January Sales

are usually rubbish.  The only one I've been to this year started today: the Cambridge University Press Bookshop Sale (now in the old Past Times store on Green Street) ...  Bargain prices (£3 for every pbk, £7 for every hbk; cash payment only) and new stock coming every day for the next week or so.  What did I find?  Not much.  I bought the new edition of Reading Greek, because I haven't ever really felt like paying full price for it, and nothing else.

That's not to say that everyone was so restrained.  I was there for about ten minutes.  At least half of the crowd in there (you can't really see the fog on the windows in the photo, but it was really steamy...) were lugging piles of a dozen volumes each.  It was, as a friend has just remarked to me, like the academic version of the Next clothing store's Boxing Day Sale: a bit of a feeding frenzy.  The commonest tactic was to grab as many volumes as possible off the shelves to be squirreled away and sorted in a corner, just in case someone else got them in the meantime.

I might go back later in the week when the stock is refreshed and try again.  After all, CUP books are so monstrously expensive that it would be mad not to.  But then again, I do have a lot of books already and I do remember when a poor and needy graduate student thinking it a bit rich that lecturers who could more or less afford to buy books when not in the sale snapped up stuff that I couldn't otherwise afford...