I’m a sucker for Item-of-the-Month type clubs. As a teenager, I was enrolled in one of those Columbia House deals, where they entice you to buy a handful of popular album CDs at less than a dollar each, then they send you some random CD every month, which you get and pay for if you don’t return the monthly offer right away.

It’s a pretty good deal if you remember to return the offer right away. Not so good if you don’t.

I believe I ended up paying for more CDs than I initially planned on doing. Luckily for me they all turned out to be pretty good anyway. It’s how I stumbled onto Elvis Costello’s work; I forgot to return the offer.

I’m the same way with books. Some of the books I have in my library are from a couple of book-of-the-month clubs I enrolled in as a teenager. I managed to get some really great reference books for a really low price at one club, and I got a mess of genre books and fancy glassware at the other club.

I had to quit the clubs eventually because buying anything, whether at discounted prices or not, got to be too expensive for me and my student’s budget. After reading all the books I’d received, I ended up trading away an entire crate of them at a used bookstore so I could buy half as many other books I hadn’t yet read, and when I finished reading those books I traded them away too, until I whittled away my huge collection of books and had to resort to borrowing books from the library.

Well … I’m a working adult now, and since I now share expenses with H.E., I am somehow managing to live well within my means. I’m buying books again … and not just to have samples of my own work; I’m buying books to read and to have. It makes me giddy, and for someone who had to stop buying books for years and years, I’m buying fairly regularly now. H.E. is convinced that I get a package from Amazon an average of once a week.

So it’s safe to say that joining a book club at this point in my life is probably a good and a practical idea, and that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do.

I got an offer in the mail from the Quality Paperback Book Club two months ago: 6 books for 1 buck each. Thinking back to my days as a student, I nearly chucked the offer into the trash because I knew how expensive it could be just to save. They don’t offer you 6 books for 6 bucks without having some sort of catch, you know.

But the catch was doable, the purchase of just 2 more books in the next year, and with the internet, rejecting the monthly offer should actually be easier now. Even if it wasn’t, I have the means to actually pay for a book every month, and besides which, I already do that anyway. The upside to the book club? I’d be getting books at a discounted rate, even after I’d enrolled and not just at the time of enrollment.

I’m already buying the books. Why not save money while I’m at it, right?

Well … I’ve tried enrolling into the club twice now, both times online and both times a failure. I thought the first time actually went through, but I waited for a month and a half and never received any books, and I found out today from their customer service that my online enrollment just didn’t take. So I tried again, and it still didn’t take.

Some glitch with their web site for enrolling members or something. Not good.

After some back and forth with their customer service, we concluded that the best way to proceed is to enroll by post using the offer I got in the mail. The problem with that? The shorter book numbers in the mail catalog are different from the longer item numbers on the site, and some of the books I want to order for my enrollment offer are on the site only … and the mail form has space only for the shorter book numbers found in the catalog.

Confusing, yes? Never mind.

The point is they make it awfully hard to enroll new members into this club. I mean, how the hell do they expect to get new customers? If I were less enthused about joining, I’d have quit long ago and simply not bothered. Trying to find out what the problem is with their site is a whole lot more trouble than mailing in a rejection of a monthly offer or forgetting to do so and having to pay for a book I don’t want.

If I continue to have problems enrolling, I think I will just stick with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and my neighborhood used bookstore for my book buying.

In the meantime, stubborn me, I’m still trying, just waiting to hear back from customer service about those pesky book numbers.

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