@Minimus
Your costume is just perfect!
#fabulamurina #worldbookday

Within the last decade, I've noticed a growing number of Little Free Libraries in the neighborhood. There are a half-dozen within the area around my home, and a couple more near where I work. I really love the entire concept! Take a book, leave a book. Community-powered book circulation! I've plucked several good finds from these little book boxes. I found a paperback of "Station Eleven" in one, and a lovely hard-cover illustrated "Little Women" in another. (Yeah, I already have "Little Women", but couldn't pass up the illustrated edition. I'm a sucker for duplicating books, which probably explains why I have so many!)

If you don't have any Little Free Libraries near you, you can read more about them here:

https://littlefreelibrary.org/

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Of course, the best place to buy books is always the library sales! More than half of my books were library discards. Best plan is to drop in on the first day of the sale, to pick up any treasures likely to go quickly. Then drop in again on the last day of the sale, when they are giving away a whole bag of books for just a dollar a bag, and stuff it with anything that looks like it might be interesting. Nowadays, my local branch doesn't depend on just one annual sale, but has a dedicated area in the library where used books are always available, a sort of perpetually changing selection worth browsing when visiting. You never know what will turn up there.

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I had a job for a few years in a college town, about a half-hour out from Rochester. There I discovered a wonderful independent bookstore called the Lift Bridge. Of course, being a college town, they specialized in books the students might need. But they were also a great general-purpose bookstore, and I loved to cross the street and browse happily on my lunch breaks from work. I bought "The Penguin History of Canada" here, and a paperback set of Willa Cather novels, and "Print in a Wild Land" about newspaper publishing in the old west. Many years later, after I no longer worked in that town, I stopped there while passing through, was delighted to see the Lift Bridge still going strong, and stopped in again, to buy a copy of "Inkheart".

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My dad discovered another favorite secondhand bookstore in downtown Rochester, which we frequented in the 1980's and 1990's. The guy who ran it was called Rocky, and I vaguely remember that might also have been the name of the store. It was a complete mess to a casual glance, with books sagging off shelves everywhere. But Rocky knew what he had and where to look for it. My dad would ask, "Do you happen to have a copy of...?" And Rocky would say, "I did, let's see if it's still here... It should be over here..." and he'd pull it off the crowded shelf like a magician. He also gave credit for trade-ins. My dad would haul some of our discards when we went there, and Rocky would look them over and tell us how many books we could have in exchange. We got new books, and he got fresh stock, yet no money changed hands. I don't know how he stayed in business, but it was a great little bookstore.

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When we moved back to Rochester, our bookstore of choice was Scrantom's. It was a local chain, with a dozen stores scattered around the county, and a big two-story flagship store downtown. My regular birthday outing for years was a trip downtown to pick out a pile of books. When I was in my 20's, I worked at one of the branch stores for most of the decade, an excellent job while it lasted. The chain had been owned by the Scrantom family since the 1800's, but in the 1990's, it gradually began closing the branch stores, and lost the downtown store in the early 2000's, unable to compete with the big chain bookstores. Going through my bookshelves, I still occasionally come across a Scrantom's price sticker on a back cover.

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