Thrift Store Finds! 05/03/19

I FOUND IT.

I thought this book was some kind of weird Canadian urban legend, but last Friday there it was, a dusty paperback sitting innocuously in a stack of equally dusty paperbacks.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present:

Bear.

The 1976 classic Canadian novel of a woman who develops sexual feelings for a wild grizzly.

Seriously.

Okay, now I don’t normally get this excited when I find random erotic novels in thrift shops. If that were the case I’d be in a constant state of over-stimulation.

Bear is special.

I first heard about Bear many years ago on a blog called 11points, which sadly is no longer active so I can’t find the original link. The article was entitled “Eleven of the Weirdest Romantic Novel Sub-Genres” or something like that; and nestled somewhere in between werewolf romances and Abe Lincoln erotica was a little novel called Bear.

Fast forward to 2016; I was scrolling the Overdrive website for the Toronto Public Library and there it was again.

Listed under “Proud to be Canadian”

Bear.

It even has a wait list!

 

Allow me if you will to give you a brief excerpt from this great novel. Warning: NSFW

“She cradled his big, furry, asymmetrical balls in her hands, she played with them, slipping them gently inside their cases as he licked. His prick did not come out of its long cartilaginous sheath. Never mind, she thought, I’m not asking for anything. I’m not obliged to anybody. I don’t care if I can’t turn you on, I just love you.” (Engel, 130)

Pardon me for a moment, I’m going to go scrub my hands for typing that.

As undeniably weird and wrong as it is, only in Canada would you see something like this on a list of public library recommendations. Because instead of responding to things like Bear with righteous fury or moral indignation, Canada leans into its weirdness.

It embraces books like Bear and announces to the world, “Yup, we’re the country with that grizzly-fucker novel. What about it?” Canada accepts its own wackiness, and that’s one of the things I love about living here.

So here’s to you Bear. Let your freak flag fly.

Happy reading everyone!

Thrift Store Finds! 27/02/19

I think I found it. The thing I didn’t even know I had been searching to find. Hidden on a dusty back shelf at the Salvation Army was:

 

The creepiest f*cking edition of Alice in Wonderland ever produced.

Seriously, every single page of this thing is pure nightmare fodder. The original story written by Lewis Carroll is unchanged, but the illustrations are in a parallel dimension away from the sweet drawings popularized by the Walt Disney film. It’s as if the artist, Camille Rae Garcia, heard that the book is often interpreted to be about drug use and said “Whelp, better try some drugs”.

And then tried all of them. At once.

 

I thought Tim Burton’s film adaptation with Johnny Depp as a dead-eyed sociopath was as weird as it could get. And yet…

 

I was clearly wrong.

 

This thing is amazing.

Happy nightmares everyone!

Thrift Store Finds!

There was a $.50 book sale at my local Salvation Army, and look what I found!

 

 

It’s a full color comic book adaptation of Return of the Jedi. And…

 

 

 

It’s a first edition from 1983! And…

 

 

It was produced by Stan Lee!

 

 

This thing is so cool!

 

Happy reading everyone!