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    Bit to Do

    Fill up your shelves at the Locust Grove Spring Book Sale
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    If Anais Nin had been my mother we would have compared eye liner.  Or so I like to imagine. 

    Kohl around the lash line, water line – smudged at the edges, dirty, sultry – is something I know the two of us could have shared.  A bond.  My bird-like little literary lady-mama.  Absolutely no giggling here, though.  No.  As a mother/daughter pair, Anais Nin and I would have created a velvety black sphere of sinuous bond over eye make-up, over the way to draw a perfect arch into the brow.  Over men.  Velvety black spheres, folks – not carnation pink bubbles.  Anais Nin would have been the kind of mother that does not hold hands.

    Or so I like to imagine.

    And I imagine all this about smoky eyeliner because on the back of my copy of Henry & June is a picture of Anais Nin with her pointed-little-pixie chin cradled in her pointed-little-pixie hands staring at the camera with pointed-pixie eyes rimmed in black – with eyebrows sharp like punctuation.  I was immediately smitten. 

    Hello little she-devil soul, I said to myself.  You are fragile, and I love you, I said to myself.

    I said to myself – standing, blocking up the aisle, spacey, at a used book sale.  In the best Life Moments we are always alone in the world and totally in the way no matter the crowd.  Like the crowd at a used book sale.  I bought a 1986 edition of Henry & June in hardcover with Anais Nin’s eyes on the back.  That book was a dollar. It changed my life. 

    Wouldn’t you also like to meet your soul-parent on a dust jacket?  Let me help you: This weekend marks another round of wheeling, dealing and oodles of good Old-Book-Smell as Locust Grove hosts their annual Spring Used Book Sale, today through Sunday, March 1st – 3rd from 10am to 4:30pm each day. 

    Offering up some 14,000 + used, antiquarian and new titles in all categories, the sale is an easy way to stuff your shelves with a fresh round of histories, biographies, mysteries, cookbooks, fiction, reference, children’s and just about any other genre known to man - as well as CDs, DVDs and audiobooks.  Prices begin at $1 for paperbacks and $2 for most hardcovers, with a special section of individually-priced rare and illustrated books for collectors.  As usual, the gloves come off on Sunday with a $10 last-day-deal for whatever you can fit (stuff greedily) into a bag – or pay half-price on all books. 

    I’ll be there on Sunday.  Really.  Come find me.  It will be easy to pick me out in the crowd.  I’ll probably be spaced-out in an aisle, in the way, scanning all the spines for my mother’s eyes.  Because I gave my copy of Henry & June – my 1986 copy with Anais Nin’s foxy little face – to an attractive man after a little too much gin.  I wanted to change his life.  Now I need a new one.  So that will be me: the tiny spacey person with the obscenely-filled bag, dark hair and – yes, oh yes – much black eyeliner.

    Locust Grove is located at 561 Blankenbaker Lane. 

    Images: Courtesy of Photobucket www.photobucket.com         

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    About Erin Day

    I'm a Louisville native who transplanted home from Las Vegas recently. Don't ask. In my spare time I read a lot of books and drink gin. My soulmate is my 1994 turquoise Ford Ranger - they never made a finer truck. I still totally believe in the Loch Ness Monster. I just want to write for you.

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