Coinstar and Bibliography

Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science

In my capacity as housewife, I have stumbled across a rich ore vein of spare change. It is everywhere. I pull it out of driers, off shelves, out of cars, from the garage floor--it's everywhere. Once upon a time, I would have probably counted and rolled it by hand. (I think when I was waiting to give birth to Jackson I rolled about $50 of pennies. I was on a kick where I was trying to pull out the pre-1981 coppery ones to use as snail traps in the garden, per a suggestion in The Year I Ate My Yard.)

Anyway, at this point I don't have time for that, so when my lime-green SpongeBob SquarePants bucket fills up with spare change, I take it to the CoinStar at Pavilions, where I have discovered you can get full-freight Amazon.com gift cards for your trouble. (They take 10 percent for using PayPal and all sorts of other percentages for other outlets, but the Amazon.com thing is a fair deal!)

I use them for buying stuff I wouldn't otherwise buy (really!), and lately that means out-of-print Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science books.

Which brings me to the Bibliography part of the title of my post: In my old age I've discovered I really like collecting lists of books that no one has assembled and published on ye olde Internet, cf. Children's Choice Book Club titles, Muller's World Fairy Tales, Hamlyn's Czech-printed fairy tales series and the World Mythology Series.

As such, if anyone needs it, I've put together an almost completely exhaustive list of Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science titles on Wikipedia. I was amazed to discover that there have been more than 200, many of which are out of print. I need to add Crowell's numeration and the names of the illustrators, but the list should suffice for now.

Hey, did you know that Joanna Cole of Magic School Bus fame wrote a Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science title about evolution!? It's on the way to my house now, thanks to the aforementioned Coinstar-Amazon gift card. Whee!