I went to a book sale last week in NJ run by the College Women’s Club of Montclair, which raises money for ladies in need of it to go to college.  The elder ladies who staff the sale are commanding and chatty and niggling, and some are the type who scabrous vaudeville curmudgeon W.C. Fields made a career of lampooning, and who Ralph Kramden wanted to bang-zoom to the moon.  I’ve visited the sale these last few years, and cleaned up, and tho this year it was a bit thinner than others, I picked up a few things.

A crime novel from the 1980s about dirty real estate deals in Jersey City.  J.W. Rider is apparently a pseudonym of crime writer Shane Stevens.

… with a blurb by a trusted Jersey Tomato…

I found a memoir by an ex-priest who went to my high school in the 1950s, Seton Hall Prep, an all-boys Catholic school in North Jersey. Can’t wait to read this one.

The art of the library check-out stamp.

Some items I pulled from the James Forman Library, QC Special Collections.

Sal Vizzini, on the right, was a Federal agent who went undercover and made friends with Lucky Luciano.