Our books today comprise a small Stevereads landmark: my very first book-haul from Book Outlet!

As some of you will know, I’m delighted to spend time watching all the enthusiastic young people (and a few old enough to know better!) over in the nerdy, inordinately friendly corner of YouTube known as “BookTube.” I love the camaraderie in the ranks of the second-tier BookTubers I watch regularly (the first-tier of BookTubers, like the first tier of all other kinds of YouTubers, is entirely populated by martinet A-holes who have $15,000 professional lighting systems, bone-deep contempt for their viewers, and not one single scrap of interest in the worth of the ‘content’ they’re making)(so I don’t watch them), and I find their unabashed enthusiasm for all things books and reading completely endearing. I even like some of their shared activities – the “tags” they inflict on each other, the bookshelf-tours they sometimes take their readers on, and of course the “book hauls” they so regularly film, in which they hold their latest book- acquisitions up to the camera and talk about them.

The last is my favorite, I admit. There’s something so geekishly natural about it, not just in terms of the new-owner’s joy of a stack of recently-purchased books but also as a reflection on just how seldom any of us ever really gets to do such a victory-dance in real life. On the two-hour car-ride back from the mighty Book Barn in Niantic, Connecticut, or on the subway uptown back from the mighty Strand bookstore in New York City, or even just lugging a bulging tote bag of books home from the Brattle, or the Goodwill, or the Boston Public Library Book Sale, I have many times experienced the euphoria of suddenly owning a bunch more good books, but in virtually all of those circumstances, going back many, many years and including many, many different groups of accompanying friends, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times anybody I’ve been with has ever asked me any variation of “So! What-all did you just get, and why does it excite you?”

With BookTube book-haul videos, that slight disappointment is, as it were, edited out. Each BookTuber is free to imagine that every single viewer is deeply interested in these new additions to Ye Olde Personal Library – and the resulting enthusiasm is pretty contagious. It’s a reminder to me that I should do more book-haul entries here on Stevereads.

And even inside the ‘shared activities,’ there are deeper buried traits – and the one I couldn’t help noticing was just how many BookTubers seem to buy their books from the online remainder store called Book Outlet. At first I thought their natural first choice would be Amazon, simply for its breadth of selection. Then I thought perhaps the first choice would be the Book Depository, since BookTube is a very international group, and the Book Depository’s shipping is free. Then I thought perhaps BookTubers shy away from those two options because Book Depository is owned by Amazon and Amazon is openly, almost parodically evil – except most of the BookTubers I follow don’t seem like the type who would know that or care.

Whatever the reason (I suspect it has to do with the #1 disease of BookTube, YA fiction, but I’m trying not to think about that), Book Outlet certainly reigns supreme among BookTubers as the book-buying venue of choice. So even though my own book-buying venue of choice is well-known (a good place to remind you all that the Brattle Bookshop here in snowbound Boston accepts phone orders for gift certificates in any amount, and you need not even be clear on my last name – just call them up – 617-542-0210 – and say “I’d like to buy a gift certificate for Steve” – they’ll know who you mean), I get such enjoyment from BookTube and have made so many delightful email buddies there that I just had to try Book Outlet for myself!

So I spent a while delightedly browsing (what Rose Macaulay wrote about Bookseller Catalogues back in 1935 is every bit as true here in 2015, and it applies equally well to online catalogues as to print ones), then I placed my order and patiently waited. And about ten days later, just before Boston’s fifteenth massive blizzard closed the city down for days, my cute little package came in the mail!

It was just two books, to start with. I didn’t want to overdo things until I knew whether or not I’d like all the non-book essentials of how Book Outlet does business – the efficiency of the shipping, the condition of the books, that sort of thing. But the books came in normal shipping time and in fine condition, so there I was, almost like a BookTuber (only one who’s too old and too ugly and too tech-inept to have a video channel), eagerly opening a book-package from Book Outlet!

My two choices were gems, in their own individual ways. First there was To Crave a Blood Moon, the 2009 third installment in Sharie Kohler’s “Moon Chasers” series, and it was what the kids on BookTube refer to as a “cover buy” (they’ve got a word for everything! Except maybe “persistent literary pedophilia,” but again, I’m trying not to think about that): because there on the cover (presumably under a full moon – a rather odd cover-omission for a book with this title), looking sultry and semi-shirted as always, is our old friend Paul Marron! In this book, he’s going by the euphonious name of Sebastian Santiago, a half-werewolf desperately trying to hold onto his humanity.

But although his name might be different, his predicament is reassuringly familiar – he’s the chained and helpless captive of a vicious group of “lycans” who are using him as an involuntary sex-stud in an attempt to sire some vigorous lycan puppies. When it comes to tight chains and sexual servitude, we know we’re in home territory, and Kohler’s purple prose, um, rises to the occasion:

The only time they ever treated him to [sic] gentleness was when they wanted to rouse [sic] him. Physically, he could not prevent himself from responding. His body had become his worst enemy – his greatest weakness. No matter how he loathed them, they succeeded in using him.

When the lycan group throws beautiful, strong-willed American Ruby Devereux into half-starved Sebastian’s cage in the hopes his hunger will overcome his restraint, all hell breaks loose – but not in the way the lycans expect, and Kohler’s novel quickly romps along from there.

The second book I got from Book Outlet isn’t quite the romp of To Crave a Blood Moon, but I ended up liking it just as much: it’s The Birth of Classical Europe by Simon Price and Peter Thonemann, in a neat Penguin paperback from 2010. I’m a sucker for Troy-to-the-Caesars trots like this one, even though it’s been 270 years since I actually learned anything from any of them. This one is as beautifully put together as all other Penguin paperbacks, and Price and Thonemann do a wonderful, comprehensive job of outlining huge swaths of European and Mediterranean history. My favorite of their many techniques is to remember constantly that the mental and rhetorical forces of history are always at work, shaping the way whole societies see themselves:

The political structures of the Roman Republic familiar in the world of Cicero in the first century BC consisted of the Senate, the people and the magistrates. This tripartite structure was perhaps first articulated by Greek observers of Rome, long used to the system of council, assembly and magistrates in Greek city-states. Polybius, writing in the later second century BC, offered a classic statement of the case, arguing that Rome’s phenomenal strength in his day was derived from the balance between the three elements. Such views, flattering as they were to Rome, were internalized by the Romans, and came to form part of the ways that they thought about their own state. But it would be a mistake to project, as the Romans did, a tripartite analysis of Rome back into the early Republic, let alone the regal period. There are good grounds for thinking that earlier structures were very different.

So I was very pleased with my first-ever Book Outlet book haul! But even so, I realize something key is missing, and that key is made of cardboard: a box was missing! A real Book Outlet book haul consists of so many books that a box – stamped with “Book Outlet” – is required to get them all to my front door. But the folks at Book Outlet are canny: they sent me a coupon for $5 off my next order!