Early word from the accounting department of the HGSC suggests that the annual Book Pub held last Friday raised roughly (hey, these are amateur accountants) as much money as last year's record-setting event. And this despite the fact that a local representative of the Scottish history fraternity who wishes to remain anonymous and who in past years slopped money around while seemingly unaware that the more he drank the more likely he was to overbid for those books nobody else wanted and which he was almost certainly destined never to read, was absent.