I did end up going to Bangor yesterday and was cheered by my new accumulation of books from Lippincott's and the Goodwill. Lippincott's is a real used-book store, with cat and comfortable chairs and expensive bindings, but I happily only spent $3 there, on this fine ratty paperback:

Adolescent Boys of East London, by Peter Wilmot, 1966

It is a sociological study and contains many entertaining case descriptions, as in:

The interview took place in the living-room, which had a wide view over the chimney-pots and the tiny workshops in the foreground to more tall blocks and beyond to the River Thames. The room was large and dustless, with an enamel and chrome electric heater filling the fireplace. Loose covers in a broad autumn-leaf print were smoothed carefully over the chairs and sofa, and various ornaments--a miniature ship's wheel enclosing a thermometer, a cruet set labelled "A Present from Herne Bay," a felt scotch terrier dressed in a tartan kilt--were arranged along the mantlepiece. A framed studio portrait of Bryan [the teenage boy], taken about three years earlier, stood beneath a table lamp on the television set.

At the Goodwill I acquired

* Contes pour les enfants et les parents 2, par Jakob et Wilhelm Grimm, because I know these stories like I dreamed them myself so translating has got to be easy, 99 cents

*a Roumanian-English dictionary, a language I know nothing about, in which caracuda translates as "bastard-carp," $1.99

*Leopardi: Poems and Prose because Leopardi is famous and Italian, even though the book itself looks like it got dropped in the bathtub, 99 cents

*American Pastoral, by Philip Roth, because I am an idiot, $1.99

*Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, ed. LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, 1968, which is full of poets I've never heard of and has a bad-ass author photo, $1.99