My latest haul is also relatively small; it’s quality, not quantity, alright, man?

Today is the first day of the Temple Public Library Book Sale in Temple, Texas. As I write this, however, I have just returned from their September 1, 2021, sale. It’s held twice a year, and it’s a very nice drive from Round Rock to Temple, perhaps stopping off at Country Donuts on the way up and Johnny’s Steaks and BBQ on the way down¹ or one of the many nice restaurants in Temple.

On my first visit, I picked up several books I already owned, or used to. I read Tarzan long ago, and have several of the sequels in my to-read shelf. But I’ve somehow managed to lose my copy the first book. I’m pretty sure I didn’t just throw it out, as I distinctly remember reading it several times. Now I get to read it yet again. I also bought replacement copies of three cookbooks I already owned: hardcover editions of the amazingly eccentric Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes, Beatrice Trum Hunter’s wonderful Whole Grain Baking Sampler, and a boxed set of the Middle Eastern Cooking volume of Time-Life’s Foods of the World series. I don’t use Bull Cook very often, but I thoroughly enjoy browsing through it. Herter’s eccentric rants prove more true, sadly, as the future unfolds.

Country Donuts is only open until they sell out, so stop by before the book sale, not afterward!

Hunter’s book, on the other hand, is one of my favorites, and the main reason I keep whole grains on hand. She wrote her book before whole grains were meant as an end in themselves and when the point was making nutritious food that tastes better. She includes simple advice such as to measure oils first and then syrups, because that way the syrup doesn’t stick, and to use honey instead of sugar because it keeps breads fresh longer.

On my second trip here, in August 2018, I completed my set of books in the Southern Living Cookbook Library, when I found The Southern Living Soups and Stews Cookbook^•. It has one of my favorite soup recipes in it, and one of by far the easiest to make: just blend fresh tomatoes, yogurt, celery, lemon juice, and salt and pepper in a blender.

On that same trip I also picked up Kip Thorne’s amazing Black Holes and Time Warps^•. It’s one of those rare books that I can’t imagine not having read now that I’ve read it. From how to detect gravity waves to how singularity research ties together general relativity and quantum mechanics; from how the observable world has expanded beyond the optical to how deeply the equivalence of matter and energy goes, this is a phenomenal book for anyone interested in astrophysics.

My 2018 Temple book haul included a great Ray Bradbury book and Annie Proulx’s universally-acclaimed—for good reason—Shipping News. The Simak collection came from nearby McWha Books.

In 2019 I picked up one of those amazing Ace flip books, a double-feature of John Brunner’s Meeting at Infinity and Kenneth Bulmer’s Beyond the Silver Sky. The latter is a gonzo tale of underwater warriors, wielding tridents and guns and riding sharks into battle. The cover painting alone is irresistible.

While I’ve known of H. Rider Haggard for almost as long as I can remember, I haven’t actually read any of his works until recently. I picked up Ayesha and Benita in a combined edition while traveling through Nova Scotia in the Autumn of 2018, very much enjoyed both of them, and then in the Spring of 2018 while wandering about Los Angeles I picked up a fascinating book about the correspondence between Rudyard Kipling and Haggard, The Record of a Friendship.

On my most recent trip to Temple, I picked up The Works of Haggard, which collects Cleopatra, She, King Solomon’s Mines, and Allan Quatermain. Besides being a collection of great stories, this is a beautiful volume, leather-bound and delightfully heavy with quality paper that feels good as you read. And the writing! Haggard is brilliant at inhabiting the minds of vastly different narrators. His priest, Hamarchi, is a Shakespearean figure of tragic proportions; his lost worlds are wild, and his magic both awesome and subtle. If the only thing you know about Haggard’s characters are how they’ve been translated into modern media, I recommend going back to the source.

The goose on the wing laughs at crocodiles, so goes their saying down in Alexandria; but when the goose is asleep on the water, it is the crocodiles who laugh. — H. Rider Haggard (Cleopatra)

Another brilliant book is James Tiptree’s Brightness Falls from the Air, a science fiction mystery-thriller where everything we need to know is presented up front but nothing is as it seems. This is among Tiptree’s best work, a parlor-room mystery on a far planet, a monument to human depravity and shame.

Also on this most recent trip, and I’m reading it as I write this, I picked up Clyde Tombaugh’s history of the discovery of extra-Saturnian planets, especially his own discovery of Pluto. It’s a wide-ranging memoir-slash-history of a fascinating period in astronomical research. Individual astronomers were competing to discover planetary bodies in the solar system, especially ones that would explain Uranus’s orbit. Tombaugh himself recognized that Pluto’s status as a planetary body large enough to significantly affect Uranus’s orbit was doubtful.

Bicentennial pie!

I also picked up two more cookbooks, relatively local ones. One, Cook ’em Horns is a tome of recipes from University of Texas alumni to commemorate the University’s centennial in 1984. The other is a spiral-bound book from Garvin County, Oklahoma celebrating the nation’s bicentennial. The bicentennial appears to have been an inspiration for a lot of great community cookbooks. My own community growing up had a great one, and I recently discovered another from Fruitport, Michigan. I combined a crust from Garvin and a filling from Fruitport for a fluffy orange coconut pie.

This is not a huge book sale; the main room is relatively small. But the tables are packed above and below, and you may have to move a couple of boxes to see what’s in the box beneath. The cookbook section is especially nice; it’s off in an annex and, if you include the health food books (which I really don’t) occupies nearly an entire wall.

You might also combine it with any of the bookstores along I-35 from Waco down, and make a day of it. I tend not to do that. I have a tendency, once I buy a bunch of books, of suddenly wanting to curtail my trip and get down to reading them.