[Found Items] Thrift Store Swords and Starships!

OK. I need to brag.

On a whim I stopped by the local thrift store on the way home tonight. Occasionally they'll have bags of Lego bricks (I've found a few bags of miscellaneous pieces; my son found an entire 10" tall Bionicle warrior once...and most recently an Imperial TIE Defender...missing only one piece and the pilot) or perfectly serviceable Nerf dart guns. I rarely look at the book section because it's dominated with either Stephen King titles that I already have or Harlequin romances.

Tonight? No Lego bricks, although there was a large bag of fake MegaBlok knock-offs that I passed over. Decided to wander through the books and videos, hoping to find a copy of Labyrinth somewhere. No luck on that, but the minuscule Sci-Fi/Fantasy section had a bit of a treasure.

Picked up all six of these titles for a total of $7.50, including tax. Books 1–3 of the Mageworld Saga by Debra Doyle & James D. McDonald and the three Books of the Sword by Fred Saberhagen.

Now, I've had the Mageworld Saga for years, and found copies of the first two Books of the Sword a couple years ago at a Convention. My Mageworld copies are pretty ragged, even with as careful as I am with books, they've been read and re-read—They're quite well-loved, actually. And my Saberhagens saw much better days years before I picked them up. They're pretty ragged; I only picked them up because I'd been looking for them for a couple years.

I wanted secondary copies of these, of course. But even better—aside from the price—was the fact that these 6 books are pristine. They don't look like they've ever been opened; admittedly, The First Book of Swords has a bit of a spine-crease and the front cover of The Second Book of Swords has some ink transfer on it. Apparently, a National Geographic Society membership card from 1990 (which was stuck to the cover) will adhere to—and the ink transfer to—a book cover if left pressed against it long enough.

If you've never read the Mageworld Saga, I'd highly recommend it. A ripping good space opera series, with a good bit of action and a nice helping of magic added in...good stuff. The Saberhagen also comes highly recommended; I enjoyed the first book and the others have been working their way to the top of my "To Read" pile.

This just five days after getting a neat little haul from a downtown used book store, the largest one in the state. Dropped in with my wife while walking to my office holiday party (yeah, a post-New Year's Christmas party). It's a dangerous place, because I could literally spend hundreds of dollars there if I was allowed to do so.

I've always wanted to read Asprin's "Myth" books and was pleasantly surprised to find a 2-in-1 copy. The Face of a Stranger is a great Victorian mystery (an English detective wakes up in the hospital with a bad case of amnesia, and must discover his own identity while solving an important case involving the nobility). And a neat-looking little mystery from Isaac Asimov that I'm looking forward to reading.

All told, I'm pleased with my finds this past week; it's been a long time since I've been quite so lucky with great books for my library.

And just so I don't run afoul of the Joesky tax, here's a quick little random d20 table of books (and things stuck inside them) that you might find in that mage's dusty old library—hooks and idea germs for encounters, adventures, or campaigns:

d20 Roll	Title
1	The Everyday Application of Novel Divination
2	The Axe: A Tutorial
3	Heretics Opposing the Fire God
4	The Storm God's Invocations
5	The Minor Powers of the Great Traveling Gods
6	The Wonderful Stories of the Mysterious Plant God
7	An Expose of the Theocratic Earldom's Early Pirates
8	Sleeping Patterns of the Bugbear
9	The Trident: A Tutorial to Maintenance
10	The Subtle Truths of the Sky God
11	A Treatise of Thaumaturgy
12	Legendary Warlords
13	Virtues of the Revenge Gods
14	Hunting Habits of the Basilisk
15	A Magus' Text on Remedial Summoning
16	An Examination of the Kingdom's Cultural Annals
17	A Study of Basic Magical Arts
18	Essential Alchemy
19	Classic Evocations of the Journeyman
20	Theological Crimes in the Empire

Roll d4 times on the following table to find out "What's Inside."

d20 Roll	What's Inside
1-6	Nothing
7	Dog-eared pages marking pages with underlined passages
8	A shopping list written in code
9	Several love letters stuck haphazardly into the book
10	Hand-written notes in the margins totally unrelated to the subject of the book
11	Personal notes in the margins of several concurrent pages warning of a coming doomsday
12	A hand-written dedication in the front of the book
13	Bookmarks (d6) marking pages with errors
14	Triangular scraps of paper with notes in a foreign language
15	A document with a list of dates in the back of the book
16	A list of foreign locations in an archaic language
17	Three scraps of parchment in some kind of code that seem to have no connection
18	A list of birthdays in an archaic tongue secreted in the binding
19	A map of a local castle or keep, including secret doors and passageways
20	A map of a lost city tucked inside the binding