buying the library

Found via things magazine - you can buy all 1,082 titles of the Penguin Classics Library from Amazon.com. For the low price of 7,989 and a half USA Lucky Bucks! Shipping, quite generously, is free, although I wonder what would happen if I were to place an order from here in Canada (Update: I read the fine print, and the answer is Nothing. They won't ship this big bag o' books to the 51st State. Honestly, what's the point of NAFTA if we can't get 1,000 paperbacks delivered free from a warehouse in Denver or Washington or wherever?). Overall you save over $5,300, which is good incentive not to go down to your local Bookalomart and pick them up there.

This is not an offer for people who just love books. This is something for lovers of excess, for people who strip naked and roll around in outrageous units of measurement. Witness this bit of purchasing porn from someone who actually bought all 1,000+:

This is an orgy for a book-lover. I have had a wonderful time from the moment I placed the order. They arrived in 25 boxes shrink-wrapped on a wooden pallet, over 750 lbs. of books. It took about twelve hours to unpack them, check them off the packing list (one for each box), and then check them off the list we downloaded from Amazon.com. They take up about 77 linear feet.

Note the barely repressed glee, the careful teasing out of details - the checking off of two lists, just to verify it all. I keep on imagining the cutting and tearing of plastic, the mounds of paper and wrap, and the smell of all those new paperbacks.

Damn.