Member: languagehat

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury; and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable; and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasion, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious grow up through the common. This is to be my symphony.

- William Henry Channing

posted by theoldman at 11:50 am (EST) on Mar 26, 2009

Helllllllo, there! :)

posted by taz_ at 12:11 pm (EST) on Dec 19, 2008

This thread

What are some of the most unusual or uncommon dictionaries you think you have on your shelf?

needs you.

- Bob

posted by AsYouKnow_Bob at 3:01 pm (EST) on Oct 3, 2008

If, instead of the page you linked to, you click on the "Details" link on that page, it will take you here: http://www.librarything.com/work/5278899...

I believe that this page has what you're looking for.

posted by Gypsy_Boy at 10:02 am (EST) on Apr 18, 2008

Further explication
I own three books, as I stated a few moments ago. They are:

Selected Poems (Mandelstam)
James Green, Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Donald Davie
Penguin Classics (1992), Paperback, 144 pages
1992
0140184740

Selected Poems
David McDuff
Farrar Straus Giroux (1975), Paperback, 182 pages
1975
0374511624

Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam
1590170911

Although LT assigns this ISBN to the NYRB edition (New York Review Books Classics, Paperback, 128 pages, 2004), that is only partly correct. In fact, my copy of the book with that ISBN is a predecessor edition that NYRB must have purchased the rights to and then reproduced with a new introduction. The earlier version, the book I have, was published in 1989 by Simon & Shuster; it had 102 pages. The translators are Clarence Brown and WS Merwin.

Let me know if I can help further.

Dave

Hope this helps.

posted by Gypsy_Boy at 10:03 am (EST) on Apr 17, 2008

Actually, I've got three books of Mandelstam's poetry, each of which includes the words "Selected Poems." They're all packed away right now, but I assume that the details page on my library has the ISBNs for each, no?

posted by Gypsy_Boy at 9:49 am (EST) on Apr 17, 2008

Interesting library. Nice to see another good Vietnam War collection.

posted by LamSon at 11:42 pm (EST) on Apr 3, 2008

Thanks for the advice. I like my travel writing old anyway! My biggest problem now is going to be learning the language with the two existing, decidedly feeble, printed books available on the subject....

Cheers again!

posted by Widsith at 8:02 am (EST) on Feb 26, 2008

Hi Stephen. You seem to have more books on Laos than anyone else here, and I'm trying to read up on the place before a trip there in a few weeks. You haven't rated any of them, and I just wondered whether you had any recommendations? I like the look of the Odeen Meeker book, what's it like? Any advice gratefully received..
PS I'm a big fan of your blog, if you're the same languagehat.

posted by Widsith at 5:33 am (EST) on Feb 25, 2008

You're probably running afoul of this.

posted by jimroberts at 10:27 am (EST) on Dec 29, 2007

Hi, would it not be more accurate to have Multiple Languages rather than Hebrew for Bibles containing old and new testaments, even more for With Apocrypha?
Regards, Jim Roberts

posted by jimroberts at 3:33 pm (EST) on Dec 27, 2007

Ah, you seem to have Conversational Ukrainian by Slavutych. One of the few language books that I've ever learnt from cover to cover. It's one of the best grammar books around I think.

posted by Budz888 at 9:01 pm (EST) on Dec 24, 2007

Hi,
Thanks for the tip of The Thread in your blog. I ordered it directly, and added a link to your blog post in the Work Description of Common Knowledge.

