Fort Mason Book Sale

San Francisco just held the biggest book sale on the West coast down in one of the warehouses in Fort Mason. It was a four day event, beginning on Thursday at 10am and ending some time Sunday night. Breanne and I had been looking forward to it for a couple weeks so we walked down early Thursday morning and got there a little before 10, and were surprised to see a line of maybe 100 or 150 people already waiting at the door. People had backpacks slung over both shoulders, giant boxes, and some even had their own shopping carts. Breanne and I, novices, had brought along two tiny canvas bags we usually reserved for groceries.
The warehouse would be more accurately described as an enormous hanger, the kind you see stuffed with old war planes. Sectioned off along long tables were the most books I'd ever seen in my life. Sci-Fi, westerns, DYI, music, politics, fiction, science, sports, religion, cooking, psychology, children's- basically anything you can think of that comes in book form.
We were there for about 4 hours on Thursday, with a lunch break in between, and bought about 100 books, sheet music included, for 140 dollars. We found some great stuff, but I'll get to that later.
On Sunday, anything that was still there was a dollar or less. Previously, books had been priced anywhere from a dollar to 5. Being cheap, I hadn't selected anything that was more than 2 dollars and rarely bagged a book that was more than 1. We weren't in the mood for the crowds on Sunday so we only picked up about 20 books (for 20 dollars of course).
All told, we purchased about 120 books for 166 dollars. Good deal if you ask me. Here are some of the highlights:

1. The Unabridged Jack London ($1). Everything London ever published in one fat paperback. I know that one can only hear so much about wolves but they're good stories for all ages.
2. The Spire, The Pyramid, Pincher Martin and Free Fall ($4). Four books for four dollars by one of my favorite authors, William Golding. Three of the books have unbroken spines.
3. Don't Know Much about... ($3). The Bible and the Universe, two more fun books by Kenneth C. Davis. The first one I read, History, I purchased from a Smithsonian gift shop many years ago. I recently read Geography.*
4. The Greatest of All Irish Songs ($1). Sheet music of traditional Irish songs. I've tried a few of them and the parts that I can play sound good. They sound exactly as I imagined they would.
5. Roger Angell ($2). Two hardcover books by Roger Angell, Game Time and Late Innings, a dollar a piece. Perhaps the greatest baseball writer ever, these books would have cost me 30 bucks, at least, in a book store.
6. Playboy Stories ($1). The best of forty years of short fiction published in Playboy. Bradbury, Updike, Cheever, Baldwin, Kerouac, Philip Roth, Malamud, Dahl, Garcia Marquez, Nabokov, Irving, Mailer, Coover, to name a few.
7. Lord of the Rings box set ($3). One of those box sets that include The Hobbit and have pictures from the movies on the book jackets. Couldn't pass that deal up.

*Noticed today that Don't Know Much about the Universe is signed by the author. It's also inscribed with the words, "To Rick, Best Wishes." Why would Rick give up a book autographed, with a personal (or impersonal) message from the author? We'll never know.