With a heavy load of papers and projects in the offing, a friend and I did the only thing two self-respecting college students can do on a rainy Saturday. We hopped on the train and wandered into every used book store we could find.
One was Mecca. While it didn’t have any Roald Dahl collections, it was two floors of awesome. The size of a small box book store, everything was neat, clean, and organized. Fiction, music, art, military history, civilian history…ah! Nearly anything one could want to read! Giddy, we strolled through the stacks, picking up anything that caught our eyes. Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, Dumas…the fiction section alone was enough to send any reader into fits of delight.
We ventured upstairs, picking through books of art, biographies (no luck on the Ogilvy memoir I’ve been keeping an eye out for) and military history.
I nearly hugged the bookcase labelled “aviation” and tore through the WWII shelves. What should I find hidden among the books on the European theatre land battles but a book about Spitfire pilots? Though this book (The Few by Alex Kershaw) is about American pilots in the RAF, research is research. So much of my story is up in the air (no pun intended), and dependent on my discoveries, I figured any little bit can help.
Ned Wolfe 
Sounds like fun. If I had a job and thus could afford to feed that particular monkey on my back, I’d wish that my wife and I had been there with you.
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Nothing like a good used book store, is there? I know what you mean. One of the things I use very often for reference facts is the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I wanted to secure every edition of the Britannica book of the year from 1938 when that title first came into production, until the most recent issue in 2009. My source was eBay and 3 or 4 other old book web sites. I managed to get the majority at under $5.00 each. The ones in the 30s and the WWII years were a bit more expensive but still under $20. These have given me a wealth of background information on more subjects they you could name. And, since the material comes in the year it took place, the articles are more up to date than they would be in a new edition of Britannica. They’re longer also. I acquired the Sience and Future and Medicine year books as well, and in the same price range. Can’t beat it!
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