Book-shopping in Frisco

   After a wonderful weekend in Dallas with our supper club from Marshall (dinners at Nick & Sam's and Abacus) my bride ditched me in Frisco for a seminar I'll be attending across the highway in Plano for the next two days.  After watching the Cowboys beat the Giants in my (very nice) hotel room, I did what I always do when Jamie leaves - find the nearest used bookstore.  Luckily there was a Half Price Books about half a mile up the street so I walked up - and got lucky.
As I noted in my post on Andrew Chaikin's A Man on the Moon, this book was so good that I was now on permanent lookout for a good dust-jacketed hardcover copy to replace the softcover one I bought in Kerrville exactly two months ago and promptly devoured.
Well, tonight I hit paydirt.  For less than eight dollars I got a hardcover with dust jacket in mint condition of the first hardback version (it's not a first edition, but as it's a 1994 edition of a 1994 book, it's bound to be a fairly early edition - only mark is of its prior owner, Nihal J. Mehta, Ph.D., who according to Google is a Plano mathematician who's posted a lot of reviews on Amazon).  And the photos that I complained about the quality of in the softcover edition?  They're actually just fine in this one, printed on glossy paper.  Can't wait to get it home and added to the collection.  Now all I have to do is figure out how to get it signed...
Also picked up Arturo Perez-Reverte's Queen of the South.  I'm reading his The Seville Communion at the moment, and my recollection is that Queen is first in a series, so I knew I needed to locate it.  I also saw Simon Winchester's A Crack in the World about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (I'd enjoyed his Krakatoa) but it was eight-ish dollars as well, so I passed on it - until I saw a copy on the sale rack for one dollar.  Score one more for the general American history section (or would this be science - I'm not sure).
Finally, I couldn't find images of them, but the store had a large collection of the Prager Illustrated Military History books (hardcover versions of the Osprey military history books) really cheap, and I picked up the books on the Battle of Hattin in 1187 and Gallipolli in 1915.  They had Constantinople - 1453, but I have the Osprey of that as well as the later combination of that book with two others.  Learned something reading both, which was the whole idea.
Anyway, good evening book-shopping - and the Cowboys won.  Now bad for a night away from home.