Bought: a Buttload of Tubb

On a whim I loaded Timothy in the Odyssey tonight and drove down to Half Price Books in Tacoma. Memory is notoriously unreliable in these matters, but it seems to me that whenever I get these sudden urges to go to HPB I am always rewarded. Tonight I was rewarded in spades.

We have a rule around here that you can go just about anywhere anytime if you're willing to take a boy with you. Timothy was disappointed we weren't going to the Borders down the street (they have an elevator) but he handled it well. We found a Pixar-themed magnetic drawing pad that kept him occupied while I browsed. I was looking for reasonably priced Moorcock omnibuses. No luck. But check it out...

Someone brought in their entire Dumarest of Terra collection, most of them in fine condition, all of them priced at two dollars. I picked out twelve of the nicer ones, all DAWs. It turns out two of them are duplicates and will be donated to the public library.

I'll probably never read these, but there's a good chance someday Timothy or Nicholas will. In the meantime there are the distinctive yellow spines, author's name in red, title in black, stylized DAW = sf logo at the top. And the covers: I recognize George Barr and Ken Kelly, and there are two by Don Maitz, an old favorite. Thanks to Terran_Trader for uploading more than a thousand cover images to Amazon, including all but one of the above.

The Dumarest books would have made the trip worth it, but there were two more rare DAWs - The Witling by Vernor Vinge and The Other Log of Phileas Fogg by Phil Farmer - and finally a beautiful copy of the Dell 1979 Slaves of Sleep by L. Ron Hubbard with gorgeous San Julian cover, Edd Cartier illustrations and, yes, fold-out ad for the SFBC in the middle (4 books for a dime with membership, sucker).

Now I just have to explain to my wife that I didn't spend thirty dollars, I saved at least that much. Wish me luck.