Some great books here:

Iwo Jima: Twenty-two first-hand accounts. Very interesting read.

Franco and Hitler: How the war would have been different if Franco had joined the Axis, this is very interesting stuff.

The Last of the Doughboys: More first-hand accounts, but this is from the Great War.

Now, this The World War II Album was a risk, as it looked so familiar, and my list had The World War I Album in my library and was very familiar, but all it would take would be one little typo, a “I” instead of “II” and I’d have a double on my hands. This is why it’s good to sample books from one’s library, as to know the library better. There shouldn’t be books in my library that I am unfamiliar with. But as it turns out, I won this gamble and now I have the two-book set! I have never seen this book before or I would have it already. I actually read the first volume five or ten years ago in its entirety. I don’t pay attention much to authors and book titles, which is not a great habit, but there it is. In any case, I’m really happy with all of these buys.

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This soundtrack was a gamble as it was scratched up more than I usually accept… and it ripped to my computer perfectly. No issues, I listened to the entire thing, expecting some sort of audible errors… nothing! This is great as I really like the soundtrack to these movies and only have one of the five so far (now, two of the five). This is one of those soundtracks that never hits the thrifts, and was only there because it was so scratched that nobody wanted it. I really like Hans Zimmer soundtracks.

This is one of my favorite symphonies, so another rendition of it is a good find.

This Decca / Haitink series of Shostakovich is almost complete. I’m trying to get the releases with this format of cover, and this Decca / Haitink series contains the first copy of Symphony 11 that I bought right after hearing it live, which hooked me.

This is actually two seperate physical releases that I combined into one cover since it’s a complete collection of Dvorak’s symphonies. It’s nice when the entire set is available at the same time as to avoid having to put up with an incomplete set, waiting for that opportunity to come across the missing discs.

This was still in the shrink-wrap! Thibaudet is one of those pianists I am specifically collecting.

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Finding all of these completes my Deutsche Grammophon / Abbado set of Symphonies. I do have to wonder where the missing 3 & 4 and 7 were as I didn’t see it at the thrift I found these at.

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I have been listening to more organ music lately thanks to some orchestral transcriptions, so it was nice to find these. One of them was still in the shrink-wrap, too!

Below is the rest of my finds, all good! It took some time to sort through them all, check them against my list, check the condition… I’d thought they were all full price ($3.00) since they were all together in a plastic tray, but it turns out they were all half-off! The Rachmaninov Symphonies and Schubert Lieder were both three-disk sets that come in custom boxes, and looked to be completely unused!

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After not hitting the thrifts since May, we’ve been at at least two per week as Dad was looking for something in particular. So I can’t not look, and not pick up good finds while I’m there.

Above is a slideshow of all the discs; below are selected discs that are in that slideshow.

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I listed to Li quite a bit back in 2009, but he’s been lost with all of the other pianists I’ve been listening to… there are so many! But I haven’t seen these three albums in a thrift since then. It’s unfortunate because he’s really good. Odd thing is that I can’t locate the other albums by him that I have, which is strange since my library is fairly well organized.

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This was in one of those rare, ideal, quality jewel cases, unlike the normal, cheap, easy-to-break cases that 99.9% of CDs come in. It’s sad that these cases weren’t the standard.

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This guy is quite prolific with his recordings… I’ve never seen these two in a thrift before.

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Shostakovichs’ Eleventh Symphony is my favorite, and adding these two discs to the set makes for a good day. I need to look and see how many of these I have by Haitink. It would be nice to have the entire set.

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Looking forward to listening to this one, apparently it came straight from Japan (Or Korea?)

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I thought I had all of these VoxBox discs, and I have yet to make sure that I don’t have this one. If I lose in picking this up, I’m out a buck-fifty. This is one I’d likely have by now. I do know that I have the re-release, but this one matches the others in the original set.

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How did I not have this one? I thought I had all of Sarah Chang’s releases! Amazing. I probably was waiting for the price to come down back when I originally collected her discs, and this one was too expensive at the time, and got lost in all of the collecting I’ve done since then. That’s all I can think of for as to why I didn’t have it already.

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These guys have so many discs… Happy to find this one, I think it’s a double-disc and only cost what a single disc does, about a buck-fifty.

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I have the first disc of this already, so this was a good find! I’ve been listening to a lot of Bach Transcriptions lately so this works into that playlist really well!

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Thanks to the recording by Anna Vinnitskaya of the Third Concerto, of course I was going to pick this one up. Also a multiple-disc release for the price of one disc!

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I didn’t get this at the thrift, because almost none of Kyle Mills’ books ever end up there. But it is notible for being the last one that I needed to complete the set… after I finish the Brad Thor and Vince Flynn/Kyle Mills books, I’m going to read all of Kyle Mills’ books. I recently did a post on these authors.

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Luckily/Unluckily, I didn’t find too many books over the past three weeks. But these were all good ones, the USS Indianapolis book is nothing but stories from the survivors. The Ambrose book, The Victors, I’d thought I had already, but didn’t. The Romanovs comes at a good time as I just watched a really good documentary on them. High-Tech Warfare is part of a general sort of set that I like because it had great art of the subject matter. Grant: A Biography is only the second book in the house dedictated to President Grant. After seeing the miniseries on him a few years ago, I’ve been wanting to read more about the guy. Breakout is on the famous battle in the Korean War, a subject I have yet to seriously dive into.

I don’t like thrifting; There are hordes of rude people, narrow isles, people in my way (how dare they!), crowded parking lots, (Saturday is half-off day, so it’s packed) traffic, etc.

