A View to a Coronation

If it's the first Saturday in June, it's time for the annual St. Anthony Park Library book sale. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of books fill the basement community room. People browse the rows, discussing and recommending titles to each other. Someone saved me from buying three Sinclair Lewis books at one point. Thank you, kind woman; I will take them out of the library if I feel so moved.

Daughter Number Three-Point-One found a couple of cool things she thought I would like before I had even arrived, and she was right. Here's one of them:


It's a shallow paperboard box. The design is an odd combination of pseudo-historic and 1977 (check out the Bookman swashes, set in all capital letters, and the ahistorical pink). It's odd to realize this was made the year I graduated from high school.

The box is a sleeve for what's called a telescopic book. It's an accordion, basically...


...with a hole at one end (inside the center arch) that you can look into...


...to force depth perception of a scene, in this case Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1952:


Pretty nifty, hey? I have no particular interest in the royals and their doings, but this souvenir is a keeper. And it appears to be worth about 10 times the $3.00 I paid for it.