Bargain Books arrived in my mailbox the other day. It’s a paper catalog produced by the Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller Co. of Falls Village, Conn. How much longer will there be paper catalogs?

A while yet, probably, but I’ll still show this bit of ephemera to one or the other of my children and say, remember these, they’re on their way out. A few of them, such as the Sears Catalog, were once as big as phone books, even in the 1970s. You know, phone books. One or the other of my children will not be impressed. Youth looks forward.

The catalog is essentially a remainder table. Guess some mailing list algorithm somewhere detected that I’m fond of remainder tables — which is true, I always take a look — and so I took a look into Bargain Books. It promises books in the following categories: Arts & Entertainment, History, Home & Garden, Cookbooks, Military History, Biography, Healthy Living, Fiction, Crafts/Needlecrafts, Science & Nature, and Children’s Books, plus Bargain DVDs.

It seems like a fine selection, but some of those categories are a bit stretched, let’s say. In History, for instance, I found Secret Journey to Planet Serpo: A True Story of Interplanetary Travel. By Len Kasten. “On July 16, 1965, a massive alien spacecraft from the Zeta Reticuli star system, piloted by alien visitors known as Ebens, welcomed 12 astronaut trained military personnel aboard their craft. This volume exposes the truth of the human-alien interaction, revealing that our government continues to have an ongoing relationship with the Ebens to this day.”