So I went book shopping for some classics for my challenge......

I went to a Salvation Army outlet near my home today, on my way home from dropping my youngest son at school today.  It was bitterly cold, and his school bus was an hour late (according to the transportation schedule), which we checked after half an hour of waiting outside. So rather than wait in the cold for another half hour and get sick again, I took him in a taxi to school.  My excuse to get books treat was to stop into the Salvation Army outlet on the way home, and scope out their book section, which sometimes has interesting books.  I never know what I will find there.  I went in saying, "Ok, I need Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson so I can read his Mars trilogy for the Classics challenge.  Oh, and let's see what literary classics are in too."  This is what I came home with:                 

 The steal of the day, for me, the find that made me exclaim and get all excited?  The Dark Imaginings, A collection of Gothic Fantasy, edited by Robert Boyer and Kenneth Zahorski.

                                               
                                           

 I have never seen this book before, and I love, love, love the cover.  There are 17 illustrations inside by James Cagle.  Some of the stories are ones I've never seen before:
Cross Purposes - George MacDonald
Darkness Box - Ursula K LeGuin
The Unholy Grail - Fritz Leiber
The Troll - T.H. White
Lila the Werewolf - Peter Beagle
The Crowd - Ray Bradbury
The Brown Hand - Arthur Conan Doyle

There are 17 stories in total in this collection.  They are the same editors of The Fantastic Imagination (1977), and The Fantastic Imagination 2 (1978), exhibiting the best of fantasy writing for 100 years, both of which I own and have only partially read.  Hmm, maybe I should add these to the fantasy challenge portion......
                    

Actually, I exclaimed over all the books I found today. Madame Bovary!  The Day of the Triffids!  Jack Kerouac!  The Count of Monte Cristo!  The Giant Squid book, which I am going to read while I read Moby Dick!  We, the classic Soviet science fiction novel!   And the Colin Dexter book The Way Through the Woods which Margaret at BooksPlease just reviewed and I don't own among my Morse mysteries. And it was half-price day too, so I can still hunt for Green Mars and feel virtuous in this first week of January.

Now to update my challenge list page......

I love finding books second-hand, especially the hard-to-find and out of print books.