A Humidifier by Tom Wolfe?

This past Moday, i ordered a humidifier from drugstore.com. (I didn’t know then that I could have saved the shipping fee and gotten instant gratification by buying the exact same machine at the exact same price in the local CVS around the corner.)

I got an email Wednesday morning saying that they’d shipped it, and yesterday, Thursday, I received it at my office (not bad for standard 3-7 business days shipping). I didn’t open it, since it was for use in my home, although I did wonder why the label was so messy. I also wondered a little about why the box was so big. Carrying it home I also wondered why the contents seemed to shuffle around so much … a professional ecommerce site would surely have packed it better.

Finally home, I opened the box, and here’s what I found:

18 copies of Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe!

Here’s what the mysterious label looked like:

I’ve checked that drugstore.com don’t sell books. Besides, who would normally order 18 copies of the same book? So it’s probably someone at UPS who fucked up. Either someone misplaced my package with a package to a public school class reading Tom Wolfe, or someone with a ton of copies of this book lying around filled up an empty box with enough copies of this book to make it weigh the same as the humidifier that he stole. But then again, the book is brand new (published in October 2000). I have no idea which one it is.

I’ve checked on Amazon.com, and they charge $20 for one copy of the book (and it’s even got a reasonable average rating). Since the humidifier only cost $34 including shipping, and there were 18 copies of the book, I guess I’ve made $326 on this deal. That is, if anybody wants to buy them.

Maybe I should ask at Strand’s?