Hans

posted by hnn at 6:13 am (EST) on Nov 11, 2007

Hi,
the link in your review of Orbit 8 doesn't work any more, but you could replace it by http://contento.best.vwh.net/t59.htm .
Regards, Jim Roberts

posted by jimroberts at 10:43 am (EST) on Oct 4, 2007

You are more than welcome, I always try to reply as soon as I read the message, otherwise it would be very likely that I would forget about it :-)

posted by emanbe at 4:37 pm (EST) on Sep 20, 2007

Hi,

the title of the book is Živá púšť (in Slovak) and it is a translation of Abdarrahman Munif´s an-Nihayat النهايات, Beirut: al-Muassasa al-Arabiyya lid-Dirasat wan-Nashr, 1978. Translated by Prof. Ladislav Drozdik.

posted by emanbe at 9:58 am (EST) on Sep 20, 2007

Thank you for your note. Nice to share VN's books with you!

posted by vnmlibrary at 9:31 pm (EST) on Sep 10, 2007

Liked your comment on Newman's World of Math, even though I wouldn't call it a review. I also failed to become a mathemetician, but made it as a computer System's Enginer. My son was also inspired by the books, and he too eventually turned from math (but did get PhD in Physics). - Also appreciate your work on Wikipedia (I am LouI over there).

posted by ServusLibri at 1:09 pm (EST) on Sep 1, 2007

Thank you. The correction has been made to the I.J. Singer title: Di brider Ashkenazi. MT SINAI

posted by mtsinai at 9:19 pm (EST) on Aug 26, 2007

i get that alot, but no, I am not Brazilian, just studying its history and will be going there in the near future to continue my research.

posted by tamara_gm3 at 4:16 pm (EST) on Aug 18, 2007

You've added some 20-odd books in July, 2007 and you're *moving* - not chutzpadik, but tempting fate, definitely.

posted by jkcohen at 7:48 pm (EST) on Aug 1, 2007

So, I look at your catalog. Our most uncommoned shared book is All American Music which is an important gift book to me as well as a good read. Yours is an "uncorrected proof." Editor? Friend? Bargain bin bonanza?

posted by DromJohn at 3:39 pm (EST) on Jul 25, 2007

Re: the Blasted Pine -- sorry to take so long to reply. I've been away from LibraryThing -- no time to catalogue books with several deadlines to meet, then out of the country till July 21.

The book is close at hand, and somewhat a "classic" for satire-loving Canadians. I'll be glad to send you a few samples, just need to hunt for some that are both brief and pointed. Some of them are long poems, and many of course related to specific historic events in Canada.

For starters (quite literally) the poem cum epigraph for the collection is by Louis Dudek, an anglophone Montreal poet, somewhat a poet's poet:

THE PROGRESS OF SATIRE
(To F.R.S. and A.J.M.S.)

[the above initials being F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith, the compilers of the anthology)

"Reading a dead poet
Who complained in his time
Against bad laws, bad manners,
And bad weather in bad rhyme,

"I thought how glad he'd be
To be living in our time
To damn worse laws, worse manners,
And worse weather in worse rhyme."

Or: since one of the recurring themes in the collection is our Canadian cultural "identity" vis-a-vis our "hewers of wood and drawers of water" history next door to our much larger and more powerful neighbour to the south:

THE CALL OF THE WILD
by F.R. Scott

"Make me over, Mother Nature,
Take the knowledge from my eyes,
Put me back among the pine trees
Where the simple are the wise.

Clear away all evil influence
That can hurt me from the States.
Keep me pure among the beaver
With un-Freudian loves and hates,

Where my Conrads are not Aiken,
Where John Bishop's Peales don't sound,
Where the Ransoms are not Crowing
And the Ezras do not Pound."

Congratulations, languagehat, on completing the cataloguing of your collection. I still have a long way to go, and unfortunately(!!?) continue to buy books and must somehow balance spending time reading with time spent cataloguing.

And now that I've been "introduced" to your fascinating list of books, I expect there'll be many of them that I'll want to buy for myself, e.g. the Shamans of Siberia (will have to check exact title).

