A Very Good Day for Finding Things

One hidden benefit of living in New York is finding free things on the curb. Without trying at all, we have accumulated a nice rolling office chair, several milk crates, a small rolling metal cart that required only minor repairs before becoming a handy shoe rack, and several large ceramic planters (which we took to my parents' in Connecticut).

And I still rather regret letting a plastic pizza man figure, who was about three feet tall, the sort of thing that stands outside restaurants, get away.

But the best thing to find are books, in a densely populated land of readers and small apartments. We have found many excellent books on the street, but today was particularly fruitful. A beautiful fall day of strolling around Carroll Gardens with the dog. On the way home from the bakery we found:

Bullfinch's Mythology (c. 1949)
Who's Who in the Bible
Mansfield Park (a very nice Penguin edition in good shape, the only Jane Austen novel I don't already own!)
Anna Karenina (another Penguin)
Julie & Julia (which I had wanted to read for while: the author's memoir of cooking her way through Julia Child's French cookbook)
The Red and the Black

Back in the apartment buidling, we discovered someone had discarded about 30 suit hangers, the sturdy curving wooden kind. We took those home and got rid of all our remaining wire hangers from the dry cleaner's.