When I was a child and the adults were teaching me how to behave back in the middle of the last century, one of the thousands of rules they laid down – without any justification or explanation that I can remember – concerned money. Actually there were many rules concerning money, but the one I am thinking of concerned prices. Bad manners to mention how much you paid for anything, that was the rule. And I must still feel its effect because I spontaneously feel inhibited even today about mentioning the fact that my daughter and I not only got the ridiculous sale price at Flax for all the sheets of handmade and otherwise splendid papers we bought in the Basement Sale on Friday, but also qualified for a Quantity Discount. Consequently each of the amazing large artifacts of ingenuity and art pictured here was sold to us for eighty-five cents.