Happy reading,
nlundberg

posted by andreajorgensen at 2:43 pm (EST) on Jul 25, 2007

When I was announced to my father, back when fathers were not in the delivery room, he had just read in the Post that the Senators were going to send bonus baby Harmon Killebrew to the minors that year 1956. My father seemed to always tell that story. By the time I was 5, I was a Killebrew fan. I have a substantial Killebrew memorbilia collection, and the negotiation I'm having with the National Baseball Hall of Fame to upload there logo onto LT developed after I catalogue a wall calendar which had a Killebrew page, therefore a keeper. I saw a dinner theatre production of Damn Yankees in Minneapolis where they updated as the Twins winning the pennant.

posted by DromJohn at 11:00 am (EST) on Jul 25, 2007

Thanks for pointing out the error; should be fixed now. I am embarrassed I did not notice it at the time.

posted by aesmael at 9:06 am (EST) on Jul 20, 2007

Hey, have you read Ostler's Empires of the Word yet? I loved it.

posted by timspalding at 11:31 am (EST) on Jul 13, 2007

Just a quick comment...

I'm sorry my feeble attempt at humor on our word usage was taken as a personal attack. It certainly wasn't meant to be. I apologize. I think we're going to have to "agree to disagree" on the meaning of "unconscionable". I'm done. Peace.

posted by _Celeste_ at 10:04 pm (EST) on Jun 17, 2007

Hi LH,

I just wanted to say I really enjoyed your comments over on the blog (regarding those who called people complaining about the downtime "anonymous whiners"). I'd made some of the same points in a comment on the previous entry, but not nearly as well. I was relieved to see I wasn't the only longstanding LT member who felt that way.

Laura

posted by perodicticus at 3:51 am (EST) on Jun 14, 2007

Hi Language Hat,

Just thought you might like to know that some Russian translation is needed on this thread.

posted by perodicticus at 10:11 am (EST) on May 24, 2007

Ooh thanks for the heads-up on DeWitt's blog!

posted by vito90 at 12:17 pm (EST) on May 14, 2007

Thanks for your recommendation. Upon further investigation, I see our libraries (library's?) share DeWitt's "The Last Samurai", and that it had a profound influence on us both. It motivated me to learn Japanese (I'm the adopted son of a Japanese woman) which had long been on my to-do list. Despite coming across you in MeFi I had been skeptical of you because of your criticism of DFW's prescriptivist essay, which I totally didn't understand but thoroughly enjoyed :) I remember reading a thread about DFW where people eagerly awaited your arrival to rant on one of my favorite writers :)

Did you follow the story, I don't know, about a year ago when people feared DeWitt had committed suicide but was heard from after disappearing for a few days? It was around the time Spaulding Gray died (whose work I never have read once...) Anyway...thanks again for Hew Strachan, which I am enjoying VERY much.

posted by vito90 at 3:18 am (EST) on May 12, 2007

I just discovered the 'favorite author' feature, and went to add some of mine. . . and I discovered that you have preceded me to claim Avram Davidson. AND Lafferty. And Wodehouse....

posted by AsYouKnow_Bob at 9:01 pm (EST) on May 11, 2007

Languagehat, please forgive my delay in response to your query regarding Richard Goodkin's 'Around Proust'.

If you enjoy Mallarmé and Racine, literary criticism and discussions of intertexuality, I think you will find the book worthwhile. Certainly for the discount prices I've seen book offered at online, it's well worth a peek.

Another "bargain priced" Proust book you may want to search out is Mary Ann Caws' 'Proust', part of the Overlook Illustrated Lives series. It's quite brief but very well illustrated and really gives the reader a sense of what the people and places most closely associated with Proust were like. I bought it just this week at Barnes and Noble (from their bargain book racks) for $4.98.

posted by marietherese at 5:18 pm (EST) on May 10, 2007

Ah! You can find it here. (The illustrations are different, though.)

posted by nasreddin at 12:41 am (EST) on May 1, 2007

Hi languagehat!

I was wondering if you've read Lev Uspensky's book Slovo o slovakh? It's an introduction to linguistics from the late '40s (my copy even had pictures in the margins), but it's written in this absolutely wonderful engaging style not at all typical of Stalinist writing. After having read it at least four times, six year old me could tell you all about the onomatopoeic theory of language origin and whatnot.

Anyway, if you haven't stumbled across it yet, you should try to track it down. Every MGU graduate in my family swears by it.

