Book Hauls

We've mentioned this in passing on other reads, but it's about time it had one of its own... Picked up any good books recently?

I've just been to the charity shop and bought cheap:

- an omnibus edition of Henry Green's Living, Loving and Partygoing
- Shifts, a collection of short fiction by Adam Thorpe

From Bookcloseout.com: The Afterlife: Essays and Criticism by Penelope Fitzgerald, Hawthorne in Concord by Philip McFarland and Selected Poems and Four Plays by Yeats. And from Amazon, The Letters of Samuel Beckett.

Brought home a big load of stuff from our town library book sale. Two huge books of Penguin history by J.M. Roberts, the complete short stories of J.G. Ballard...and I'm waiting for the arrival of Andre Breton's surreal classic, MAGNETIC FIELDS, which I've ordered from England.

Ah, I love library book sales. These are from about a month ago.

VERY nice...

On a number of occasions I've had a dream where I'm in a book store; there's some kind of massive sale on and everywhere I look there are titles I've wanted for years, discounted 75% or what have you. I'm snatching up handfuls of books--

--but then the alarm goes off and I wake up. You know the story.

This spring the dream came true--albeit in a very modest fashion. On the way to visiting the folks we stopped off at a mini-mall in Yorkton to stretch our legs. When I popped into a chain bookstore for a quick glance, I found a scattered pile of books "5 for $10". And the first tomes I spotted were by two of my faves, James Crumley and Nicholas Christopher.

I tensed, waiting for the alarm to go off.

But it never did--at least, so far...

The local symphony recently held their ten day (!) fundraising book sale. The "literature" section is fairly generic (if I had a dollar for every copy of To the Lighthouse I came across...) but I picked up a few old favorites and some "what the hell, I'll try this" selections:

Domestic Peace and Other Stories (Balzac)
Undertones of War (Blunden)
Great Russian Short Stories
Great English Short Stories
A Personal Matter (Oe)
Everything That Rises Must Converge (O'Connor)
From a View to a Death (Powell)
The Reef (Wharton)
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (Carver)
Cheri/The Last of Cheri (Colette)
The Semi-attached Couple & The Semi-detached House (Emily Eden--wonky touchstone)
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (Bemelmans)
The Vicar of Bullhampton (Trollope)
The Girls: A Tetralogy of Novels (de Montherlant)
And a selection to increase my Algonquin Round Table cred--Of All Things, Benchley-or Else! and Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This?

Good reading, Harry!

Between a MASSIVE used book sale (I didn't see a thing marked above $2.00, including hardcovers) and end-of-term splurges in lieu of keggers, I've recently acquired the following:

Of Human Bondage -- a hardcover to replace my Signet edition with its text kindly running into the gutter of its pages
Lilith -- J.R. Salamanca one, not the touchstone one provided
A Passage to India
The Scarlet Letter -- really, really nice illustrated hardcover to replace my Dover edition
The House on the Strand
Corelli's Mandolin
Old School
Middlemarch
Lorna Doone
Ex Libris
Orient Express -- Graham Greene's novel, not the Agatha Christie novel touchstone gives you
The Aran Islands -- the last time I went there our van driver refused to give us a tour of the island because he'd have to cut through a graveyard, and he "didn't want to be distairbin' the spirits"

Really great hauls, everyone. Major library sale in my area this weekend. Here's hoping.

Weekend purchases:

The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom and Selected Essays by Albert Camus (snazzy Everyman's Library edition)
The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy
Operation Shylock by Philip Roth

and, inadvertantly, my second copy of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.

Oooo, I've been after ORCHARD KEEPER for awhile meself. Cormac's first...and I think the only major novel of his I don't own. Lucky devil...

waiting on the 8 books i bought last week from Small Beer Press' $1.00/book -really $2.00/book w/ shipping- sale.

Huh. I ordered seven....

maybe i only ordered 7 too. i'll need to check. 8 books, $10. shipping - one book: Kings Last Song soldfor $12

maybe they felt a little guilty since their web page wasn't calculating shipping rates at all properly @ the start. i dunno.

#12 Likewise for me, Cliff!

Dammit! Now I really want to get a job! Oh well, I have 2500+ books to keep me occupied until Adam Smith's Invisible Hand stop pummeling me in the torso.

I recently grabbed a nice two-volume hardcover edition of stories by Georges Simenon for less than $4.

Was handed a carrier bag of books this lunch time by Eric Brown. He was on his way to Bradford and stopped off in Sheffield to change coaches, so we met up. In the bag were:

Nights of Villjamur, Mark Charan Newton
Deadstock, Jeffrey Thomas
Winterstrike, Liz Williams
Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham
Journey into Space, Toby Litt
Xenopath by Eric himself.

All new copies he'd received for review. Well, except ofr Xenopath, of course.

Not a bad haul for a tenner.

Especially curious about the Litt--it was reviewed in the same issue of INTERZONE as your piece on Bruce Sterling. Cunningham has never much interested me.
Obviously you'd better link to any reviews you post or we'll nail your knees to your forehead...

Haven't read any Eric Brown--ya like him lots? Anybody who hands over a stack of books can't be all THAT bad.

It was the review in Interzone that made me want to read the Litt. The Cunningham sounded interesting. And he was selling both very cheap...

I've known Eric for years, and yes, he's an excellent writer. He's never made it big because he writes character-driven sf. His last few books, all for Solaris, have seen him move int oa slightly bigger market, although of them Kéthani is perhaps closest to his other stuff. Helix I thought was a bit disappointing.

Went into a bargain store yesterday, looking for some stuff for my son Liam's school project and came across the loose pile of books. Glanced at them, as any bibliophile would, and my eyes nearly bugged out of my head.

For $1.50 (Canadian, yet), I picked up a beautiful hardcover edition of LES BRAVADES, a book of watercolours Orson Welles put together for his daughter (with Rita Hayworth). Managed to peel off the ugly sale sticker and carefully rubbed away the underlying goo. Thrilled to own this book--lovely to look at AND it's by one of my maverick heroes, the great Orson himself...

Not a haul, but definitely a bargain: a signed first edition of Iain Banks's Walking on Glass... for £20.

Very nice. D'you like the book (that, of course, makes it doubly pleasurable)?

P.S. Must have been tired this morning: spelled "peel" wrong in the previous message. This word nut humbly apologizes...

Peals of laughter all around at the writer who didn't know a peal from a peel. Hahahahahah. (I'm jealous of you, Cliff. I'm sure you know that. You too, Ian, and Wolffie.)

There was a fellow who brought to church one day an autographed Bible published in the 16th Century. He collected autographed Bibles.

Autographed by whom? Obviously not its authors...

I got two awesome books in the mail today via Bookmooch:

The Hasidic Anthology ed. by Louis Newman
Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America At Century's End by Sara Evans

Okay, what's The Hasidic Anthology? I just clicked on it and looked at the available descriptions and reviews. Then I clicked Barnes and Noble to see what they had to say about it. Is it something I should be looking for?

