Eye Candy, of a sort

*I found this in my drafts, and I've had a hard time getting photos off my phone, and it's very cold and 2018 now, and so please just pretend it is last week...

Once upon a time, there was a secondhand bookstore.

When I lived in married-students residence in, oh, 1990, we used to go down Yonge Street to Eliot's Books, and ABC Books. We bought secondhand Brother Cafael books and Janwillem Van de Wetering books and Sue Grafton books, most of which we still have.

And now Eliot's is closing. I don't know much about the tax increase mentioned in that article, but I know Yonge Street ain't what it used to be. Huge holes mean huge condo towers will be coming, but surely they can't build only condos, can they? Maybe they can.

I went to the sale yesterday. Should have gone weeks ago, but there were still some good books, and everything was a dollar, so you can't really go wrong. I picked up a couple of okay knitting books and carried them around a bit, but wasn't committed to them and lost them when better things came along.

The better things were from the CanLit shelf. I have just finished a book called Arrival, about the CanLit boom in the 60s and 70s, so picked up some poems by George Bowering, and a few others. I couldn't find a single Margaret Atwood or Alice Munro, and I couldn't remember if it was the Stone Angel or A Jest of God that was the good Margaret Laurence book!

At the last minute I decided to get a fifth book so I wouldn't need any change from my $5 bill (silly, I know) so I got the Greek cooking book without looking too closely. Turns out it is the sort of thing my parents would buy on a cruise in the Greek Islands: some decent and classic recipes, translated badly.

On my way out I saw the nice Oxford edition of Trollope, so grabbed that, as Arthur was paying for his books.

I didn't realize till I got home that they were all so colour-coordinated.