Free Books!

So, my English class is on the fourth floor of the English building, and I always take the elevator (which, incidentally, my professor warned the class in direst terms is foolish to the extreme because people have gotten stuck in the elevator in the past. But if she thinks I'm going to haul my enormous 3-ton rolling backpack up four flights of stairs and down again, she is mistaken!). Once out of the elevator, I come to a hallway, and then to my classroom.

In this hallway are three bookcases, each stretching taller than me. And they are simply overflowing with old, thick books of varying degrees of wear.

Every time I went to class, I would slow down to admire the books and wonder if they were available to be read, or put there for storage or something of that nature. But, typical me, I also kept forgetting to ask my professor about it.

Well, I asked her yesterday. Her response?

"Oh, those are just old books nobody wants. It's like a book dump. Take whatever you like, they're all free."

So now I have paperback versions of Othello and Hamlet, an enormous book bound in red cloth which is titled 'A Collection of 18th Century British Literature', a seventy-year-old tiny hard-cover version of A Comedy of Errors, and the complete works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Admittedly, the last is missing its cover, but since that inevitably happens to any book I love, I do not mind (some of you may know I like Shelley's poetry?). I just carefully taped it up and am now happily reading Prometheus Bound for the first time.

I am still exulting in my good fortune and pitying the sort of people who would throw this kind of literature on the dump heap. Still, good for them; they make people like me very happy.

Oh, and I'm looking forward to my next English class very much now . . .


Gorgeous Pic