Secondhand Goodness
I seem to be on a secondhand binge at the moment, which at least creates an uneasy balance between my love of new-to-me goodies and my guilt over rampaging consumerism. Also, it’s quite noticeably cheaper (though I admit it does little to support the original artists, musicians, authors, etc.; nothing is, alas, perfect).
It started a couple of days ago, when I felt the urge for new punk. What I was particularly craving was for something in a Dead Kennedy-ish vein, having been splitting my Fenric-the-iPod time pretty much exclusively between them and the Decemberists lately (don’t ask), and somehow going to a secondhand shop just seemed more appropriate than, you know, ordering from a corporate behemoth. However, I have never in my life gone into a secondhand music shop and found anything I had in mind when I went in. (I’ll just have to order my DK-and-that-ilk directly from Alternative Tentacles, which is probably better anyway.)
On the other hand, I did manage to talk myself into picking up a few other CDs, mostly replacements for old CDs I had in college but lost somewhere along the line, or — in one case — a replacement for an old vinyl album that got left in a car and came out unfortunately warpy. (Gah, I’m old.) My score:
Today witnessed an excursion with Cindy to Atlanta Vintage Books, which was having a sale. I’d never been there before, but I liked the fact that it’s one of those shops plunked down in a preexisting building, so all the shelves are crammed into little rooms that lead off each other in weird and twisty ways.[1] At any rate, I was primarily interested in their vintage sci-fi, particularly of a Frank Herbert-y flavor,[2] and retro cookbooks from the 1950s or earlier, preferably with lots of illustrations of what was perceived at the time as the perfect family, perfect housekeeper, perfect meal, etc. Sadly, I don’t think those areas are AVB’s strong points — which, btw, include an excellent selection of vintage and antique children’s books! Most of their cookbooks dated from the 1980s or later, with a few from the 1970s; though I did have a little success with their sci-fi, their selection was, quite honestly, the tiniest I’ve ever seen in a secondhand shop. I didn’t think it was possible that one could exist without an entire room devoted to sci-fi, but oh well.
Scores from AVB today:
and, most excitingly,
On a completely irrelevant note, why is it considered polite, or at least acceptable, to ask people with red hair whether the color is natural? Maybe it’s just me, but I find that a little personal. No, I don’t dye it — I dyed it black for a year, and learned I am way too lazy to keep up with retouching roots — but if you’re not actually cutting my hair, or I don’t volunteer that information to you, then what business is it of yours? Gah!
*** ***
[1]Oddly shaped secondhand bookshops, and the graduate library stacks at the University of Illinois, which somehow managed to fit something like five stories of stacks into a three-story building, always remind me of the quote from Terry Pratchett: “. . . even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.”
[2]Happily, quite a few Herbert novels that were out of print for years are now being reissued, but I still prefer the old paperbacks. The paper is all velvety and yellow, well, it just smells like it should. I’ve found that reading Herbert printed on crisp white new paper, in a book with a spine previously uncreased, is somehow unnerving.
