Secondhand tomes

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"You don't have much of an arts selection," complained a man in a button-down shirt to Romulus Stefanut, AM'06, a Div School PhD student working at the library this summer. "We used to," he answered. On the second day of the Reg's duplicate-book sale, the arts and cinema section already was down to a half-dozen volumes. If the customer had been looking for religion or psychology books, he'd have been in luck: those sections took up an aisle each.

The library still had some gems in stock for its $2-hardcover, $1-paperback sale. John Updike's Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit Redux, as well as the 1978–79 volume of Critical Inquiry, remained in the literature section, and several editions of Sweet's English Grammar, one from 1892, sat on the linguistics shelf.

Most books had frayed pages and ripping bindings, and customers flipped through them gingerly. Stefanut, meanwhile, continues to stock the shelves this week and next, as librarians wheel in two or three hand trucks a day. Sale hours this week are 9 a.m.–12:30 p.m. and 1:30–4:30 p.m. Next week's hours are mornings only.

A.B.P.

Photo: A customer scans library finds while Stefanut stocks the shelves.

June 6, 2007