Books, Books, and More Books!

Rhyne and I came home late yesterday afternoon from a week-long vacation in East Tennessee. We stayed in a cabin in the Smokies right outside of Gatlinburg. We spent our time between Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge and had a great time.

On our way home, we drove through Knoxville and found THE BEST used book store either one of us has ever been inside. It's called McKay's, and it is absolutely amazing. They had tons of books, but everything was so well organized. I was very impressed. My husband and I are both self-professed bibliophiles, so we were like two kids in a candy store with all of those books! Y'all, we spent three hours in this store!! We finally tore ourselves away from the shelves to check out...and discovered that they have two other stores--one in Chattanooga and one in Nashville. And wouldn't you know...we had to drive through Chattanooga to get home! So guess where we stopped an hour or so later...but this time we only stayed about an hour and a half or so!

When we got home, we decided that we wanted to pool all of our books together before we divided them up and took them to our offices. Here are all of our treasures:

Then we began the process of separating them. These are all of my books. I divided them into two categories: personal books (which will go in my home office) and school books (which will be labeled and relocated to my classroom).

I bought 37 new books for my classroom for a mere fraction of the cost. Some of these books cost me only 30 cents. When I got home I did the math and discovered that if I'd bought all of these books at full price, it would have cost me about $183.00. Let's just say that I didn't spend even remotely close to that!

These are all of Rhyne's books. He teaches theology and philosophy of religion at New Orleans Baptist Seminary--hence the mixture of Immanuel Kant and biblical commentaries. :o) He really got the best deals between the two of us. He bought some academic books that were worth around $100 for about $8-$10 a piece. He's also in the process of writing a dissertation, so these books are some definite "investment" pieces for us!

And here we have all of our books together. Again, I'm amazed at how much we got for so low a price. We were in book heaven!

If you live anywhere near Knoxville, Chattanooga, or Nashville, I would highly recommend checking out this store at some point. If you live close enough that you could make a day trip to visit this store, you should. Seriously. Best used book store ever.

Are there any other great book stores that I should be checking out?