I did my research before leaving for the Scrabble Players Championship in South Bend and wrote down the names of three second-hand bookstores located there. I was able to visit two of them, both of which were within walking distance of our hotel, the Courtyard Marriott. On our first night in South Bend Mark and I took a walk around the city after dinner and we stumbled across one of them, Griffon Bookstore. It was closed but I returned the following morning. As I am a fan of the movie Greed, I was pleased to find two editions of the novel McTeague by Frank Norris for sale. The movie was based on this book. I bought one of them: of its 414 pages, 243 were devoted to the novel itself while the remainder was comprised of essays, criticism and even a few stills from the movie:

The second bookstore was Erasmus Books and I walked there with Dave Postal. Mark met us there later. At first Dave and I walked right past the address. We had recorded it correctly, but the address corresponded to a private house. There was no sign outside to say that this was the bookstore, and since a car was in the driveway it didn’t seem inviting to squeeze past it and the shrubbery to take a closer look. I did anyway, and noticed the store sign on the side door. I will bet that many people would not have bothered to venture that far, and sadly come to the conclusion that the address must be wrong or the store had relocated.
Inside was a bibliomaniac’s hoarder house. Piles upon piles of books in front of the stacks do not appeal to customers who will have to do manual labour in order to get a closer look at things. I gravitate to the languages section first whenever I go to a second-hand bookstore and found a slim pamplet (31 pages) The Death of Cornish (1600-1800) by P. A. S. Pool:

I had browsed the on-line store at the Andy Warhol Museum before I left home so I knew what to look for as I had wanted to spend as much time as possible in the museum. My attention was drawn to The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné 1963-1965 Volume 2, a gargantuan hardcover of 512 pages (published in 2021) that seemed as heavy as a sack of bricks. Three years of Warhol’s film output were analyzed in excruciating detail, reel by reel. Most of Warhol’s films during these years were in black-and-white and the book is generous in including still frames from movies that have acquired mythical status and also stills from his unfinished films. Imagine thirty pages on Batman Dracula alone. I read about all the films I had seen and not seen, and I was shaking my head in wonder at the dozens of films that were wholly unknown to me.
Over forty years ago when I discovered Warhol’s films I was captivated by the book Andy Warhol by John Coplans (published in 1970). In the book a single paragraph was devoted to each film, and I was in awe of such information, as minimal as it was. However since Warhol’s death his filmography has been pored over, viewed and catalogued. I still smirk when I read these lines by Jonas Mekas in the Coplans book: “A number of films are not listed because nobody could agree on either their whereabouts or their very existence. The people at The Factory Film Library (if I may dare call it by that name) are totally disorganized, bless them.”. Warhol had to die in order for anyone to put his film library into a navigable state of order.
Two copies of the weighty catalogue were on the open shelves, one for display and the other still sealed. The sealed copy however was unfortunately not in pristine condition as its cover was pockmarked and one corner was badly dented. I will not buy a new book in such a sorry state so I asked the clerk to see if others were in stock in better condition. She obliged by checking the store inventory and brought me an untarnished sealed copy from a back room:

I also picked up Warhol Headlines, a large paperback from 2011 that analyzed the print media and its influence on Warhol’s work. Magazines, tabloid newspapers and other advertising media were presented, some in their original states, which makes me think that these print items were from Warhol’s own collection, since some of the newspaper articles reproduced were now brittle and yellowing:

Addendum:
On our drive to South Bend Mark and I stopped in Ann Arbor, Michigan. One bookstore I visited was Dawn Treader Books, and although I didn’t buy anything there, I did spend some time mulling over one particular book, Islands of the Manitou by Kathryne Belden Ashley. The cover grabbed my attention immediately, as I recognized the island on the right as Cockburn Island, which lies to the west of Manitoulin. I have long wanted to visit Cockburn, and on a visit to Manitoulin almost twenty years ago with a friend of mine, Kirsti Hirvi, we drove to the far west, past Meldrum Bay, to take a look at it. This book, published in 1978, was a history of these islands in Georgian Bay: St. Joseph Island is Canadian, Drummond is American, and Cockburn was still called Little Manitou when Ashley chose the cover art. The author covered their history from the first indigenous occupants to European colonization, with chapters on the War of 1812, delineating the border, treaties with the First Nations and the arrival of Mormons on Drummond. I was taken by two chapter titles: The Finns & Miss Maggie Walz and The Finns of Drummond Island.
In spite of my obvious interest in the book and its low price ($7.50) I decided not to buy it. I regretted that decision days later while we were in South Bend. Since I knew we were not going home via the same route, I wrote to the store to ask if the book was still in stock and if they would mail it to me. Postal charges to mail the book to Canada were so much more expensive than having the book mailed within the US, so I contacted a Scrabble friend, Judy, who lives in Pennsylvania to ask her if she would accept the delivery. The October tournament in Lake George, New York saw dozens of players in attendance, among them Judy as well as some Mississauga Scrabble Club players. I asked her to give the book to a local player who would then give it to me. I picked it up this past Monday, October 21. I did not mind waiting three months for it as it saved me a lot of money in postage: it cost less than $5 (US) to mail it from Michigan to Pennsylvania. I still shake my head wondering how I could have passed up such a book on these Georgian Bay islands. When I checked for it at other on-line retailers, the cheapest price was already double the Dawn Treader price. And the book I got was in pristine condition and also autographed:
