One is a complete collection of Guy de Maupassant's short stories, a very thick volume that has no date of publication but does contain an inscription that includes the date "Oct. '39" so it's at least that old. I had a paperback of some de Maupassant, but never a complete collection. The second book is a copy of T. H. White's The Once and Future King, which I previously had in a paperback edition from the 1960s. This hardback is not much older, as the copyright information includes the renewal in 1959, but it is pretty beat up. The previous owner (or owners) must have enjoyed it, as it has obviously been read many times.
The third book is extracts from the Arabian Nights tales, in the rather florid translation by Sir Richard Burton. There are but thirty of the 1,001 tales, which is considerably fewer than in the abridged paperback of a more modern translation I lost in the fire. I believe that the entire Burton version is available on the Internet, though, since it has long since gone into the public domain, so I don't really need this book. It will simply be nice to have a few of the stories in a form I can easily read while lying in bed.
The two modern books I bought include a single-volume edition of the first three novels in the Kay Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell. I've never read any Cornwell before, but her reputation among detective fiction fans is very good, and I believe there are over a dozen novels featuring her fictional forensic pathologist, Kay Scarpetta, so she must be doing something right. We'll see if she can make murders in Richmond, Virginia, as interesting as murders in England. If not, well, I only paid $1.50 for this three-in-one, which, adjusted for inflation, makes them each about as cheap as the penny dreadfuls of the 19th century, so no big loss.
The other modern book I picked up is Larry McMurtry's Duane's Depressed, featuring the characters from his novel The Last Picture Show. This one is the sequel to Texasville, which picked up the characters a couple of decades after the events in the first novel. I had a paperback of Texasville, and I think I can remember it well enough that I won't have any trouble connecting it to this final volume in the series. Of course what I might have trouble doing is finding enough time to read all this stuff I've bought.
It did get uncomfortably hot again today, so I stopped at Taco Bell on the way back from book shopping and picked up a burrito for a late lunch. I figured I'd fix something for a late dinner, but never got around to it and now I don't think I'll bother. I'm getting pretty tired after being awake since ten o'clock this morning. I might make some cinnamon toast and chocolate milk, it still being to hot for cocoa. There will be two more quite hot days before a moderate cooling trend will set in, and I'm really looking forward to enjoying some days in the mere high eighties. We'll most likely have to wait until October to have some in the seventies. Oh, well. At least I've got plenty to read.