Several libraries here have a perpetual book sale in one corner of the library. One library has no books over $1.50, the other library has books up to $5 for hardbacks. Not a lot of what you're looking for, but you never know what will come up.

The following link is for book sales in different states:

https://www.booksalefinder.com/

I have been dipping out of "chick lit" for years, and I like some, but most leave me cold. I did like Beach Read.

African American men were not the only minorities to be referred to by the demeaning "boy": there were Asian "houseboys," for example, who could be in their 50s or 60s and older than their employers.

Foyles is the one I've heard of.

Too bad you are not going to Hay-on-Wye! I hear the town is known for its bookshops.

Bigotry toward minority groups was sadly common in those days. It's an Italian organ grinder who tries to kidnap Phronsie in The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew.

It was very common then for women that age to marry older men. Since women were supposed to be married and raise children, they needed to be young and healthy, but, if they wanted to live well and have a nice home and clothing and send their kids to good schools they had to marry an older man who was "established" in business and could make a good salary. Ten and fifteen year age gaps were not uncommon.

It's very common in the rom-com genre, I've noticed. You get one chapter from one protagonist and then the next from the other.

You don't want to see my to-be-read piles. There are currently 11, and some of them are nearly as tall as me.

It was a best-seller for a while. Very appealing to people who collect old books. There's also a sequel, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, where Helene finally gets to visit London, sees where Marks & Co. used to be, and meets Frank's family. Anne Bancroft plays Helene in the film, which I love.

Yes. Poor children were especially hard hit because "they were a burden" on the community. Being an orphan meant you had no relatives to take care of you, which probably meant your parents had been "bad persons" (they still believed in "bad blood" back then, and if your father or mother was a thief or a liar, you would be, too, not because of example, but because "it ran in your blood").

Only 20-30? Some of my TBR piles are nearly as tall as me. And there's eight or nine of them.

E-books can be very expensive.

If you can somehow arrange transportation once in a while to somewhere that has a library when they have a book sale (like Uber, a bus, a cab), library book sales are usually very inexpensive. And if you buy a book for a dollar, it won't bother you if you get rid of it. (You can also donate the books you accumulate back to the library to sell again.) You can also get cheap books at Goodwill or a thrift shop. Again, you'd have to arrange for transportation, though.

There is a website booksalefinder dot com which helps you find book sales. (I hope it isn't against the rules to post that. Everyone should know this site!)

This looks a lot like the book list PBS had, except for Mein Kampf and a couple of others.

I've been moving away from cozy mysteries for this very reason. I'm tired of the same old whitebread attractive female protagonist who is all of a sudden romancing the sexy cop/sheriff/private eye--or heck, anyone else in the book.

We have several thousand--I have no idea. Hubby thinks it's 10K, but I don't think it's that many, but he does have many small military books that are like 60 pages each devoted to uniforms, or planes, or other military subjects--there could be 10K. He mostly has SF and nonfic military. I think I have mostly mystery and US/European history. We also have space books, animal books, nearly one Ikea "Billy" filled with biographies (two shelves of travel at the bottom), linguistic books, two bookcases just full of children's books, a bookcase and a half of just Christmas books, a bookcase full of bound issues of "St. Nicholas" magazines, etc.

The library doesn't have most of the books I read.

In fact the library seems to have fewer and fewer books every time I go to it, and more computers. When I first moved to this county 30 years ago, the main library had wooden shelving way over my head and almost every shelf was stuffed with books. Now there are fewer, metal shelves, they are not even six feet high, and if each shelf is 1/3 full, that's a lot. Many of the shelves have only four or five books on them.

Mary Stewart's Merlin trilogy

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

A Christmas Carol

and probably 20-30 other books.

Mostly comfort reading.

I don't find that's enough to throw me out of a story. The thing that usually gets me are historical errors. Like the otherwise great mystery story set in 1930s NYC where a police officer calls an unmarried woman "Ms." THREE times. And later the protagonist and her boyfriend are dancing to a song written in 1950.

Or the mystery set in Gold Rush-era Alaska where the protagonist talked about someone being "in her personal space."

After those a small town with multiple bookstores is small potatoes.

All the time! I love reading my childhood favorites and remember how I felt when I read them. I found a book as an adult that I asked my mom for when I was in elementary school--it was in the school library--but it was out of print, so she couldn't get it. When I re-read it I recalled how much I loved it, and the smell of the school, and even what the library looked like, and also that the book is what prompted my interest in dog obedience trials.

There used to be a site called Loganberry Books where there was a hive mind of readers who helped people find out the title of books. They never could find the books my husband was interested in, but it was worth a try.

Could the illustrator have been Arthur Rackham? He did fairy tales back when they did not expurgate them for children, and his illustrations were wonderful.

I remember reading that in school in the early 70s. It's one of the stories from The Martian Chronicles.

I love his book Dandelion Wine.