Robert

There is a used book store located next to my office and I shop there regularly. Yesterday I bought ten books including a complete 3 volume edition of Sir Richard Burton's translation of the 1001 Nights and a four volume slipcase edition of the works of Lu Xun who was an influential Chinese writer from 1918 to 1936. All of the books I bought were hard covers. I paid an average of $7.00 a book. The store owners do give me a 20% discount for being a regular shopper. When I buy used hard covers I am always amazed at the quality of the books. At least 50 to 75 percent of what I get are in like new condition.
Buying used books is a bit of an adventure. You can't go into the store with a list and expect to find everything you are looking for. You can go into the store or other venue and find something like the Lu Xun or 3 volume 1001 Nights.

Now THAT'S a book store. But I have to wonder sometimes what all these big discounts mean to profits and how long a business--particularly an indie--can stay alive marking books down so much. Good for readers but what about longterm viability?

>28 Mr.Durick:: It was published by Schocken Books before Schocken was bought by Random House and is now out of print.

It's a collection of Hasidic stories and aphorisms. Quite wonderful.

Thank you. I am sorry that it is out of print. I have only rudimentary search skills, but I'll have to have a try on Google.

Robert

Try this: http://www3.addall.com/New/compare.cgi?dispCurr=USD&id=71686&isbn=087668...

Cool!

Robert

And just to toss it out there - if anyone has a bunch of pre-Random House Schocken books, I would love to take them off your hands...

Just arrived today...

Four Freedoms, John Crowley
Apollo 11: Owner's Workshop Manual, Chris Riley (touchstone not working - it's this book)
Eclipse Corona, John Shirley (signed)

Not completely sold on Shirley (but it's signed so that makes the difference) but the other two are more than worthy. I'd definitely steal them from you if I ever get the chance.

Thieving, rotten bastard that I am.

i liked city come a-walkin - the writing wasn't great but i did enjoy the book a good deal. I thought he was might have been an influence on Jack Womack, whom i really like.

Yeah, I know some folks claim Shirley as the father of cyberpunk but I've read a bit of his stuff and it just didn't knock my socks off. Ian, post a review, will ya? Once you finish ECLIPSE CORONA?

Will be a while - it's the 3rd book of a trilogy and I don't have the 2nd yet.

Earlier this month I ordered a bunch of discounted books from B&N; today they had a table of 50% off books. I hauled away:

The Penland Book of Homemade Books
Birds of the World (photographs taken by Gilles Martin, if I recall)
General Chemistry by Linus Pauling
The Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides
Tenting on the Plains: General Custer in Kansas and Texas by Elizabeth B. Custer
The Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest by John Allan Wyeth
The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
Personal Memoirs of P.H. Sheridan by Philip H. Sheridan
Ancient Egyptian Myths and Legends by Lewis Spence
The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach
Characters and Events of Roman History: From Caesar to Nero by Guglielmo Ferrero
The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 by Alfred Thayer Mahan
Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno
America Now by Harold E. Stearns (I don't remember if he's the author or if he collected material together to form the book, though.)

Not bad, I think.

That's a pretty brainy roster of tomes. Good on you...

>42 CliffBurns: - Oh, indeed. Worst of all, the day after that, I got at least as many books from another B&N. The half-off table can be so generous, but its timing is bad.

Funny thing is I wouldn't expect most of the books I got to be half-off; the majority are published by B&N (and at the second B&N, they had a huge chemistry dictionary. It was lovely, but alas, I could not get it), after all.

Side note: no one seemed to be looking at those books, either. Maybe that's why they had to be half-off...

also because they're B&N imprints of material that's out of copyright, all they really need to do is cover production/distribution costs.
I more or less divide equally between library book sale purchases, Amazon and used bookstores online, and for comix i support a local store @ full price. The owner is v. geeky and knowledgeable and after i told him what I liked, he is v. good @ picking out other material i'd like.

But probably half my reading comes from our library which is great when i come across a surprise that i really liked ie the wasted vigil and even better when i read a book that i might have bought, given reviews and general opinion, and found myself disliking the savage detectives.

I just bought a beautiful, hardcover, slipcased edition of In Our Time by Hemingway. It was printed in the 90s, I think. Got it on sale for $10 and it's just beautiful.

Found Rumours of Rain by Andre Brink and Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone at the local Savers (kinda sorta like Goodwill). I want to dip into some South African lit sometime soon.

I have a question for the group. what do you think of those people with scanners who are now showing up at library and charity sales ?The big sale in Gainesville, the best I.ve encountered so far in Florida, doesnt allow them.

>47 cndkey: - Scanners?

Checking the value/availability of a particular title? Is that what you mean? A wolf among the sheep? Some greedhead seeking books for profit instead of a dedicated bibliophile snooping for a bargain?

Yes. these are like the things you see clerks in grocery or convenience stores using to take inventory by scanning the barcodes. For books they are set to scan ISBN numbers which are linked to prices and other info. In effect you have something like Amazon or Abe search engines on a hand held scanner. The people who use these haul away boxes full of books. Unlike the George Carlin "Stuff" routine they dont seem to always get the "good stuff". At one sale they left very good books on the specials table, some with ISBN numbers. Some of them may be looking for textbooks for which there is a big market on the net and in college town book stores.

I hate the notion. But that's capitalism, at its most cold-blooded.

Big SIGH.

>52 cndkey: - Well, as long as the books are being bought I don't really see the problem. Maybe that's because I view anyone and everyone who buys something I had wanted to get for myself as the enemy, so it doesn't matter if they have scanners or not.

let me add a big sigh for all those bookstores which are closed because the landlord would rather rent to a trendy restaurant or boutique.I lost my store because of that. Meanwhile life goes on: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, the Pill Versus Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar.pb
Frank Whitford Bauhaus pb
Franz Kafka The Castle pb
E Annie Proulx The Shipping News.pb
The best of a bad lot from a library sale shelf. no scanner needed

i commented on the horde of used booksellers w/ scanners pushing their way through the last Pittsboro library book sale. Usually I'm uber polite in crowds, but if someone was scanning a box of books and i had finished my visual scanning of the box next to it, I'd just look over and take out books i might be interested in. The whole group of speed scanners was awfully rude.

Ooh. I forgot to post here. A few weeks ago, but I spotted a nice copy of Sebastian by Lawrence Durrell. Caught my eye, b/c the dustjacket looked very nice and was in an unmarred dj protector. Flipped it open, sure enough it was the American 1st. Hmmm... oh look. It appears to be signed. Paid the $5 and thought of this group.

Nice one. Only my Livia is signed.

I just went to a book sale up the street from my house and scored the following for $6:

A Spy in the House of Love by Anais Nin
The Man Who Mistook His wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
The Psychoanalysis of Fire by Gaston Bachelard
Art and Lies by Jeanette Winterson
The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville
Amerika: The Missing Person by Franz Kafka (2008 translation by Mark Harman)
Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
The Devil in the Hills by Cesare Pavese

>58 inaudible: - Six dollars TOTAL?

Why do none of my neighbours have book sales?

Not a neighbor - there's a charity bookstore nearby, and they do half-off sales now and then. All the books are just $1-$2 anyway, so with half-off they almost give them away.

