Library sale haul

Twelve books, one tote bag, and a strong suspicion that I already own two of them.

Our local library holds a sale twice a year, and I have never once left it with the restraint I promised myself on the way in. This summer’s haul, for the record:

• A battered hardback of Bleak House, with someone else’s pencil notes in the first hundred pages and then, tellingly, none at all.
• Two volumes of Montaigne’s essays in an old translation, the paper the colour of weak tea.
• The Peregrine by J. A. Baker, which I have been meaning to read for years.
• A cookbook from the seventies, purchased entirely for its photographs.
• Several paperbacks I picked up because of their covers, which is a perfectly respectable way to choose a book.

The best part of a library sale is not the price. It is the history. One of the Montaigne volumes has a bookplate from a reader who owned it decades ago, and a bus ticket from somewhere I will never visit tucked into chapter twelve. I left the ticket where it was.

I am now fairly sure that two of these books are duplicates of copies already on my shelf. I have decided not to check. Some questions are better left unanswered.