Shopping at the Planned Parenthood Book Sale in Des Moines is a family tradition.  My grandmother went to the sale in the ’60s, and I envied her 19th-century editions of Thackeray’s Henry Esmond and George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways. My husband and I have faithfully attended the sale since moving back to the Midwest.

Founded in 1961, the Planned Parenthood Book Sale is held twice a year in the 4-H Building on the Iowa State Fairgrounds.  I have found Viragos, an almost complete set of Trollope, and out-of-print books by Lawrence Durrell, Angela Thirkell, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Alice Adams, Robert Graves, Margery Sharp, Violet Trfusis, Edna Ferber, and on and on.

Last night was Opening Night.  The scouts had already picked over the books.  Truly, there were gaps in the classics section and the books were already leaning.

If you don’t find something right away, you keep going.   We found a few classics, some literary novels, vintage mysteries, SF, family sagas, and so on.  Honestly?  This collection looked very like last spring’s, which makes me wonder what happens to all the books we donated over the summer.  It needs an infusion of new old books.

Here’s what I found, after hours of going through what felt like every book in the fiction section.  (Of course I didn’t mind.)

Many of you know John Williams’ Stoner, a Willa Catherish novel about a modest English professor with an unhappy marriage and a career stymied by departmental politics.  What you may not know is that his historical novel Augustus, told in the form of documents, letters, and memoirs, is even better. It won the National Book Award in 1973.  I read this long ago but didn’t have a copy, so this was an exciting find.

Oddly, I’ve never read Raymond Chandler.  This Raymond Chandler omnibus includes The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, and The Lady in the Lake.

Bloggers have praised Cynthia Harrod-Eagles and I hope the Morland Dynasty books are historical novels a la Poldark rather than romances.  (I actually bought a huge pile of them, but I can’t fit them in one picture.)  It was a pity buy, so let’s hope they’re fun. Even if they’re fodder for Little Free Libraries, that’s okay.

I have never seen this novel by Ford Madox Ford.  I idolize Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a novelist best known for  her screenplays for the Merchant-Ivory films, so was pleased to find this early novel. I cherish the thought of spending time with Jhabvala again.

Katrina Kittle’s graceful novels are good reads, even though issue-oriented. And, on a different note, Alice Adams’ stunning literary novels (also praised by Tony’s Book World) are out-of-print so I was thrilled to find this book for only $1.  (It has never been read!)

I’m behind on my Ian McEwan reading, and Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake was well-reviewed a few years ago.  (She is the sister of the brilliant Karen E. Bender, whom I interviewed here a few years ago.)

How can you go wrong with an omnibus of Josephine Tey?

I’ve been planning to read Atwood’s SF trilogy and here’s the first book.

And here’s the second book.

Yup, Cathy Guisewite is my favorite cartoonist.  I have so much in common with Cathy.  The eating, the shopping, well, maybe not the shopping, but feeling the social pressure of being a woman in the twentieth century….  Well, I know it’s the twenty-first cnetury, but Cathy got canceled!

This horror novel by Thomas Tryon, an actor turned writer in the ’60s, has been reissued by NYRB.  An eerie novel about twins.

Clifford D. Simak, an American science fiction who won three Hugos, a Nebula Award, and was name SFWA Grand Master, is neglected these days, but his work is very good.  He is best-known for City, a poignant novel about robots and talking dogs.  He has a thing about robots, and, as so often in literature, they are more human than humans.  My favorite of his books is They Walked Like Men, a very witty, very original novel about a journalist who discovers, with the help of a talking dog, that Earth’s real estate is being taken over by aliens.  (I wrote about it here.)  I know nothing about these “new” books, except they are some of his later books, and I have heard those are uneven.  Each book was only $1, so if it’s fodder for Little Free Libraries, that’s okay.

And there were a few I didn’t get around to taking picutres of.

Another box of books to add to the other boxes of books…