Monday, June 06, 2005
Bargain Bins
I was in Borders bookshop before, had a look around, checked out the humour section and found some great stuff.
As I kept walking around I found one thing that amuses me in bookshops, the discount books bin.
“Seventy-five percent off” said the sign, beckoning me to come over and check out the crap in the bin. I don’t want to make up a figure as it sounds wanky, but nearly every time I look in a discount bin at a bookstore, the stuff that’s in there is in there for a reason.
Tonight’s offering: Biography of Mark Waugh, an Australian test cricketer I couldn’t give a shit about, and seemingly the general populace too. Another title that caught my attention was the Hardy Boyz; it quickly reminded me of those halcyon days as a kid, spent cosily curled up with those schoolboy detective novels so popular back then. But without even getting my potentially incriminating fingerprints on the cover, I realized it was some boxing crap.
The final title I almost thought about chuckling at was something like, “How steam trains really work,” as if the pages of said book contained some sort of expose whose ‘steamy’ secrets had been kept confined by those railway bureaucracies all those years. I guess then that maybe they actually didn’t use steam to power them but some sort of alien device, but everyone was deceived by the site of sweaty workers shoveling coal into a furnace. Riveting shit I’m sure, and I can tell Borders wants people to have the opportunity to find out these steam train secrets too, by taking 75% off the price. I didn’t have any money so I didn’t get a copy though.
As I kept walking around I found one thing that amuses me in bookshops, the discount books bin.
“Seventy-five percent off” said the sign, beckoning me to come over and check out the crap in the bin. I don’t want to make up a figure as it sounds wanky, but nearly every time I look in a discount bin at a bookstore, the stuff that’s in there is in there for a reason.
Tonight’s offering: Biography of Mark Waugh, an Australian test cricketer I couldn’t give a shit about, and seemingly the general populace too. Another title that caught my attention was the Hardy Boyz; it quickly reminded me of those halcyon days as a kid, spent cosily curled up with those schoolboy detective novels so popular back then. But without even getting my potentially incriminating fingerprints on the cover, I realized it was some boxing crap.
The final title I almost thought about chuckling at was something like, “How steam trains really work,” as if the pages of said book contained some sort of expose whose ‘steamy’ secrets had been kept confined by those railway bureaucracies all those years. I guess then that maybe they actually didn’t use steam to power them but some sort of alien device, but everyone was deceived by the site of sweaty workers shoveling coal into a furnace. Riveting shit I’m sure, and I can tell Borders wants people to have the opportunity to find out these steam train secrets too, by taking 75% off the price. I didn’t have any money so I didn’t get a copy though.
