Category Archives: Book Picking

As I mentioned in my previous post, my friend Aaron and I are making a mutual New Year’s Resolution: to stop purchasing books and read the books we already have in our home libraries.

I was going to list just twelve books and go with one a month (I have one full semester left on my Masters degree), but I just started picking books and eventually came up with this list of twenty.

Fiction

• The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
• R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Capek
• Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Non-Fiction

• Ancient-Future Worship by Robert Webber
• The Power to Heal by Francis MacNutt
• The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
• Come, Creator Spirit by Raniero Cantalamessa
• Keeping the Sabbath Wholly by Marva Dawn
• The Christ of the Mount by E. Stanley Jones
• Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright
• Resident Aliens by Hauerwas and Willimon
• The Deeper Journey by Robert Mulholland
• The New Shape of World Christianity by Mark Noll
• Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• Let’s Start with Jesus by Dennis Kinlaw
• Intimacy with the Almighty by Charles Swindoll
• Being White by Harris & Schaupp
• Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton

So that’s it. 20 books. 51 weeks left. 2 friends.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my good friends and I decided on a mutual New Year’s Resolution: to stop purchasing books for an entire year!

Now, I am a regular purveyor of books, especially from amazon.com and an avid book-picker at the local Goodwill, Salvation Army, and rare book stores. The concept behind this resolution though isn’t just a desire to abstain from something (sweets, pop, movies, ect.), but to live differently. The purpose of not purchasing more books (besides running out of shelf space) is to finish reading the many books I already own. My friend and I  plan to read a minimum of one book a month and discus our findings over a warm beverage.

So in the end our hope for 2011 is to spend less, read more, and invest unequivocally in our friendship.

What is a book picker? A book picker is someone who goes to thrift stores, Salvation Army stores, Goodwill stores, garage sales, and rare or used book stores in search for CHEAP books. I am such a person, I am a book picker. Over the course of the past few months, I have really come to enjoy the book hunt with a few of my friends.

There are two purposes to book picking. The first is to collect rare and used (sometimes never read) books to add to your private collection. This is the primary purpose for why I have become such a book picking enthusiast.

For instance I collected a complete set of the original numbering of the Chronicles of Narnia (the original numbering started with the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) for just a few bucks. Another prized set that I collected was a six book set of Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne for $2.75.  The second purpose for being a book picker is to purchase rare and expensive books for a cheap price and then to flip them online for a profit. I’ve only done this on a few occasions and have made enough for all the other books I buy in my book picking endeavors. Overall it is not the chance for profit, but the mystery of what I may find during my visits that keep me going. Today for instance I went to three Goodwill stores and a Salvation Army thrift store near my father-in-laws house in Canton, OH (by-the-way, Ohio Goodwills are a ripoff! They individually price their books to get more profit. In Lexington, KY they only charge .50 a book). Anyways today my favorite buy was a near mint condition 1905 Methodist Hymnal.