Nasreddin (from mefi)

posted by nasreddin at 8:51 pm (EST) on Apr 30, 2007

Welcome to Nordica/Baltica, languagehat!

posted by LarsonLewisProject at 5:38 pm (EST) on Mar 5, 2007

Hello languagehat :-)

I was wondering if you have an advice on learning German to give to mindysullivan here. I searched your impressive blog for 'German' (which made me find your entry on The Last Samurai - the book is high on my 'want to read again' list).

Best wishes

sunny

posted by sunny at 11:51 am (EST) on Feb 12, 2007

The Love Songs of a Hoodlum by Wallace Irwin. Yes, just the two of us. I wonder if we have the same edition (if there was more than one!). Mine is red paper cover, copyright 1901, published by Elder and Shepard, San Francisco 1902. Printed by the Stanley-Taylor Co., S.F. With an Introduction by Gellett Burgess.

I have only a faint recollection of where I found this. I think it was in Victoria, British Columbia about 30 years ago ... a wonderful dusty second-hand bookstore on Government (or was it Governor?) Street. A complete shambles, but the pipe-smoking ancient proprietor, who wore an equally-ancient trilby hat that I feel fairly certain he never removed, even in bed, knew exactly where to look amongst the seemingly disorganised piles when I asked about pre-WWI books on New Zealand. Came up with two gems. Then I spotted Irwin's book. It's well travelled; there's a small green 5/8 x 3/8" label from Brentano's, Booksellers and Stationers, Union Square, New York, pasted top left on the inside front cover.
Cheers, Franek, Ottawa, Canada.

posted by franek at 7:24 pm (EST) on Jan 27, 2007

Hello... Just wanted to say hi to the only other person on LibraryThing that shares the "Ancient Turks" with me, though I have it in Turkish translation and apparently you have it in the original Russian. You have a great library though I cannot imagine how you deal with so many books at your house. I am at 1400 books (not counting my textbooks and cookbooks) and I already am having storage problems.

posted by Muge at 12:45 am (EST) on Dec 13, 2006

Hi, and thanks for the comment. I find endless fascination in the origins of words, phrases etc. and find it hard to resist any book that becomes available on this topic.

posted by vallis-salutis at 8:07 am (EST) on Oct 12, 2006

re: Russian Pynchon Collection

It's the best title name I could make out (not being familiar w/Russian language characters). It contains COL49 and 5 short stories, of which I haven't taken a close enough look at to see if they're all in SL (which I believe has 6 in it).

I just combined it with COL49 - I really wasn't sure whether to combine it w/SL or COL49 :-)

I'm just setting up my scanner, so if the cover isn't out there yet, it'll be there soon.

posted by abductee at 9:48 pm (EST) on Sep 18, 2006

Just unearthed Sweet Adversity and am reassessing it to see why I didn't read it in 1998. If you remember it, should I take another crack at it? We do share others that I certainly am glad I read. Thanks.

posted by book_up at 11:13 am (EST) on Aug 24, 2006

Very nice anthropology and ethnography selection. Then again, with that many books, I suppose it would be hard not to have some of the best of every field :).

posted by WylieMaercklein at 12:11 am (EST) on Aug 15, 2006

Aw, hi there, it's Moi! (So Blue it's Black from ages ago on Blogspot, the_red_shoes at LJ) So glad to see you sharing the LibraryThing obsession! I only have about 1/2 my books catalogued, I'll make it into the top 20 yet....

posted by the_red_shoes at 12:56 am (EST) on Jul 30, 2006

Enjoyed looking through your catalog. Noticed we share a nice stack of books, including some of my favorites (Perelman, Faulkner, Wodehouse, etc.). Also enjoyed looking through your blog, which is saying a lot since I don't speak or read any language outside of English. You've a good job of making the subject interesting to someone who usually isn't interested in it.

