Skeptics, supermen, and the RAND Corporation

(One has to be careful with a subject line like that; I don't want to raise your expectations too much. So settle down, settle down, people.)

K. and I went to the Oberlin College Library book sale this afternoon. It was not a particularly good book sale, as these things go. The selection was pretty small, and made it immediately obvious why they were getting rid of these books: pasteboard academic books that weren't so great when they came out and are now thirty years out of date, computer manuals that would tell me how to use a VAX if I happened to trip over one moldering in a ditch somewhere, paperback copies of Grisham and Danielle Steele. But I did manage to pull three gems from the dross:

1. Krypton Nights by Bryan Dietrich, which is a serious book of poems about Superman. I don't know if they're any good, but they did win the 2001 Paris Review Prize, whatever that is. The concept tickled me.
   
2. The Compleat Strategyst by J.D. Williams, one of those seminal game theory books that came out of the RAND Corporation and led some people to think launching a nuclear first strike might be a good idea.
   
3. The New Age Notes of a Fringe Watcher, which collects some of Martin Gardner's early columns for the Skeptical Inquirer, in which he debunks spoonbenders, psychics, and the Face on Mars (as well as the Smiley Face on Mars).
   

It made me miss Ann Arbor, but I'm pretty happy with my haul. And I just noticed that #s 2 and 3 came originally from the library of Edward C. Bittner, though they were scattered to opposite ends of the book sale. Thanks, Edward C. Bittner!