My son and I went to Scarborough Renaissance Faire a couple of weeks ago.  It’s in Waxahatchie, which is south of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.  (Lou Antonelli assures me that “Waxahatchie” means “where the buffalo poop”.)  Since we came in from the west, I stopped at a couple of Half Price Books, one in Burleson and one in Fort Worth.

This past weekend my son was competing at the State Solo and Ensemble contest in Austin.  Austin has five Half Price Books.  I managed to hit four of them, two on the way in and two when I left.  (I didn’t ride on the bus this year and went to visit family when I left, so I went out a different way than I came in.)

I bought more than you see here, a lot more.  (Don’t tell my wife.)  There were plenty of DAW paperbacks with the yellow covers to be had. Unfortunately none were the Lin Carter The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories or the Karl Edward Wagner The Year’s Best Horror Stories.  That was probably a bit too much to hope for.  I’ve got all of Carter’s volumes, but I’m missing some of Wagner’s.  Although speaking of Wagner…

Looky what I found.

Paperbacks weren’t the only things I looked at.  While I was primarily looking for pulpy paperbacks, especially DAW titles, I did peruse the hardcovers and trade paperbacks at all the stores.  There were a few nice finds there, as well, the best of which you can see in the photo on the right.  The title on the lower right is an anthology containing stories by Wagner, Joseph Payne Brennan, and David Morrell.  I have a mass market paperback of this one, but they don’t show up often, so I grabbed the trade paper edition.  The silver book at the upper right is Masques II.  The book in the middle on the left is The Soft Whisper of the Dead by Charles L. Grant.  Next to it is The Definitive Best of the Horror Show.

I’m not going to be buying many books for the next few months, at least not once Howard Days is over.  My son is going to a trumpet camp where he’ll be staying in a hotel in Dallas later in the summer.  I’ll be staying with him and driving him to camp.  During the day, I’ll be at the hotel working on revising lab manuals.  Dallas and the surrounding suburbs have plenty of good used book stores.  I promise to be good.

Now to figure out where I’m going to put all of these…