Happy cataloging.

posted by coffeezombie at 8:10 pm (EST) on Jul 25, 2006

Forgive my nosiness, but what does the 'bon' tag mean?

posted by perodicticus at 11:02 am (EST) on Jun 28, 2006

Hi,
I think you're one of about 12 who share Teach Yourself Gaelic with me. I use Gaidhlig for a lot of linguistic purposes. Maybe some day my ideas will get out to the world. Right now trying to hang in there and get my first book out, one on Maori. You specialize in Russian... others? Are you Celtic? My Dad's family are from Massachusett.
Sally

posted by Sally-AnneLambert at 5:08 am (EST) on Jun 26, 2006

Thanks for the reply. The book was (if its editors can be believed) written by an Iranian menial worker at the British embassy in the 1940s, who taught himself English for the purpose. It sounds intriguing. I thought it might be worth asking you since I've heard of a lot of interesting obscure books through your site.

posted by perodicticus at 8:26 am (EST) on May 3, 2006

Hi Language Hat,

This is kind of an oddball question, but do you happen to know anything about a book called No Heaven for Gunga Din?

Thanks a lot.

posted by perodicticus at 8:37 am (EST) on Apr 28, 2006

hi: we share life along the silk road & it seems like you have an extensive collection in both russia and the middle east - any recommendations on central asia (history, fiction, poetry, anthropology)?

posted by deliriumslibrarian at 12:46 pm (EST) on Apr 19, 2006

Hi LH -- do you know what happened to The Raven? I hope he didn't leave because of the nasty comments.

posted by perodicticus at 5:00 am (EST) on Jan 5, 2006

Also, we're the only ones with copies of On the Edge of Reason, a novel I really loved. Have you read other Krelza?

posted by OmieWise at 4:09 pm (EST) on Dec 18, 2005

You son of a gun, I can't believe you have enough books to warrant a 'yemen' tag. Your library is great, I wish I had your languages, but, on reflection, perhaps it's best not.

posted by OmieWise at 4:01 pm (EST) on Dec 18, 2005

Hi, LH! I just saw that you're on LibraryThing. I think I will just nudge over 1000 once all my books are catalogued, so it's inspiring to have your library to live up to. :-)

posted by tessone at 1:50 pm (EST) on Dec 17, 2005

Thanks for your comment!
I'd love to show you around Greece sometime. It's wonderful there. I tracked down a copy of The Flight of Ikaros after spending two years at the American School in Athens, and a number of excavation seasons in Greece (and a few in Italy). By that point, it was nearly impossible to find it. I used that Amazon search feature about three or four times, gave up, then my fiance tried again later and found it.

posted by Lucretius at 6:30 pm (EST) on Dec 16, 2005

Hey languagehat!

posted by OmieWise at 10:16 am (EST) on Dec 15, 2005

Wow, we share The flight of Ikaros by Kevin Andrews, not an easy book to find these days.

Impressive holdings.

posted by Lucretius at 2:15 pm (EST) on Dec 11, 2005

What do you think of Brenda Ueland?

posted by perodicticus at 4:11 pm (EST) on Nov 18, 2005

Steve, we have almost the same library because I went through yours and used it to add the books we have in common! Which I guess is kind of cheating. But we still share many many books...

posted by anggarrgoon at 9:46 pm (EST) on Oct 3, 2005

Thanks for the compliment! I still have a ton of books to put in, but I'm just a part-timer at this...I bow to the superior library.

Well, bow and drool. :)

posted by asim at 12:24 pm (EST) on Sep 27, 2005

I decided to eschew the translation, and ordered it in Russian from kniga.com. Should be interesting...

posted by maryb at 6:07 pm (EST) on Sep 25, 2005

I spotted Petersburg by Andrei Bely in your library, so I went to Amazon to check it out. I read the 1st two pages there, and the translation looked awful. Does it get any better? Did you read/enjoy this book?

posted by maryb at 1:23 pm (EST) on Sep 24, 2005

Hi Language Hat,
I notice we no longer share Sei Shonagon -- did you get rid of her (I hope not!) or do we have different editions?

posted by perodicticus at 5:06 am (EST) on Sep 19, 2005

I always respect a person who has an OLD. Bravo! Vale!

posted by amethystarlight at 4:41 pm (EST) on Sep 9, 2005