Loading…
18
Warning: the guy at Half Price Books in Columbus told me to stop buying matching sets, and my shelf agrees with him
I was at the Half Price Books on Bethel Road in Columbus about two weeks ago, digging through the clearance carts like I always do, and this older guy next to me, maybe 70, had a stack of paperbacks all different sizes, nothing matching. I said something dumb like "hard to find sets here huh," and he laughed and told me he used to buy full series sets, spent years hunting down all the matching spines, and then realized he'd read maybe six of the books. He said the matching set thing is like buying a bookshelf for the idea of a person he wasn't. That hit weird because I have a whole shelf of matching Nora Roberts paperbacks I bought at a library sale in Dayton last spring, 34 of them, and I've read four. I paid $17 for the whole lot so it's not the money, it's more that I keep buying books for the future version of me who has time. So now I've been grabbing random stuff, a beat up copy of Cold Mountain for a quarter, a weird old gardening book, whatever looks good. Anybody else deal with this, or is it just me and the clearance cart guy?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
henry_hernandez8d ago
Wondering if the clearance cart guy ever went back and read those books he hunted down, or if the hunt was the whole thing for him. Like, once he had all the spines lined up, was there even a point in reading them anymore? I ask because I bought a Dean Koontz lot off eBay three years ago, 22 books, and I swear the day the last one showed up I lost all interest. Did you actually read that Cold Mountain, or did grabbing it random feel different because there was no set to complete?
8