The $3,000 Book - Jennie

Last week, I blogged about the $62 my family dropped in Powell’s Books in Portland.

Really, that was nothing.

We’ve spent more on books than on any other form of entertainment. There are stacks of books in every room of our tiny house. When it starts feeling cluttered here, my husband suggests that we get rid of some books.

There’s no way.

The kids and I couldn’t part with a single, vital tome. Every one is special in a certain way: we cherished the character, the setting was magical, we think the great-grandkids might like the plot.

It’s an investment, all those pages.

One book in particular cost over $3,000!

Are you ready for its bank-breaking title?

It was Mary Pope Osborne’s Blizzard of the Blue Moon, #36 in the Magic Tree House series.

You can get the same one for twelve bucks off Amazon.

Here’s how we ended up paying a fortune for it: Reesie, our youngest, loves the Magic Tree House books. He’s read them a billion times, and listened to them on tape. If you give him a sentence out of any one of them, he can give you the next three. When we read #36 – about the depression in New York City – he became obsessed with seeing the unicorn, Dianthus.

Since Dianthus lives in a tapestry in the Cloisters of New York, we flew across the nation last year, taking a cab through Harlem to find him. Watching Reesie’s eyes pop before the majestic weaving was worth every penny.

This was our most expensive book trip – to date. There’s one planned to La Paz in October to see the setting of Steinbeck’s The Pearl. We rode his red pony in Salinas two years ago.

Before that, we sat under Barbara Kingsolver’s Bean Trees in Arizona and marveled at Lawrence Yep’s Chinatown in San Francisco.

On the kids’ Someday List is the Tomten’s Sweden, Hogwart’s Academy of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and the land where the Wild Things are.

We’ll get to some of them eventually.

Emily Dickinson said, “There is no frigate like a book.”

Where have your frigates taken you?