Yesterday

Yesterday, I went into one of the local used bookstores, Books of Yesterday, and delved into their dungeonlike basement, where half the books are just lying around in towerlike stacks or unsorted on big shelves behind the desk I never see anyone at. In the back corner, they keep their fantasy books. I saw a copy of R.E. Howard's King Kull stories, but the book had mold in several places, and I'm not about to pay five bucks for a moldy book. I also found an Ace paperback edition of Fritz Leiber's Swords and Deviltry. Wikipedia says Fafhrd amd Gray Mouser is one of the seminal swords and sorcery series. The only other time I remember reading about Gray Mouser is when he dueled Zorro way way back as a joke in InQuest magazine. The store had two copies of the book. One had a laminated cover, and they wanted more than ten bucks for it. The book cost 1.25 in 1973. The other, the one I bought, was five bucks. It has a page loose and several pages torn, so I was going to try to talk them down, but my nemesis at the register beat me to the punch.

When they say Neanderthals would fit in with modern men, I wouldn't be too sure. This guy had a brow ridge that would do a silverback proud. He barely spoke three words to me, didn't say hello when I did, and literally threw my credit card onto the counter when he was done swiping it. Since I was worrying about whether I was going to get brained by a stone-headed club, I didn't have the audacity to question him about the quality of his product. And so I walked out, five bucks plus tax poorer, but with a book that, according to the back cover, promises "the greatest heroes in the annals of fantasy." Can't go wrong there, now can ya?