Hmmm, well, scanners. The fact is that a barcode scanner ain't worth doodly if the book lacks a barcode, and the used book market is full of books that predate widespread retail barcoding ... which was, by an odd coincidence, the subject of conversation when I dropped into Pulp Fiction in Vancouver on a business trip a few weeks back and scored a (barcoded) first edition, first printing Rock Springs by Richard Ford.

I'm in favor of more people using their psychic powers to blow up people's heads.

Oh wait ... not that kind of scanners.

Carry on.

>60 inaudible: - Ah. Oh, well; my point still stands. I don't find sales with books that cheap...

Maybe I should get out of the house more. That could help.

I've been collecting romance novels. I am amassing a nice collection of smut with unintentionally humorous covers. I guess some would call these pictures "erotic." My latest find is my new favorite: http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n19/n96157.jpg

>61thats why I dont feel at all threatened by them. But, if I owned a large general interest used book store and saw these guys waking off with books I needed for general stock, I would probably feel differently. A good tolchuk on their gullivers or in their rots , to use the Nadsat of Clockwork Orange.
>64 holcombjmarie: My all time favorite book cover appeared on an early pb edition of Pnin. A bald headed, bespeckled Pnin is depicted strolling through campus with some cute little Lolitas in the foreground and background.

the scanners annoy me for two reasons: 1. they are VERY rude and pushy; 2. goddamnit...it takes the fun out of looking for used books to be frantic about it all. (actually these are the same points phrased differently).

>66 bobmcconnaughey:

I agree completely. I find the same behaviour by the three or four book dealers who haunt local library book sales infuriating. Running, pushing, grabbing, elbowing as they all fight over the hardcover non-fiction. Like watching crows fight over a dead possum. Nauseating.

>66 bobmcconnaughey:,67 - So if they were calm and civil you probably wouldn't mind?

>66 bobmcconnaughey: I have heard from booksellers about a sale at which everyone applauded when one particularly obnoxious fellow was thrown out. I dont know if he was a dealer or not. Dealers and scanners are not the only offenders.

#68

I'm not opposed to contact sports or physical roughness in principle. I just don't think book buying falls into either category.

So, I guess my answer is yes, I wouldn't mind so much if they could manage some civility.

#68 totally agree. I know the goal is to raise money for the library...but it hardly matters if it's MY money or a used book dealers. And, perhaps, my money has a slight moral edge since i've contributed 100s of books to the book sales overs the years.

Maybe the "friends of the library" should get first pick (UNC does their sales this way)

If book dealers didn't exploit library book sales to sell books at obscene mark-ups, I wouldn't really care. This is like stock market speculation or Mafia resale. Buy a Michener book at a library book sale for 50 cents -- for a hardcover -- then turn it around and sell the same book for $8+ at your used book store. You reap a $7.50 profit, even though the "intrinsic value" of said book has not changed.

Ayn Rand Objectivist Fanboy: But capitalism is good and the dealers are acting in their own self-interest.

Decent Caring Human Being: Those stocks you sold me that lost all their value, I want my money back.

AROF: It's your own fault. Stop begging, you commie parasite. (Gives 70 page speech on the virtues of selfishness ... abridged.)

AROF then punches a baby, sets fire to a hobo, and tells Bush there are WMDs in Iraq.

DCHB: That's the last time I let my uncle try and sell me stocks in artichoke futures.

I was once a part owner of a bookstore in Milwaukee and probably never sold a Michener hardcover for more than half the cover price. That was pretty standard in used bookstores before the internet. As for profit, we payed the previous owner $1100 a month and we paid the same in rent, so we had to make $2200 before we saw any profit every month. As I mentioned in a previous posting, it is common for landlords to boot used bookstores inorder to rent to a trendy new shop or restaurant. It happened to me and it happened to two of the largest used bookstores in Madison. It didnt happen to the oldest of the stores because she owns the building. If she didnt she would have lost the lease to Wendy's or Pizza Pit or Burger King. To the best of my knowledge none of them has ever set a State Street pandhandler on fire, punched a baby or approved of GW's war.

I wonder what the ghost of Jane Jacobs would think of that? The profit of gentrification vs. the more nebulous aspect of "neighborhood character." I'm not an urban planner, so I don't have any answers.

>72 kswolff: - But isn't that the risk you run with stocks?

But you're implying that the stocks had any intrinsic value to begin with. Our current Capitalist Apocalypse has occurred because the amoral geniuses on Wall Street -- and card-carrying members of the Rough-Sex-For-John-Galt Fan Club -- have hyperinflated stocks that were worth nothing. In a word: sub-prime. Mmmm, delicious sub-prime rib. The ropey gristle means it's yummier. Coupled with the derivatives market -- and deregulating derivatives to the point where brokers were selling things too complicated to comprehend -- was another aspect that has led to the Cell Death of Laissez Faire Capitalism.

That said, what do we do next? All the great 20th century -isms have proven resounding failures: Communism, Capitalism, Fascism, including the ism left on blue dresses.

Any ideas, geniuses?

Bartering works. When it doesn't, pillaging hasn't failed me yet.

>76 kswolff: - Apologies for my lack of economic knowledge.

>77 benjclark: - And I doubt it ever will.

For those of you in the United States, Dalkey Archive is having a summer sale. It only runs until the 29th of this month so if you're interested, you have until Wednesday.

If you aren't familiar with the Dalkey Archive, I'd suggest taking some time to browse their backlist. A non-profit publisher that focuses on quality U.S. and World Literature in translation.

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/

Only in the US of A? Canadians get hooped again. Dalkey's an excellent press...

While on a trip up the Shenandoah Valley to Philadelphia and back through Virginia again, I picked up a bunch of Dover Thrift Editions at various museum gift stores (Uncle Tom's Cabin, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Autobiography of Ben Franklin, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, The First Men in the Moon, At the Earth's Core), one Penguin Classic (Our Nig, very excited to find that at Gettysburg), several used books (a collection of short stories by Voltaire, Humphry Clinker, Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited, The Tin Princess, The Woman in White) at a used book store in Valley Forge, a Ruth Fielding book at an antique store in Fredericksburg, and perhaps (and most exciting) the eighth volume of The Spectator from 1803 at a used book store, also in Fredericksburg. All of these cost the grand total of $60.

Well the sale still applies, it just isn't quite as attractive for us.

I think its 20 books for $120 (shipping included) in the U.S. Shipping isn't included for those outside the USA.

There are some other configurations, with less books on offer, as well.

I had a quick glance through their roster of authors--a very, very excellent selection. Snobs based in the USA, check out that sale! And, again, kudos to Dalkey...

>79 beardo:-83 - If only I hadn't gone hog-wild with the Folio Society sales...

Though even if I hadn't, I still wouldn't be allowed to get more. Just as well.

One question, though: how are Dalkey Archive's books in terms of paper and binding?

If you were to take advantage of the sale, what authors would you look at?

I'm very grateful that you mentioned this opportunity, beardo - I've heard good things about Dalkey but have never gotten around to buying anything from them, so this seems like a good time. But so many of the authors are unfamiliar and enticing, so I just don't know where to start!

