5 favorite off-center books found at the thrift store

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If Central Pennsylvania is home to anything in abundance—besides tattoo parlors and tanning salons, that is—it’s thrift shops. And in every thrift shop, somewhere tucked behind the linens, glassware and racks of mom jeans, is a slightly heaving shelf filled with books, books and more books.

Last year’s best-selling murder mysteries? Check. An entire collection of The Baby-Sitter’s Club for 49 cents each? Yup. Almost every Dr. Oz and Oprah book, some with endearing and encouraging hand-written notes in the liner pages? You know it.

And then there are the books you’d never normally buy…not at full price, anyway. These are the books I love. Those weird, oddball and slightly off-center titles that make you wonder whether some publishers start happy hour right after breakfast.

In that case, thank goodness for bourbon with pancakes. Without it, I’m not sure some of my favorite finds would have ever made it to print. Here’s a sampling of treasures I’ve recently dug up.

Rip Van Winkle & The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Iriving

Maybe not a weird title, but this version of Irving’s stories, published in 1974 by Sleepy Hollow Restorations, includes illustrations “designed and etched by Felix O.C. Darley” and colored by Fritz Kredel. And, let me tell you, those illustrations lean toward the creepy. Each of the 12 color plates depicts a variety of mangy dogs and feral kids, men who don’t live life far from a whiskey still, and hard-faced women who look like they’d beat you with a broom if you asked “What’s for dinner, Ma?”

Is this a book for kids? I don’t know. Definitely the kind of book kids will page through to look at the drawings, getting a glimpse of childhoods that had nothing to do with good nutrition, soccer practice or PlayStations.

A Mother’s Survival in an Alien Wilderness by Violet M. Kielczewski

In the 1920s, Violet M. Kielczewski eloped to Manitoba, Canada at age 17—via dogsled, nonetheless—and went on to raise nine children in the wilderness. She birthed the kids in a cabin without the assistance of a doctor or midwife. She learned to tan deer hides and make buckskin shirts for clothing for her children. To say Kielczewski’s children were “free range” is to make Lenore Skenazy look like a helicopter mom.

I took a break midway through this book to chop wood and learn to skin squirrels. This is the book you read when you feel like life is tough because your new dishwasher won’t be delivered until next week.

Unmentionables by Robert Cortez Holliday, 1933

For 298 pages, author Robert Cortes Holliday presents his research on gotchies, brassieres and crinolines in language as flouncy as a pair of ruffle-bottom pantaloons. He’s also a bit perverted.

“The time will come, it is to be hoped,” writes Holliday in the introduction, “when there will be a Chair of Ladies’ Underwear in every well-regulated American University….Girls in school today and even most enlightened young women in our most flossy women’s colleges have little to no idea, historically speaking, of what the thing are that they first put on when dressing.”

Maybe he has a point. But probably not. In either case, morbid curiosity propelled me through several chapters of this book. 1933, I hardly knew ye.

The World’s Greatest Letters from Simon and Schuster, Inc., copyright 1940

This is a great book to replace your Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader. Some of my favorite letters are from Leonardo Da Vinci asking the Duke of Milan for a job (“I can make a kind of cannon which is light and easy of transport, with which to hurl small stones….”); William James writing to his students because he has “omitted the deepest principle of human nature from his textbook on psychology” (Whoops!); and, Benjamin Franklin writing to a friend and listing all the reasons to take an older woman as a mistress (“8^th & lastly. They are so grateful!!!”)

Really, Benjamin Frankly was a bit of a jerk.

The Hodgepodge Book collected by Duncan Emrich

Today’s fairy tales are all but scrubbed clean of Grimm’s dismembered arms and poked-out eyeballs. Mother Goose’s Old Woman no longer whips her kids before sending them to bed in a shoe, half starved.

But, forgive me…I grew up in the 1970s. And Emrich’s Hodgepodge Book is a sentimental, if somewhat eye-opening, trip down memory lane to a time when kids recited rhymes about spitting tobacco juice or dressing in rabbit skins, and death was not a topic anyone shied away from.

Songs, folklore, myths and legends…back when I was a kid, we didn’t have Snopes to tell us it’s not really bad luck to start walking with your left foot or to not hold your breath when driving by a cemetery. My kids think my childhood was ridiculous. I think we were just creative in ways that didn’t involve screens.

Either way, The Hodgepodge Book was an amazing find. And at $1, the price was perfect.