Library sale started up yesterday! You might remember last year's post about it where I picked up a bunch of music and Redwall audiobooks, and we went again today. I love library sales and flea markets and the less-traveled end of music hunting, because you never know what you'll find and you'll usually pay a lot less. True, I may stumble into five copies of Cher's Believe, but then you'll find a copy of Editors' The Back Room for $1 and it becomes the best album you've heard all year! Not to mention the weird bootleg mix CDs (today's was Barbara Streisand in an Imation CD-R case) or the bonkers low-quality local releases, you find everything. I do love a good CD shop, I really do, but they're much pickier about what they accept and they know what they have for pricing.
I'm very fortunate to have such good options around me for CD hunting, and the library delivered this year! If you can't read from the picture, I picked up a (probably missing the dust cover but I don't mind, it suits) copy of Mossflower, because fantasy animal autism, William Gibson's Count Zero (no, I didn't buy it because of the Harmonix band Count Zero, that'd be silly, but I am also actually curious about his stuff since he's one of the few authors I recognize), out of shot, but iWoz, Steve Wozniak's autobiography, this funky book on registry hacks and customizations for XP with a still-sealed CD in the back and a December 2004 CompUSA price tag, and ten CDs, all a dollar apiece:
- John Frusciante's debut, Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt, in a nice cardboard sleeve
- The Doors' L.A. Woman, because I've been accepting my love of oldies more and more
- The Wallflowers' Bringing Down the Horse, on the gen X oldies front
- The Verve's Urban Hymns, which had me humming "Bitter Sweet Symphony" all day
- Throwing Muses' In a Doghouse, a two-disc set of all their formerly import-only early material
- The Reverend Horton Heat's Smoke 'em if You Got 'em (!!!!)
- They Might Be Giants' Flood (time to see what all the hubbub is about!)
- Return of the Rentals, because fuzz bass and throwback sci-fi are peanut butter and jelly
- Is It...Man or Astro-Man?, who I've been curious about ever since I loved the Jimmy Neutron theme as a kid
- The Juliana Hatfield Three's Become What You Are, because her work on that Lemonheads record was lovely and I'd hear "My Sister" on Lithium Deep Cuts at work decently often
Oh, and all of this was $13.50. And yes, I check the discs are in there and clean, and they were. I also saw plenty of other cult 90s favorites on display—Morphine, Spacemen 3—on what planet should I be allowed to buy the Rev, the Rentals, and Man or Astro-Man? at a library? Apparently this one, and I'm thrilled.