Stabbing Incident Leads, Oddly, To Alley Book Salvage...

Through the wondrous workings of chaos, a fatal stabbing on Dupont Ave. N. somehow led to the salvage and sale of good quality discarded books...

I was driving through the alley near the "stabbing house" with my friend, looking to see if any kind of memorial had popped up, as these things so often do. We weren't sure at that time where, precisely, the stabbing took place (it seems as though it was inside 3823 Dupont Ave. N. itself) so we thought the alley might be a good place to check.

Lo and behold. Books! Books thrown away in the alley at a nearby house, neatly tied up with twine. A dozen bundles. The books and the way they were set out, arranged, allowed the books to speak. And what they were saying was, "Take me! Take me!"

We threw the books in the trunk of the car and called my friend Karl, who makes a living off salvaged books which he obtains from auctions and, well, dumpsters. Karl paid us 40 bucks cash, but we didn't even give Karl all the books. It turns out some of the books were study guides from the Navy Academy in the early 1970s and happened to be THE EXACT SAME KIND OF COURSES which my friend's dad had taken only a few years earlier at the same academy. My friend kept those books as a kind of keepsake-once-removed of her own father.

In the bottom photo, I pose with a bundle that shows the odd juxtaposition of books: stuff about how to relate to women along with a war strategy guide. I don't know who the owner of the books was (we suspect he died) but I think he was my kind of guy.

Well, except for the Navy part, of course.

To learn more about how to make money and have lots of fun through dumpster diving, check out the two books I've authored:

The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving and Dumpster Diving, The Advanced Course, by John Hoffman.