Selling Remnants by Andy Scheer

The circumstances that led this morning to my buying a new hardcover nonfiction title were never included in the author's marketing plan. Or anything cooked up by the Little, Brown sales department, except as an unwelcome afterthought.

I didn't buy the title at a bookstore, and I didn't visit the store looking for books. Until this morning, I didn't even know this author had released the title. But as soon as I saw the books, spine out, and noticed the author's name. I knew I had to buy a copy. Especially for just one dollar.

My wife wanted something at Dollar Tree. I visited the back corner where they shelve overstock books. This time I struck pay dirt: Here, There, Elsewhere, a collection of travel essays by William Least Heat-Moon. Having enjoyed his Blue Highways, Prairie Erth, and River-Horse, how could I lose? Especially for a buck.

I don't often buy books at Dollar Tree, but over the years I've found enough treasures to keep checking: a coffee-table book about the filming of Master and Commander: Far Side of the World. And titles by hardly obscure writers such as Stephen King and Clive Cusssler.

No matter how successful the author and how good the book, the publisher usually ends up with extra copies at the end of the print run. These remnants find their way down the retailing food chain – sometimes as far as Dollar Tree.

As my wife drove us home, I began the first essay. Serious pay dirt. In the opening pages I received food for thought about how the author's career began (a letter to the editor of his local paper), the odds of getting published (“Writing books is indeed a gambler's trade because it's one of hope against probability: the belief someone somewhere sometime might choose to spend money on your words rather than on a nice bottle of cabernet or on a couple of lottery tickets”), and the judgment of editors to limit a writer's vocabulary to what's accessible to an average reader.

All that in the first six pages.

Somehow my copy of Here, There, Elsewhere wasn't needed by a brick-and-mortar bookstore or an online retailer. My gain. Even better, the store on Austin Bluffs near Academy Boulevard had maybe a dozen more copies. If you're lucky, maybe a Dollar Tree near you also has a copy. Based on those first six pages, you'll more than get your dollar's worth.

A Word Fitly Spoken by Andy Scheer

I often hear the phrase “divine appointment” bandied at writers conferences, taking the narrow view of direct meetings between people.

But the past few days I've received several reminders that divine appointments also apply to interactions with what others have written. And not simply with writing that's supposed to be “spiritual.”

Even with writing in a free community newspaper.

When my granddaughter was less than a year old, her parents spied an article about child safety in The Woodmen Edition. It advised parents to speak out to inform the other when expecting them to watch the child. Ever since, “you've got the tot,” has been their frequent phrase.

Last evening, my daughter asked me how long I thought Juliet, now nearly three, would be “the tot.”

“Until she's a teen,” I said, “or at least a tween.”

This weekend I made for the several dozenth time a recipe for microwave scrambled eggs, prepared and cooked in a deep coffee mug. It's given my weekend mornings a far better start, and it's given my mother-in-law the satisfaction that she passed along a useful one-inch clipping from her community's give-away newspaper.

Perhaps someday the writer will produce cookbooks for a big New York House. Meanwhile I'm grateful she sent the recipe to a publisher in Arvada.

The amazing, divine aspect of putting something into print, whether online or to a more formal audience, is that you never know when or how those words will touch a life.

Today at lunch, I encountered in the pages of William Least Heat-Moon's travel book River Horse some amazing perspective for my upcoming cross-country trip with my father-in-law in his 1930 Ford.

But the words aren't his—except his decision to include them. They come from a page of advice to foreign motorists in Japan, creatively translated about the time my father-in-law's Model A was built:

When a passenger of the foot
hove in sight, tootle the horn trumpet
to him melodiously at first.
If he still obstacles your passage,
tootle him with vigour
and express by word of the mouth
the warning “Hi, Hi!”

Beware the wandering horse
that he shall not take fright
as you pass him.
Do not explode
the exhaust box at him.
So soothingly by
or stop by the road-side
till he pass away.

Give big space
to the festive dog
that makes sport
in the road-way.
Avoid entanglement of dog
with your wheel-spokes.

Go soothingly on the grease-mud,
as there lurk the skid demon.
Press the brake of the foot
as you roll round the corners
to save the collapse
and tie-up.

Driving an antique car with wheel spokes, I'll remember to avoid entanglement with festive dogs – and to go soothingly on the grease-mud.

If I'd encountered those words a year ago, I'd likely have passed over them. But today, they pointed to yet another divine appointment.

What words in print have unexpectedly touched your life?

Great American Travel Books by Andy Scheer

I've had a soft spot for nonfiction travel books since I received a hardcover of Kon-Tiki the Christmas I was 10.

I've read and re-read most of Paul Theroux's curmudgeonly accounts of  travels by train. But except for early chapters of The Old Patagonia Express, most of his journeys take place overseas.

I prefer books about domestic journeys--especially this summer as I plan a trip as my father-in-law's co-driver in his 1930 Ford Model A Town Sedan from suburban Denver to Hickory Corners, Michigan.

As I plotted our route across Kansas and Missouri via Highway 36, I've considered the US travel books I've read—and which I might take with me in the Model A. Not owning an e-reader, I want to limit myself to a single volume.

I recently re-read John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley. And not that long ago I read The Home Front, Alistair Cooke's account of driving across America in a Lincoln Zephyr during the early years of the second world war.

Considering our projected route, I'm leaning toward a re-read of William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways. Or perhaps River-Horse, his 1999 account of an Atlantic to Pacific trip by small boat. Still, that book's an unknown. Can I trust it to match the quality of Blue Highways or PrairieErth??

I could take a mass paperback of Stephen Coonts's The Cannibal Queen, a highly re-readable account of flying through the lower 48 in a 1942 Stearman open cockpit biplane.

Do you have a suggestion?