As far as I know, Dalkey puts out well-bound, good quality books. No fear on that front. Not too many places where you're going to find writing by Harry Matthews, et all. It would be pretty hard to find decent translations of a good number of the authors in Dalkey's catalogue elsewhere. Give 'em all the support you can...

>86 CliffBurns: - Ah, thanks. I'll try and support them when I can!

Our local library's fall sale today (started yesterday, but the crowd was just too damn big to fight. $19.50, 17 books (as a member of FoTL get a $3.00 discount.) 1st ed, w/ dust jacket of Auster's In the country of last things, poetry chapbooks by James Merrill, Donald Hall and someone new to me, Mona Van Duyn, vol that won the Pulitzer in 1991. a good day to die - Jim Harrison, the rebel angels, the pianist, thriller rose by Cruz, several books i've read lib. copies of - shadow of the silk road, the history of love, a second copy to give to a friend of a philosophical investigation , Carroll After silence, lux the poet by one of my favorite authors of light pleasure reading, Millar, Cracking India by a Pakistani author i was unfamiliar with, Bapsi Sidwa, and some other odds and ends (eg - Scandinavian Proverbs to give to our close Swedish friend who provides us w/ our fix of Danish wedding cookies (and much more) each holiday season..). The dealers took ALL the SF/Fantasy yesterday and i was a bit disappointed in the amount of poetry, but wtf, will keep me going for a good while, and can't beat the price. It's a grocery bag for $5.00 tomorrow, but this is defn. enough till i donate our next set of books for the next sale.

Oooo, Robert, there's some goooood stuff there.

My greedy, acquisitive nature is definitely aroused by those prize catches.

And today, on the bag of books for $5.00 Saturday, picked up another 17 or so. Mostly trade ARC's but the one that, in some wise, looks to be the most interesting, is the 1936 volume of Eliot's collected verse 1909-1935. The book had belonged to an English prof. Many poems are very heavily annotated. Inserted was a lengthy set of typed notes for a lecture on the Wasteland, and...dated 1950, was a student essay, marked down substantially, awarded a 70. I can understand the person who gave the book to the booksale (probably one the prof's kids) carefully cutting out the teacher's name, but not having it there IS a shame. Some better poetry was out today, too: Donald Hall, James Merrill, Mona van Duyn near changes won the 1991 Pulitzer and i'm quite sure i'd never heard of her.

Only a wee haul, but yesterday I popped into a couple of local charity shops on my way to the supermarket and picked up number9dream, David Mitchell, The Woman and the Ape, Peter Høeg and Live and Let Die, Ian Fleming - all for about a quid each.

A "quid" being a particularly revolting sexual act peculiar to the Brits. Don't ask.

Giving Mitchell another shot, are you? Lovely. That one's set in Japan, if I remember; for some reason, when I picture Japan, I imagine something out of "Blade Runner"...

Nah. A quid is spondulicks innit.

Is a quid exchangeable for Schrute Bucks?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G59KY7ek8Rk

Another visit to the charity shops... A Fool's Alphabet and Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks, and Moonraker by Ian Fleming. 69p each. That's about $51 in American money, or $76.23 in Canadian money.

I had no idea Britain's finances had improved that sharply.

The sun never sets...on Ian Sales' imagination.

A quid is a squid after it loses its suction.

Yesterday I got Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and John Reed's Insurgent Mexico together for $1.50, both in fine condition.

Yesterday my local library had a book sale; for $1.50 I got His Dark Materials trilogy, The Odyssey, and (this surprised me) The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Now THAT's a good mix--which translation of ODYSSEY?

While in the big city, found a number of books, library book sale, other cheap venues.

Michael Curtis Ford is one of my favorite historical novelists and I was pleased to come across THE FALL OF ROME. Also a couple of volumes of THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES; the editions edited by Salman Rushdie and Michael Chabon. They had the Stephen King edited BEST AMERICAN STORIES there (2007?) but I just couldn't bring myself to buy it. With his aesthetic and mentality toward writing, I have no respect for the man's views. Other neat finds included, Algernon Blackwood's THE COMPLETE JOHN SILENCE STORIES, Steve Aylett's neo-noir/cyberpunk collection TOXICOLOGY, Jared Diamond's GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL and a couple of cool erotic titles from Taschen (Publishing)

One small footnote, I went into a news stand and bought the Atlantic Monthly Fiction issue (I do that now and then) and was appalled by the high prices on many of the magazines. With the free stuff available on the internet, charging twelve to fifteen bucks (or more) for a magazine seems like suicide to me. These people are pricing themselves right out of existence. I know it probably has to do with rising costs and falling advertising $$ but I wonder how long that sort of this can be sustained.

Also, there are no longer any major bookstores (chains or otherwise) in downtown Regina, you have to drive to the north or south end of town to have a chance to buy a decent new book. Wow...

I think I have you all beat on this one. I work at a public library, and when we get donations or weed from our collection, employees get first crack at the books for 50 cents apiece. My classics collection has quadrupled since I've started working here. Not to mention the awesome nonfiction that constantly gets weeded because hardly anyone reads serious nonfiction these days. Library booksales are some of the best deals in town.

Aahh...gah....smrkk...

(Sorry, your post has rendered me temporarily inarticulate with envy and rage.)

i dunno - i figured that my books from our most recent library sale came to $0.22 each. But the last day is a grocery bag of books for $5.00, for anything but the "collector's table" where it's let's make a deal. That included a first hb ed. of Auster's in the country of last things for $5.50 which inflated my expenses considerably ;-)

It's not a recent haul, by any means, but perhaps this also counts.

Velly, velly nice.

I had no idea you were such a Lucius Shepard fan. I know some stories that would--never mind.

And Lewis Shiner. I remember him from an anthology of nuclear (nucular?) war stories back in the early 80's.
And wasn't there a rock 'n roll novel (I refuse to open a tab to check Google)? What's he been up to?

You can tell from that impressive pile o' books that you're not married, Sales. You've got some actual fucking income to dispose of at the end of the month.

Of course, I hate you...

The rock & roll novel was Glimpses, and it's bloody excellent. His last novel was Black and White, published last year by Subterranean, and they're also publishing his Collected Stories in November (it's on the wants list).

At another library sale I got Wieland (I was surprised about that one, too), No Thoroughfare and The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens from 1900, The Way of All Flesh, and The Lost World for a total of $1.75.

#100: E.V. Rieu's translation (Penguin Classics)

I really like glimpses. One of those fantasies that i've foisted on a bunch of friends who usually avoid the genre like the plague, and they've uniformly enjoyed it. Of course these folk ARE rock and roll fans and the whole recreation of lost albums is great fun.

Got a free copy of Sex Scandal America by David Rosen Looks like a fun, scintillating read.

See, the title alone sells it for me.

It's bound to be more amusing and worthy of respect than Obama's Nobel Prize speech...

#112:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/73783

Check and mate.

But I counter by stating that my closing sentence was more of a quip/rejoinder than an attempt to lead us off-topic. Of course, had someone taken exception the conversation would have shifted to the thread you indicate.

