No thanks. :-) You may have realized by now from all my posts over the past year, that I am not particularly religious. I do treasure this book due to how I acquired it though. :-) Also thanks for the link. At one time I had an opportunity to buy a page from a 12 or 13th century "Book of Hours". At the time I did not have the money. Sigh! I do love to read books. I have around 5000 books here at my house. (Makes it a real pain to move though!)
My father-in-law always used to talk about this one book he had that he had loaned to someone years before and never gotten back, and he hadn't had any luck prowling around local bookstores. So my wife thought it would be cool to see if she could find it for him - we plugged it into Amazon's out-of-print search, and forgot all about it. Three months later, I got an email from them - they had an edition available, for only $330, plus shipping. Ha.
Well, that was bit more than we were prepared to spend, so we had to say no thanks, although it was disappointing. I found out about ABE not long after that, and plugged in the title. And it was fabulous - I got back a hundred hits on the spot, all of them in the $30-$60 range.
Now, ABE at the time was just a book finder service - back then, once you found the book you wanted, you had to get in touch with the bookstore that actually had the thing and work out the details with them. So I called one of them, and as I was talking to some super-nice lady at an independent bookstore (somewhere in Manhattan, IIRC), I happened to mention that I had tried Amazon and what they had come back to me with - and she started laughing!
"What's so funny?" I asked her (nicely - I still wanted the book).
"Oh," she says, "we sell old books to Amazon all the time. If I knew how much they were marking them up, I'd have charged them more!"
So now I start with ABE for old books, and think only nasty things about Amazon and their out-of-print service scam ;)