Each year when I go to the used book sale at UHS, I try to find the most unusual book to highlight here in this column. This year it was an easy choice: an atlas of "Nephrons and Kidneys" that was the size of a coffee-table book. It was previously owned by a Havertown man, based on the name and address inside the front cover.
This year, in a very helpful strategy, the volunteers (the sale is run by the PTO) grouped the bestsellers so you could either browse through them or avoid them: there was a sea of paperbacks by Jodi Picoult, Nora Roberts and John Grisham and about a dozen copies of "Eat, Pray, Love," "The Kite Runner" and "Memoirs of a Geisha."
There was also a table of "popular culture" books. Browsing through a book of Beatles lyrics I learned that I've been wrong for decades about "Across the Universe": it's "nothing's gonna change my world," not "chain my world."
I'm not sure who donated all the pre-press review copies of fiction books, but there seemed to be tons of them this year.
I overheard a worried-looking mother and her son looking through the SAT prep books; the mother was concerned that a 2010 book might not still be useful.
For $20, I went home with a bag full of not only books but DVDs, including "The Sound of Music." At the same time as the book sale, a used sports equipment sale was going on in the smaller gymnasium, so people were walking around carrying helmets and baseball bats. One older woman bought a vintage wooden Davis tennis racquet, still in its original press.
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