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Readers- of books, not this blog, there are few of those- always get around to talking about the best places to get more books. When it comes to getting best sellers or to cross another off my ever growing list of must-have technical books, it’s hard to beat the big booksellers that everyone know. I find ISBN.nu handy when price-shopping for a particular book but my favorite is the book liquidator Edward R. Hamilton and their storefront site Hamilton Books. The oddity of the two sites is that the first only allows you create an order form which you then print and mail in (snail mail, not email) with a check (yes, a personal check, if you can believe it) while the second has the expected shopping cart with checkout.

The best thing about Hamilton is not its web presence but the newsprint catalog sent out at roughly monthly intervals. Pages and pages of small type with some pictures for notable items thrown in and the whole thing broken into sections by topic. On a Saturday, I’ll go through it with a pen, putting little hash marks next to some titles, question marks near others, big circles around ones I’ve got to have. After Maria has made her picks we sit down and decide on an order. Because these are heavily discounted, we have an arbitrary dollar limit justified by the fact that there just isn’t enough room in the apartment for everything on the list and the gamble that if the title is there next month it will be reduced. So we engage in friendly haggling as we juggle the titles; an enjoyable (if quaint) way to spend a little time before digging in to our reading.

I’m home, sick with a cold, so I’m catching up on my reading. Just read Flophouse, Life on the Bowery by David Isay. I didn’t hear the NPR broadcasts of Sunshine Hotel: Part I and Sunshine Hotel: Part II (real audio) until after seeing a documentary on Sundance channel but the book is even more striking. These life stories are each rendered alongside the photos in just a few words of interview. I have an arm’s-length sympathy for these characters. I worked in Catskill hotels through college and the porters, dishwashers and housekeepers I met lived these lives and had these faces. The ‘Animal House’, what they called their staff quarters, where they boozed and slept looked a lot like the photos of inside these flophouses.