So why have I been doing it? My dad and I go (went) every week and also stop for lunch at our favorite restaurants, such as Culver’s or the Wishbone. That’s always a good time, and I have to admit, with thrifts, the thrill-of-the-hunt is a big draw, something that helps me deal with all of the annoying things that thrifting inflicts. There are so many good books, cds, and DVD/Blu-ray out there, and one never knows what one will find. Sometimes, there’s nothing, but often, there are some fantastic deals on items I never would have run across anywhere else.

But after maybe about five years of this, (was it longer than that? Maybe?) I’m just out of room. I’ve purchased some fantastic libraries, which is great, but the next step is to start stacking books on the floor. I’ve done that before, and I really don’t like it. Books should be on shelves, not in boxes or stacked on a floor. I already have a few boxes of cds on the floor of my office, which isn’t something that I want going on. But there is literally nowhere else to put them. And every week, I’m getting more in that I have to catalog and sort, and that is time that I’m not using to actually enjoy what I have. This constant thrill-of-the-hunt finally has to come to an end. Which is sad. But my libraries are at a very good place, with plenty of varied options to read, hear, and watch.

It was a good time for a long time, but now we’re just going to go out to lunch and take care of errands on Saturdays. And then home for a quiet Saturday afternoon of reading, instead of dealing with the new acquisitions. I read on Saturdays now, but it’s going to be nice to be doing less at my computer in cataloging new buys when I could be reading on any given quiet Saturday afternoon.

And I will also admit that I very much understand why people pack their houses with collections of stuff; that thrill-of-the-hunt is a lot of fun, but at some point one has to stop and assess where their boundaries should be with collecting.

When I was a kid, I used to have this stack of comics that I would read every day, and when I read the comic on top, I’d transfer it to the bottom, and so on until they rotated back to the top. Every once in a while, I’d get a new stack of comics at the flea market, and that was always a huge deal; my point is that I didn’t have much, but I really used what I had.

And video games back in the day; I didn’t have an Atari, everybody else did. So any time I could get playing a friend’s Atari, Colecovision, Odyssey 2, or Intellivision, that time was gold. When I did get my Atari, the Nintendo was released, and although I could play it all of the time at my cousin’s (good times!), he only had a few games, so we played those over and over, even if we couldn’t get anywhere with them. It’s what we had. And it was a good thing, because we’d have never beaten or eventually enjoy them if we’d been inundated with lots of choices. Again, the point of that story is that one doesn’t have to have a great big library; it’s nice, and there’s nothing wrong with having a good library, but what good is it if you don’t use it? It’s just stuff on a shelf if it’s not used.

Everybody should be reading a book on Saturday afternoons.

Discs from the past month or so.

Here are my finds for the past few weeks. I’m going to stop commenting on every single book since my preferences and interests in each one should be fairly obvious by now.

Brad Thor: Use of Force • Finally! Out of the twenty books Thor has written, I have read fifteen or so of them, and was missing the newer ones… and this is the last of those new ones that I needed! (Only $2.50!) It’s taken forever to find it at a thrift, being a newer book (2017). Now I can finally begin reading the series again, and when I’m done re-reading the first fifteen, I’ll just continue through into the newer ones such as this book. What’s also great is that my Vince Flynn series is in the exact same situation, as far as how many I’ve read before and new ones that I’ll be reading for the first time. These series are great to read and re-read.

Great Photographs of World War II • I have a separate post about how I came across this book…

Picked up a stack of these magazines at the ARC Thrift Store in Arvada; I’ve found other military/history magazines here before, although it isn’t often. This post contains my recent find as well as my previous magazines. I have a subscription to this, which is an expensive choice but one never knows when, or if, that subscriptions’ editions will ever be found at a thrift in the future, and how many years would that take to find, if ever? It is very nice to have one show up in the mail. Back in the day, I would look forward to Newsweek and National Geographic, car and video game magazines; now it’s history magazines which is far more interesting. Most car magazines are super-thin, don’t contain much news and have more and more cars and issues I don’t care about (electric, save-the-world green cars and such). However, when they have cool cars, the photography is amazing and almost worth the subscription price.

Time changes things, and car magazines don’t deliver much car news anymore aside from reviews and comparisons, so much has moved online that the print versions are lacking.

I do believe, and I think it is Road & Track that either moved, or added a big, four-times-a-year publication that is really neat. That’s probably the way print needs to go.

Newsweek has been and became unbelievably more partisan, so much so that it hasn’t been in print form in years. Not sure if it’s even online. It’s eye-opening to read an old one and observe how often they would predict or promote something that didn’t happen or turned out badly. This is an age-old epidemic in media.

National Geographic, while it still has excellent photos and some great articles, is clearly nothing more than a vehicle for social politics today. It is also much thinner than it used to be. They’ve had entire issues dedicated to topics that they wouldn’t have touched not so long ago; so much that I have actually tossed a few issues into the trash, something unthinkable for me to do. It’s not scientific anymore, very one-sided and always pushing agendas as opposed to just delivering on the Society’s mission statement. So even at only thirteen dollars a year with access to the entire archive that covers more than 100 years, I let this go. Their History magazine, however, is pretty good and I still subscribe to that.

Video game magazines, I haven’t had a subscription since the late 1990’s. At one point I let almost all of my copies go as I had no room and didn’t play games anymore, but they were fun reading for years.

In any case, finding a stack of old history magazines is good fun!