Just sayin'. It's these political non sequiturs (what on earth did your second sentence have to do with your first?) that lead to pointless arguments & hijacking.

But this sort of thing hasn't happened in the group lately (not that I've noticed, anyhow), and for that I'm quite glad.

115:what on earth did your second sentence have to do with your first?

Isn't that the classic definition of a non sequitor? Latin for "it does not follow," for those of you playing the home game.

http://darwin.chem.villanova.edu/~bausch/images/nonsequitur.jpg

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon (1st ed.)
Talk to the Hand by Lynne Truss (1st ed.)
The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
Ludwig Wittgenstein by David Pears
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabakov
Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire: the Conquest of Solitude
Levertov, Rexroth, Williams (poetry collection)

All for $5!

Another good day:

A Casebook on Ezra Pound
Foundations of Judaism by Jacob Neusner
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
The Girl Who Played Go by Shan Sa
two issues of 'The Literary Review' (one of which showcases contemporary Danish fiction)
House of Incest by Anais Nin
Diary of Anais Nin, Volume Four
Marcel Proust: Overlook Illustrated Lives by Mary Ann Caws
Tosca: Libretto (Bilingual edition)
Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin (hahaha)

All for $6!

What have you been doing? Robbing libraries?

There's an amazing used book warehouse/store near me that has half-off sales a few times a year, and all the books are priced at one or two dollars to begin with. They also have an unsorted section of the warehouse that is $2 for whatever you can fit in a bag.

Can't match that haul but when I was in Regina, I picked up cheap library copies of Alessandro Baricco's OCEAN SEA and Iain Banks' WHIT.

Found the 3-volume omnibus editions of Strangers and Brothers by CP Snow. Nothing beats a library sale.

Oh, I'm jealous.... my health problems make it hard to leave the house, but even if I did, the used bookstores here in SF are fairly pricey, and the library sales are notoriously crowded. I used to visit Portland and make pilgrimages to Powell's, where I felt the selection and the ability to page thru a book made up for the prices.

I used to volunteer for a library in Montgomery County, Maryland, and picked up many treasures for minimal money. They thought my tastes were so strange that sometimes they would just give me the books I wanted. (This must be true, because until I entered a bunch of fiction, no other LTers had even 10% of my library. Even now it's under 12%.)

I got a bag of free books once from Freecycle--it's a wonderful resource for giving and getting, if you don't know about it already--
http://www.freecycle.org/
It was a mixture of dogs and gems. The best one was Alias Grace, which turned me into an Atwood fan. The dogs went to BookMooch.

My financial, uh, stuff, hit the fan recently, so I can't buy anything (except beans), but before that happened I ordered a pile of remaindered books, which got here last week and made me very happy:
Female of the Species
California Fashion: From the Old West to New Hollywood
Mistress Masham's Repose
Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me With a Goodly Amount of Murder
The Abduction of Sita
The Manual of Detection
Gentlemen of the Road
Gormenghast
Great Short Works of Mark Twain
To the Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy
Alive in Necropolis
Of Gold and Grass
The Ruby in Her Navel
The Jewel Trader of Pegu
Persian Fire
The Barbary Plague

All for under $100, including S&H.

Irene, I'm sorry to hear you have CFS. My dad has had that for more than a decade now.

Cheers for odd book tastes!

I was lucky enough to find Oulipoems by Philip Terry for just 500 yen at the Japan Writers Conference.

inaudible--

Thanks for the sympathy. I'm sorry about your dad. I hope something comes from the discovery of a retrovirus in cfs patients.

I took an antiviral for nine months. It helped me cognitively, but zilch otherwise. Now I can read entire books, at least some of the time. Before I couldn't concentrate on something as short as a newspaper article.

Woohoo, just picked up the complete box set of Remembrance of things past (1934 hardback editions) for $2. The book gods are smiling on me today!

Yoicks, that IS a steal. Congrats!

Found an unabridged reprint of Audobon's Quadrupeds of North America for $12. At the bargain area at Barnes & Noble. Wonderful reproductions of the hand-painted lithographs.

There are many editors and people in the publishing biz I am acquainted with who would qualify for a place in that book, Karl...

There is a picture of a lynx licking itself ... if that's what you mean?

In a nutshell. Must be someone from ______________ (publisher's name deleted at the insistence of my attorney, J.S. Squeen & Associates).

My parents popped down for a visit, so we went into the city centre. Waterstone's are doing a "buy one get one free". I bought David Lodge's Deaf Sentence and got Roberto Bolaño's 2666 free. Or was it the other way round? My father wanted a book that was in the "3 for 2" promotion, but he could only find two books he wanted. I tried to persuade him to get me Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones as his third book, but he found something he'd sooner read himself instead...

I'm green, Sales, and that's only partially because of me Irish blood. Good snags.

Our local library had a charity fundraiser in which they asked a number of Country & Western celebrities to donate CDs plus copies of their favourite books. They then auctioned these off on eBay. I know nothing about C&W music but decided to bid on a few items just to support the library and I won the packs from Canadian musicians Jamie Warren and The Higgins.

Here's what I got: 3 signed CDs, 2 signed photographs, 2 t-shirts, 2 canvas library bags, 1 signed water bottle, 1 shortbread cookie in the shape of a cowboy hat, 1 giraffe pen and the best part: 1984, Wuthering Heights, Demian, This is Your Brain on Music and Go, Dog, Go. Not bad for a $50 donation to the library. Most of the other celebrities chose Clive Cussler and the like. Guess I found the literate ones.

I think, Cliff, you might be surprised how much literate people like roots kinds of white boy blues (country music, to all you sophisticates out there). Give me some good old bluegrass, tell me again about what Uncle Pen could make that fiddle do. There's no place I'd rather be than some honky tonk road house with hardwood floors.

I don't mind bluegrass, Gene, me lad. Stanley Bros. are jes' fine with me. My mom was married before she was fifteen. You're talking to a dyed-in-the-wool hillbilly here...

Dear me, you New World types with your limited gene pools...

Uncle Pen, my oh my. Me, I like the fiddle tunes. Bill Cheatham, Whiskey Before Breakfast, Fiddler's Dram. Bluegrass is best when not a spectator sport.

And on topic, This is Your Brain on Music, good book.

Off topic: Sales, one of these days I'm gonna tie a slipknot in your trachea.

138: Limited gene pools? The houses of Windsor and Hapsburg ... inbred hemophiliacs of limited brain capacity seem pretty limited. Then again, go to Appalachia or a town hall meeting and you meet the same type, minus the hemophilia.

Went to "Savers" today, a bargain Goodwill-ish type store, and found:

Duluth by Vidal
The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch. Looks interesting. I've been curious about this book for a while.
From Dawn to Decadence by Barzun
The Radiant Future by Alexander Zinoviev. Looks funny. Gotta love satires of the Soviet system.

Small Appalachian towns aren't that bad. Even when you are related to at least half the people.

It's awful when phone books contain only 3 last names...and 500 people.

