It all started a few weeks ago when I was struggling to make a pot of potent espresso half asleep in the wee hours of the morning. I opened the curtains to my kitchen window to shed some light on the mess I was making and saw three people unloading boxes into our trash. Naturally, I wasn’t pleased since our trash was picked up yesterday and wasn’t to be picked up again for another week. I asked Danielle to go outside and see if they planned on using the entire dumpster for their own use. They said they were friends with our landlord and that he allows them to dump their trash there as long as they don’t take up too much space. Anyway, they unloaded their (what I thought was garbage) and were on their way. I asked Danielle if she knew what they were throwing away, and she said, “I think they tossed out boxes of books.” Jebus! Why would anybody throw away books? You could donate them at least.

Dumpster Diving ensues! We took all the boxes of books out and rummaged through them. I found a plethora of brand new vegetarian cookbooks, a slue of German, Korean, and Spanish language course books, and a variety of home remedy books. After gathering several boxes of brand new books, we decided we would take the rest to a used book store, hoping to get store credit.

Time passes. Then a few weeks pass (we can be so lazy) and finally we decide to take these boxes somewhere because they were aiding Lucy (our ferret) onto the top shelves of our bookcase where she would burrow behind DVDs and books, then proceed to cast them off the shelf. We found a decent used bookstore and surprisingly they took about eighty books off of our hands. This is equivalent to about eighteen dollars in store credit. It doesn’t sound like much when you think about it, but when you really think about it, it’s all free to begin with.

This is what I got in exchange for eighty books: The Catcher in the Rye, Fahrenheit 451, Franny and Zooey, Anne Frank’s Tales from the Secret Annex (mistakenly I picked up thinking it was Anne Frank’s Diary), Hiroshima, and some Guinness Book of World Records book. Not bad at all considering most of the books they had were new and weren’t able to be used in conjuction with store credit. The larger part of all the used books mostly consisted of Fabio romance paperbacks and an endless amount of Star Wars and Star Trek books.

My quest for an enormous library doesn’t stop there. My mum called me today to tell me our local library was having a book sale. (Woe is Danielle, for she knows not what to do with my towering stacks of books stuffed in every crevice of our tiny apartment.)

We ended up leaving the library with fourteen more books to add to our ever-growing collection. The books only cost a mere $3.50. Some how I managed to find a first edition of Hiroshima for twenty-five cents.

Now I’m sitting here trying to devise a way to store these books. I have one book case that was full prior to all these new editions. Not to mention in addition to all of this, we still have nine boxes of books littered throughout the car. We’re going to take them up to Metropolitan Ministries and donate them, unless any of you want to stop by and peruse through them?