ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, September 30, 1996 TAG: 9609300084
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: FINCASTLE
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
IT WAS THE LITERARY EQUIVALENT of a flea market Sunday at the Fincastle branch of the Botetourt County Public Library.
Everybody was finding great deals at the used-book sale Sunday afternoon at the 28th annual Historic Fincastle Festival.
After all, everything was marked down to a buck a box. And it didn't matter how big the box was.
But the best deal went to the man who decided to fish an old Popular Mechanics out of the trash can. It had been discarded there because it was soggy from all the rain the day before.
He opened it up and found a surprise inside.
"Would you believe he found $50?" said Paige Ware, librarian for the Fincastle branch of the Botetourt County Public Library. "A $50 bill."
But there were plenty of other great finds at the book fair, which was expected to bring in about $1,000 to benefit the public library.
At 4 p.m., you could still pick up, at the buck-a-box rate, a gold mine of books: W.P. Kinsella's "Shoeless Joe," Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s "Cat's Cradle," "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," "The Portable Graham Greene," even "Bart Starr: The Cool Quarterback."
"It's like a treasure hunt - just to see what you can find," said Cathy Henderson, a Fincastle resident who was bent over the boxes and boxes of books.
Henderson braved the rain two times on Saturday to check out the book sale. She bought a half dozen books, and her 11-year-old daughter found No.7 in the series of "Readers Digest's Best Loved Books for Young Readers" that they've been collecting.
Then on Sunday afternoon, with the sun beaming and the prices marked down, Henderson was back for more. She was delighted to find a copy of "The Last Tycoon" by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
"Usually I'm looking for the specialty books you can't find elsewhere," Henderson said. "I can read a little bit of German, so I picked up some books in German."
The Feazell family came all the way from Huddleston to pick through the books.
Ali Feazell, 4, had picked up a "Sidney the Elephant Coloring Book" and her sister Leah, 7, had latched onto a Golden Book Encyclopedia, Book 5 ("Dauguerreotype to Epiphyte").
"I don't think there's anything like picking up a book - touching it, reading it," said their mother, Constance Feazell. "If you start them out young on books, they have a lifeline of interest in them."
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS/Staff. 1. Sarah Mooney (above), 7,by CNBof Cloverdale, holds up a book she found Sunday at the Historic
Fincastle Festival. Each box of books was being sold for $1 each. 2.
(At right) Paul Rice of Salem strikes a pose in his 2nd Virginia
Cavalry Company uniform, which he donned for the festival. 3. Ali
Feazell (left), 4, and her sister, Leah, 7, both of Huddleston, pore
over books Sunday at the festival. color.