Picked up, for about 16 bucks

The English Patient
Black Hawk Down
Invitation to a Beheading
The Human Factor
The Bonfire of the Vanities

Amazon giftcard went to

Gilead
The Guns of August
The Broom of the System

This whole "reduce the amount of books I own that I need to read" plan isn't working out.

Try doing genealogy research in Western NCarolina counties. On Patty's dad's side, most everyone is either a Carter,a Gibbs or a Blanton and yup...lots of cousins getting hitched. Death certificates from the end of the 19th and early 20th C are both sad and fascinating. "supposed to be heart attack. dropped down dead. didn't say a word." was one female relative. Another, much sadder, was a 16 yr old girl dying of pellagra in 1916 (niacin deficiency - very common in the American south w/ a diet based on corn and pork).

Got Liver by Will Self Thanks LT Early Reviewers!

A bit of a haul today--as in hauling two bulging bags of used, mainly ex-library books from the Sports Hall of Fame book sale. I missed the first few days so the selection was pretty picked through. Still, managed to snag a newer copy of IN COLD BLOOD, THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF JAY GOULD, Thomas Cahill's biography of Pope John XXIII, Nicholas Negroponte's BEING DIGITAL and, um, Rowse's SHAKESPEARE THE MAN.

And a bunch of other stuff for family & pals. My shoulders are killing me...

Just the one book, but it's taken me years to track down a copy - Dinosaur Junction by Ann Halam. Halam is the pseudonym Gwyneth Jones uses for her YA novels. This one apparently "got lost in the shuffle" when she moved publishers from Orchard to Dolphin, which explains why copies are so rare.

Incidentally, I'd rate Halam's Inland trilogy - The Daymaker, Transformations* and The Skybreaker - alongside Le Guin's original Earthsea trilogy any day of the week.

(* no touchstone, of course. Because LT would sooner return 100 titles vaguely related to the one I want instead of the actual exact title)

Picked up Peter Ackroyd's The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein and Beirut Blues by Hanan al-Shaykh in a local charity shop yesterday. I thought Al-Shaykh's Women of Sand and Myrrh was very good, altho I was less impressed by her Only in London. We'll see what Beirut Blues is like.

(wtf - the LT touchstone gives the author for Beirut Blues as "Hanaan as-Sjakh", which is bizarre. Yes, it's a long "a" in Hanan, and sheen is a "sun letter" so the definite article elides into the noun and the "l" disappears... but it's only the Swedes who pronounce "sj" as "sh". Besides, the English translations of her novel all spell her name as I have above. Still, this is what happens when you crowd-source data...)

Almost done with the secret history of moscow - a far more conventional bit of the fantastic set inside the mundane than her exquisitely original steampunkish the alchemy of stone. All the same i'm enjoying the vision of Moscow which is both satirical and bleak as the epoch of "robber barons" gets reinvented in Russia during the 1990s. A good deal of Russian folklore is incorporated - which I aooreciate. But there's no question in my mind, at least, that this novel pales in comparison, whether one considers plot, character development, originality and just plain good writing to her later novel. If you enjoy Pelevin (which i do), i think this short novel might well appeal.

Empire Falls - Russo - Picked this up mostly because of Cliff's outspoken love for Russo, we'll see how it goes
The Plague - Camus - haven't ever read any Camus so this should be interesting
The Shadow Rising - Jordan - aw hell, I need my guilty pleasure fantasy reading
Friday Night Lights - Bissinger - Love the TV show, figured I might give the book a chance

The charity shops offered up a couple of goodies today. Two US literary authors I've always wanted to try, but never managed to find books by going cheap before:

White Noise, Don Delillo
The New York Trilogy, Paul Aster

Many folks like WHITE NOISE but I wasn't that taken with it. It's been awhile, however.

Have very fond memories of Auster's NEW YORK TRILOGY.

Nice haul indeed...

Santa was bit stingy this year on the book front, and only brought Spook Country by William Gibson and Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey.

However, on Boxing Day I visited a couple of discount book shops and picked up: Darkmans, Black Swan Green, The Lemur, The Fahrenheit Twins, Blood Meridian and Remains of the Day - all for about 99p each.

Santa brought me Bronte's Shirley, The Lost World and Other Stories, It Can't Happen Here, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, and four of the Bison Frontiers of Imagination series which have conveniently been on sale the past few months (I made a point of showing them to my relatives multiple times). I greatly appreciated Santa this year. :)
I got a couple of gift cards to bookstores too, so hopefully I'll get a chance to go shopping sometime this week.

Post-Christmas sales. Sigh.

I'm always too broke to enjoy them...

Yep, 20% off everything at Half Price Books reported around the USA. Haven't been yet, but I likely will today.

My parents gave me their old 11 volume hardback set of The Story of Civilization (+ Lessons of History) by Will and Ariel Durant. This is the 1968 edition.

On the one hand, that's impressive economising this Christmas by your folks. On the other, that's a pretty good catch.

I have now added 1984 (!!!! I've been wanting this for a while) and a signed copy of The Wet Nurse's Tale to the list of books received for Christmas, and looking forward to shopping tomorrow and Wednesday...hopefully I'll catch some sales.

159> Yes! I have been staring at it on their shelf my whole life and was always told I would get it when they died... well, I got it a bit sooner!

Oh, and my post requires a small correction. It is the 11 volume set, without Lessons of History.

I just put it on the shelf next to the two volume Oxford Anthology of English Literature I inherited from my grandpa. I'm glad I come from a family of readers!

Just picked up Lord of the Flies, Catch-22, Lost Horizon, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, The Clouds and the Pot of Gold, A Month in the Country, and Leviathan for 25 cents each at a thrift store, a brand new copy of Journey to the Center of the Earth from Books-a-Million for $3.00, Half-Moon Investigations and Tobias Smollett's translation of Gil Blas. I had a very nice day today. :)

Received a copy of First Light by Peter Ackroyd. So far so good.

Picked up a hardback copy of The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell, for £3.99 from a charity shop today.

Y'know, I'd really like to know if book sales are down because cheapskates like our friend Ian are pillaging charity/thrift shops instead of buying new books and helping authors feed their families.

But seriously...ARE people reading less or are new books so bloody expensive that we go hunting for our volumes in yep, thrift shops, used places, garage sales and flea markets...or we buy them heavily discounted off sales tables. I'm using inter-library loans more than ever...and when I simply MUST have a book, I'll go on line and find the cheapest seller (anywhere in the world). I made a number of such purchases from eBay and iOffer in the past 365 days. I don't buy many NEW books and Pynchon's latest was the first new hardcover I'd picked up in three or four years. Trade paperbacks are often twenty bucks+ (in Canada) and even your good old pocket novel can set you back twelve.

With all the competition for our disposable income, books (less flashy, if a helluva lot more interactive), at least NEW books, are having a hard time of it. And then you factor in how terrible the writing has gotten since the corporates scooped up publishing in the late Eighties-early Nineties--suddenly, dropping twenty smackers on a book that is likely to be derivative, semi-literate shite looks less and less attractive.

