I love a good used book sale. How good was the sale I went to on Friday? A three on the Puffin Scale. The Puffin Scale is my own, completely unscientific, rating system for used book sales. It goes from 0 to 4 and is calculated based solely on the number of Puffin books I pick up at the sale (anything more than four is just me being greedy). The three I bought at this sale are in the pile on the right: The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen by Lloyd Alexander, The Sword and the Circle by Rosemary Sutcliff, and a backup copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, this one with the Quentin Blake illustrations. (I also picked up a copy of the play.)

The Puffin Scale doesn't capture most of what I buy at a book sale, but it usually corresponds pretty well to how happy I am with what I did buy. In this case, a lovely stack of books by Helen Cresswell, including three of the Bagthorpes (I have it on good authority that the Bagthorpes are not to be missed) and something called The Bongleweed; two by Jane Gardam, although sadly not Bilgewater; plus others it is too tedious to list here (not really, but perhaps too tedious to read about). My daughter has claimed a handful of them already--the Pierce and the Wrede were particularly appealing--while I'm still deciding what to read, or re-read, first.