I wanted to have a decent collection of books at the office without depleting the ones from my house. I hoped there would be a site where you could buy like a whole box of random titles but I couldn’t find one. I did, however, find a pretty cool way to buy a bunch of books very cheaply.

First: If you don’t have Amazon Prime, you should. It’s $70 for the year and you get two day shipping on everything Amazon sells. The average shipping cost on Amazon is between $3-4 so that evens out to less than 20 bucks a year without factoring in how much your time is worth. (Plus since you can link it to four different accounts, you can split it with people)

Anyway, try this:

Go to FillerItem.com -> Uncheck everything but Books -> Search for Items Starting at $.01. It brings up pages and pages of books for basically nothing. I bought all the classics last night and a couple books of quotations and speeches. Most of them are books you’ve probably already read but for whatever reason didn’t keep.

Then you can go through and see all the books that Amazon puts in its Bargin Section. They have Under $5, $10, $20. It’s not a bad place to get discount hardcovers that are going into paperback or stuff like that. (They should make an RSS feed for it) If you click on one you want and scroll down to the “People Also Bought” section it tends to recommend books all in the same price range that for some reason aren’t listed in the bargain section.

It’s very helpful to have books like this one hand. You never know when you might make use of them. Every so often, it happens. And when I don’t have one and need to go to Borders to get it, I use this through my phone.

To paraphrase Lincoln telling a fable: A king asked his philosophers to present to him a sentence that would be true at all times in any situation both done and to come . The sentence they composed, “And this, too, shall pass away”

I thought these were good quotes for evaluating decisions and trying to learn from examples:

“If criticism dispenses praise or censure, it should seek to place itself as nearly as possibly at the same point of view as the person acting, that is to say, to collect all he knew and all the motives on which he acted, and, on the other hand, to leave out of consideration all that the person acting could not or did not know, and above all, the result.”

On War

Von Clausewitz, Carl

“I will repeated this point again until I get hoarse: A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact but in light of the information until that point.”

Fooled By Randomness

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas

“-It’s unfortunate that this has happened.

No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it – not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it. Does was what happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, straightforwardness and all the qualities that allow a person’s nature to fulfill itself?”

Meditations

Aurelius, Marcus