Saturday was Independent Bookstore Day, the annual biblio-holiday celebrating the small, community-based bookstores around the country. D.C. booksellers put together a crawl that included discounts, and if you visited 10 of them, you’d get a tote bag commemorating the event.

I did not make it to all ten, having not finished my job application early enough to leave me time to accomplish the task before our movie showtime. Getting around town by bikeshare just takes the amount of time it takes — you cannot make bikes magically appear at deserted docks and I am a slow cyclist — and I would have needed another hour to check off the two other neighborhoods I didn’t make it to.

However, I made it to five shops and came home with a modest, budget-friendly haul — three books, a magnet, a sticker, and some birthday cards (not shown).

First the books:

• The Girl Who Drank the Moon is a special signed copy available for Independent Bookstore Day. I read it a couple years ago and loved it, and owning a copy seemed like a nice idea so that I could reread it periodically at my pleasure.
• archy and mehitabel is a 1927 collection of poems from a column at The Evening Sun purportedly written by a cockroach (archy) about his early 20th-century adventures with a his alley-cat pal, mehitabel. I mean, of course that had to come home with me!
• And, finally, Paroles is a collection of poems that came out just after the end of World War II about the French youth experience of growing up under German occupation. Because I’ve been working on my French comprehension, it seemed like a good fit for me. It was translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the French and English poems sit opposite each other on the page, so I can make sure my understanding is accurate.

And, finally, the ephemera. The magnet reads, “Tea fixes everything,” which if not true, is at least the closest to true as one can get around here. And the sticker is a Langston Hughes quote: “Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink and be in love. I like to work, read, learn and understand life.” Seems about right.