I think it behooves publishers to employ the new technologies to deliver less expensive offerings to readers (smaller print runs, less overhead and physical infrastructure; promoting and distributing via cyberspace) and to really actively compete for consumer attention spans and pocketbooks. Authors, meanwhile, may have to sacrifice those often ridiculously huge advances and come to rely more and more on their quarterly royalty statements, at least until they acquire a sufficient audience and can (rightfully) command higher fees.

A bit of a rant, just to start the new year.

Cliff, once again, True, True and True. Also, there is still so much good stuff I *haven't* read published in the past 400 years, I can wait 18 months from when something new comes out until it arrives at the $1 bookshop in town. There are exceptions, of course, but not many.

Maybe there will be a renaissance of producing books, to make them worthy of buying! Wouldn't that be a thing to behold.

A new publishing model:
First the e-book (w/ a file that could be printed into signatures and then properly bound), then the mmpb, then a trade ed. then a big ramp up to an illustrated, annotated, sumptiously bound-in-leather, printed w/ gorgeous ink, on paper you-want-to-be-wrapped-in-when-you-die edition.

I think that published writing (generally) will improve if publishers are made to compete for our attention. I don't say the writers will improve, b/c there are enough people writing to raise the writing bar now, but many are not published. No, I'm not going to name names. It's simply faith that there are writers out there working right now on amazing books that I can't find, b/c I don't want to believe what the publishing industry says is the best writing today. There simply aren't enough publishing dollars in the world right now, allocated correctly, to publish the really, really good stuff and for it to find an audience.

Phew.

I much prefer older books (18th, 19th, and early 20th century lit) to modern stuff. It's very disappointing to walk into a bookstore and find very little of it. The two bookstores I had gift certificates to and went to over Christmas break were filled with junky fiction - the Christian bookstore, though their website had books by G.K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, and C.S. Lewis, didn't stock any in the store, having only Beverly Lewis's and the like fiction, and Books-a-Million devoted over twice as much shelf space to Twilight as drama.
With prices on new books what they are, it is also very disappointing to be able to get only one or two books for a $20 gift certificate.

We are simpatico, Ben...

#166, "I think that published writing (generally) will improve if publishers are made to compete for our attention."

That's what's happening now and been happening since the beginning of the book industry. The sad news in all this is how few of the readers whose attention publishers are competing for actually care or even recognize the quality or lack thereof in what they read. Quality isn't competitive. Never has been, never will be. Only occasionally do you find a Dickens or an Eliot or an Austen (funny how that all occurred more or less about the same time) who is just sappy enough to appeal to the average reader, but also had something very important to say and found the right way to say it. The problem we have today is the amount of dreck to be waded through while hunting the few gems (reminds me of old Noddy Boffin's trash heaps) has tripled or quadrupled.

I used to buy more books, but as I get older, I try to go for quality rather than quantity. I tend to get most of my books from the library, but the ones I really like, I'll purchase for myself to reread one day or as gifts for friends and family. I'll also buy new books if they're highly recommended by a source I trust.

I enjoy Canadian literature, and I'm fortunate enough to have a local independent bookstore that brings in well-known Canadian authors for readings. I'll frequently purchase books at these events, as meeting the authors makes the subsequent reading of their books that much more pleasurable.

I buy fewer books these days, but I'm certainly reading more, and that's mainly because of the Web. I've never been able to commit to a book club, but LibraryThing and book blogs have made reading a less solitary activity, and they've been the source of many good recommendations.

And yet another bargain: The Penguin Complete Novels of George Orwell by, er, George Orwell. Bought from a stall on a local market for 50p. It contains Animal Farm, Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up for Air, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Given that I've already read Nineteen Eighty-Four, I make that 10p a book. Not a bad bargain.

That's a killer find.

I'd like to get Orwell's collected letters and essays too. He was a first rate essayist and reviewer...

Orwell was much better as a journalist than a novelist. The Road to Wigan Pier is amazing.

I just got Mishnah: Religious Perspectives and Mishnah: Social Perspectives by Jacob Neusner for $20 together, brand new and shrink wrapped. They retail around $75 each. I also grabbed two novels by Orhan Pamuk (haven't read him yet, but the review in the London Review of Books convinced me to do so) and volume one of Moody's biography of Ezra Pound.

I just picked up The Forsyte Saga in 3 hardback volumes for $3 at my Friends of the Library bookstore. Woohoo. Now I just need more time to read them.

Found Judgment at the Smithsonian at a local Savers (like Goodwill and such). It contains the original exhibit text of the controversial Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian. Unfortunately, WW 2 has become the "New Sacred Ground" where reverential history is turned into "the official story" a la Stalin painting out commissars and anyone questioning the motives, strategy, and intent of that conflict are reduced to Trotskyist heretics, promptly dispatched and forgotten.

My friend wrote a blog post about the same issues:

http://coffeeforclosers.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/the-curse-of-the-greatest-gener...

Walked 11.2 km, so sez Google Maps, in search of used books down Broadway in Vancouver.

Turned up Flann O'Brien, The Best of Myles; Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It (University of Chicago trade paper edition); John Metcalf, Adult Entertainment, 1st ed.; Thomas McGuane, Ninety-Two in the Shade, 1st ed.

And a book on Walker Evans.

Feet feel like hamburger.

Ah, but that's a walk many of us would gleefully take (especially when there are those books to show for it in the end)...

The other day I got nice hardcover editions of Mann's The Magic Mountain and Vollmann's Riding Toward Everywhere from the discount bin at a local bookstore.

176:

Hardly felt like winter, did it. I was out and about browsing as well. T-shirts, sunshine and books - hard to go wrong in January.

"Hardly felt like winter..."

Swine.

There are storm warnings out for most of the province but we seem to be in a little pocket of decent weather, just some flurries--no need to haul out the snow shovels (yet)...

There used to be a really good cooperative book store on Granville Street, just off Robson. I've only ever spent a few days in Vancouver but that book shop stands out in my memory. Terrific books and a nice vibe...

Hardly felt like winter down here ,either. Down here meaning "from my window I can see NASA". Recent hauls include: a leather bound Poems of Thomas Gray published by Wm Pickering and Charles Whittingam in 1836, Eco's The Infinity of Lists Palimpsest by Gore Vidal, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a Skira Art Book on French Paintingfrom 1963 with the laid in plates,Why Evolution is True by Jerry A Coyne , an EO Wilson book,The Diversity of Life and two "Oxbridge" books on philology: The Romance Languages andAfrican Languages and TheOxford Dictionary of English Etymology.

Some smart reading there, chum...

Hardly winter either, in Sydney today. (That's Sydney in Australia, not Sydney in Canada. Although it rained *all* weekend, so it's not been much of a nice summer weekend either...)

Got away from the munchkins for a late lunch at a cafe with current book of choice (Vanity Fair, an old copy that used to belong to my great-aunt), then popped into Gleebooks' second hand branch. Was tempted by so much, but ended up with The Virago Book of Fairy Tales and Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus.

Seduced by one of Waterstones 3 for 2's the other day. (I know, I know, the Whore of Babylon and all that.)

Still ... 3 for 2!

