Used bookstores have proven the bane of my existence, and this one particularly so, as I often find books there that I've been looking for, some of them priced as low as a dollar. With our house so full of books, the only real justification for going is if we have books we want to trade in. We did a little digging through our guest room, and found several we decided we could part with, but this place can be rather picky about condition, as they sell their own so cheaply. Within minutes after dropping ours off at the resale counter, they called our name. I figured that meant they didn't want to buy our trade-ins. To our surprise, they took nearly all the books we brought them, and we walked out with money in our pockets.
We also walked out with fewer books than we entered, including two new books associated with Robert E. Howard. The Spell of Conan was edited by L. Sprague de Camp, who served as the driving force behind the twelve volume collection of Conan paperbacks. The book is a collection of tributes to the writer, his character Conan, and the way he carved out his own unique niche in the Fantasy genre. The Howard Collector is a collection of stories, fragments, poems, and letters written by Howard to magazine editors and friends (including H. P. Lovecraft). This second book was published by Glenn Lord, who served as the literary agent for Howard's heirs for twenty-eight years. Like de Camp, he tirelessly promoted Howard's writing, in the process acquainting future generations of Fantasy readers (like me) with the great man's work.
Two great new books, neither of which I previously knew existed (and ones I never would have discovered, had I not tried to trade in books that no longer spoke to me). I am so looking forward to reading them.
Dragon Dave
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