrift store, I also found a 15 cent copy of Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret, which is a book that I’d recently seen in a set of spiritual classics. Hudson Taylor was a mid-19th century missionary to China of whom I was vaguely familiar. I picked it up and started reading.

But that’s not the story either.

The story starts with “In my Study I have an antique Kindle — might even be the first generation.” I’ve read books on it before, but it never took off with me. I’ve preferred hard copies, and if you recall my run through Pulitzers a couple of years ago, I tried to exhaust as many of them from our base library before resorting to getting them for Kindle through Libby. Still, the later models of Kindles I was seeing were pretty cool — particularly in the way you could read them at night in bed without a book light. I’ve used book lights for my hard copies, and have never found one that I’ve liked. They just don’t give you a good, uniform illumination, and that always bothered me. So yeah, the Kindle Paperwhite I was seeing on line looked interesting. Not interesting enough to order one, but a possibility if I ever stumbled upon one that was too good to pass up…like yesterday at the BX. They usually just sell Amazon Fire tablets there (and I picked one up cheap years back that I never use), but I noticed a 12th Generation Paperwhite on the shelf for less than it costs on Amazon, and I couldn’t help it. And after all, it’s about time I stop buying hard copies of books [I tell myself]. I can’t keep using all that shelf space, even after having given away quite a bit over the past few years.

And now to finish, and bring this back around to wrap it up: guess what I don’t remember buying several years ago for Kindle? Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret. Guess I’ll give my 15 cent copy to someone else.