February 4- Russell Books

You win some, you lose some. A few boxes of books have been languishing in the garage for the last three years or so, and this week I went through them. Some went to the office; some came out of storage; some stayed in storage; and others made the ultimate sacrifice.

Yep, I turned them into store credit at Russell Books, an exchange that so far has netted me:

• Keith Basso, Portraits of the "The Whiteman": Linguistic Play and Cultural Symbols among the Western Apache ($8: a brilliant study of one thread of Apache humour, the mocking of white folks through mimicry)
• Michael Frome, Chronicling the West: Thirty Years of Environmental Writing ($7: occasional articles from numerous sources, many of them hard now to locate)
• Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth Century ($8: popular environmentalism, practical knowledge, scientific conservationism - great stuff, in an enormously valuable book of which Tina Loo ought to be very proud).

And with the amount of credit left over, some other day will bring other half-dozen or so books. Just what my newly alphabetized but still groaning office bookshelves were looking for.