You never know what you'll find in the "FREE" boxes

Saturday, Joan, Ashar and I attended a homeschooling association curriculum fair here in York County. The immense basement gymnasium at Grace Fellowship was split between professional vendors hawking their top-of-the-line homeschooling materials and local folks selling their used books and educational materials for modest prices.

We spent a good deal of time with the vendors of used materials. Joan got some terrific deals that helped kick off a neat timeline project for Ashar.

One woman and her daughter had a long table full of used books. For $1.50, I picked up the following:

• Three paperbacks from The Three Investigators series¹, which was my favorite mystery/adventure series during middle school.
• The Dover Thrift Editions paperback of "Great Ghost Stories," which features tales by Amelia Edwards, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker and M. R. James, among others.
• An well-worn and well-loved 1966 ex-library hardcover of "Round the World Fairy Tales." The book features 36 tales -- from Japan, India, Russia, Norway, Africa, Australia, the Native Americans and more -- retold by Amabel Williams-Ellis.² Baba Yaga, Puss in Boots, Anansi, and Odysseus can all be found within the book's pages. William Stobbs³ is the book's illustrator.

But what's even better than cheap stuff? Free stuff!

Many of the vendors of used materials had a cardboard box under their table labeled "FREE." Treasure chests for ephemera fans! When stuff gets to the point where it's too old, too decrepit or too "uninteresting" for someone to sell, then it's perfectly aged for Papergreat.

I found some nifty free stuff for Ashar, including a sheet of international stickers, a small book about the White House and a National Geographic map of Mount Everest. I also found some Supreme Court justice biography cards of Earl Warren, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Sandra Day O'Connor that were produced by Grolier in the mid-1990s.

Also in a "FREE" box was "Skit Hits," a staplebound paperback published in 1952 by Helen and Larry Eisenberg of Nashville, Tennessee. The 64-page book, which features illustrations by Blanche Sloan, is filled with ideas and scripts for skits (also called stunts). Here's an excerpt from the introduction:

"In stunts we depart from Shakespeare a little. ... Stunts give youth and adults a chance for the imagination and sense of fantasy that they may have lost or discarded as being 'childish.' A truly good stunt if not childish, but childful, undertaken in the spirit of play, which is child-like. Stunts can give a wonderful opportunity for people to show creativity and ingenuity. They can show how clever and cute they are! ... The ugly duckling or the shy person becomes a princess or a Great Detective."

It's a really neat old book and a fascinating snapshot of what people did for entertainment 60 years ago.

And now, on to the coolest thing I found in one of the "FREE" boxes. (Warning: You might not agree with me on this.)

Inside one of the giveaway boxes was a long, skinny envelope with these words written at the top:

Dental X-Rays!

As promised, the envelope was was filled with dozens of tiny X-rays (1⅝ inches wide by 1⅛ inches tall) of people's teeth.

Here's a sampling:

Pretty cool, huh? So, if you ever find yourself in need of some dental X-rays, you know who you can get in touch with!

Footnotes
1. The Three Investigators are Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews. In Germany -- where they are almost as popular as David Hasselhoff -- their names are Justus Jonas, Peter Shaw and Bob Andrews. The series, in fact, is so popular in Germany that it has spawned its own original novels and a series of at least 140 radio dramas.
2. Amabel Williams-Ellis' husband was Sir Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis, a Welsh architect who was best known for creating the tourist village of Portmeirion in North Wales. Portmeirion was used to film the exteriors for "The Prisoner" in the late 1960s.
3. William Stobbs illustrated at least three Ruth Manning-Sanders books -- "A Bundle of Ballads," "Gianni and the Ogre" and "Scottish Folk Tales."