The Road by McCarthy

The Book of Disquiet by Pessoa

The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo

Can I call it a "book haul" if it's from my own stash? I was helping my parents clean out their basement and found a box buried deep beneath the rubbish. This contained books that my brother and I had abandoned a couple of decades ago when we left for university. I thought my parents had given these away long ago. The box included some Hermann Hesse, Ian Fleming, Carl Sagan, and my favourite, an "Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators" mystery. There were also a number of cringe-worthy items that I dare not mention in the snobs' forum.

Oh, we all have our guilty pleasures. Ask Ian Sales about his collection of DUNE novels...

Oh, I have fond memories of "Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators" mysteries. I think I may still have one on a shelf, somewhere.

And I've got a collection of *signed* Dune novels.

And I've been eyeing off Georgette Heyer novels in the second hand shops lately.

Phew. Good to get that off my chest.

Found Berlin, Berlin, a 1987 exhibit catalog commemorating Berlin's 750th anniversary. Good stuff.

I don't know of this counts as a book haul or not, but since we are packing to move to Atlanta (Woodstock, for all you who know where that is) I've just been presented with two plus boxes of books that either I haven't seen since we left Candler Park more than twenty years ago, or that belong to my daughter Lauren, who left home some ten or twelve years ago.

Do found books count here?

Here, in no particular order, is a list:

German Romantic Novellas
A Room of One's Own (This may be a dup)
Operation Shylock
Collected Poems
The Completed Poems by Anne Sexton. This is the first book I've seen with a long prose passage come up as an option for a work. You combiners out there ought to have a look.
From Abortion to Reproductive Freedom: Transforming a Movement Obviously one of Lauren's.
German Romantic Criticism
Atala/Rene
Mythology (Probably another dup)
The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus Another of Lauren's books
The Mwindo Epic
The Riverside Reader
The Classic Fairy Tales
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories
The Red and the Black (this may be dup)
German Romantic Stories
The Trial (another dup)
Latin I might dip into this myself. Lauren was quite the Latin scholar, winning multiple firsts in her various Jr. Latin competitions. Mostly in the composition competitions.
The Fellowship of the Ring we probably have six of these around the house.
Two Evenings in Saramaka
Mysterious Creatures
Mystic Places
Psychic Powers
Phantom Encounters
Psychic Voyages
Visions and Prophecies
The Big Book of Drawing
The Coming of the King
Instant Word Power
Stars: A Golden Guide
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Road to Corlay
The Latin Language
Outlooks and Insights
The Book of Lights
Women Race & Class by Angela Davis
A Thousand Acres
The Promise
Frankenstein
How to Suppress Women's Writing
The Lively Art of Writing
Newsweek: The Sixties
The Art of Jewish Living
Romanov's Russian - English English - Russian Dictionary
The Art of Jewish Living Lauren converted to Judaism after four years at Brandeis. It was an argument with the Church over ordination of women and the Churches position on abortion. Apparently her flavor of Judaism ordains women and allows abortion.
Literature and Existentialism
Official Guide to the National Museum of Natural History/National Museum of Man
Sundiata
Eichmann in Jerusalem
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone I am the last in our household to read a Harry Potter book. I don't think I'll start now.
Beyond Despair
The Bedford Reader
Selected Writings: The German Library
Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves
The Genealogy of Morals Another Dup, probably
What's So Funny about Science
Hymns to the Night
The Two Towers
Writing Worth Reading
The Beauty Myth Lauren is the stereotypical nerd. This would have been a favorite topic in High School
Newsweek: The Forties
Newsweek: The Fifties
Everyday Life of the Maya
The Clocks
A Book of Days for the Literary Year
and, finally,
Catch-22

How's that for a "haul". As my wife and I tell each other regarding old teevee shows, "If you don't remember it, it's new to you". Well, with the exception of just three or four I flat don't care about, this is quite a haul.

Now I've got to pound them into LT proper so I can repack them for this move.

I have great fun taking my book hauls into a used book dealer and trading them in for other books. One time i let my 'account' run up to about $35 and traded it into an Eric Gillbook which was worth $100+. Just think, a stack of A Rands can be presto chango turned into some real!! books.

A friend recently GAVE ME a copy of Shakespeare:the Complete Works. Been wanting a copy for a while. Somehow a library just doesn't seem complete without a copy of the Bard's works in it. Also picked up the books for my philosophy classes for the semester, which include:

Dynamics of Faith by Paul Tillich

I and Thou by Martin Buber

Religion and Nothingness by Keiji Nishitani

the Need for a Sacred Science by Seyyed Hossein Nasr
the Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram

the Availability of Religious Ideas by Ramchandra Gandhi (Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi's grandson)

Introduction to Ethics: Personal and Social Responsibility in a Diverse World by Gary Percesepe

If you couldn't tell by the reading list, I'm taking a seminar on the philosophy of religion, and an intro to morals/ethics class. Should be an interesting semester. I've been meaning to read both Tillich and Buber for a long time now, so I'm rather happy with the situation, and the others look really good as well.

I have Hannah Tillich's memoir, and apparently ol' Paul was a dirty boy!

O_o

Came back from Saskatoon with a big pile o' books from the library--history, poetry...and CALCIUM MADE INTERESTING by the late, great Graham Chapman...

I went to Alhambra Books in Edmonton, Alberta and found two books that I knew I had to buy within seconds of seeing them.
First one: A Mouthful of Air Language and Languages, Especially English, by Anthony Burgess, and A Natural History of Latin by Tore Janson. I have read essays and reviews by Anthony Burgess before and lots of his novels, but never this volume about the English language. I am really looking forward to going through this whole book.

Where's the store located? Edmonton isn't that far away--and yet I've made precisely ONE trip there in the past decade. Shame on me...

I recently mooched Before Adam and Other Stories, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, The Foutainhead, Two Spanish Picaresque Novels, Celestina, and Professor Dowell's Head during a simultaneous purge of books I no longer want and influx of books on BookMooch that I do want.

The Fountainhead will make for a good paperweight.

It's also good for defending yourself against muggers.

at the discard section of the public library: the savage detectives or los detectives salvajes. in perfect condition as far as i can tell. not sure why they were getting rid of it.

edited to add: i know that not everybody likes bolaño but this is kind of harsh!

201: It wasn't the latest Cross novel by bestselling scribe / monkey-robot James Patterson

Does the Savage Detective have teenage vampires? Then who cares?

>202 kswolff: or maybe its like that seinfeld episode. that book has been flagged, they can't have it back. hehehe

I'm having a field day on Half.com. I just bought several books including Bill Bryson's African Diary for 75 cents each. Infinite Jest was just a few bucks.

Shipping costs (shall I say energy costs) are of course fair, but still considerable. As a result the poor sellers don't make much and the buyers can't afford too much. But it is a nice book recycling system.

Do you know of Better World Books? They're pretty socially and enviro conscious and their selection is pretty darn good.

http://www.betterworldbooks.com

I just bought a couple of cinema-related books from their "Bargain Bin"...

I just happened to walk into some books...literally. I was looking for an accent table and there they were - books.

I picked up:

Small Island

The moment and other essays

Quo Vadis

205,

Thanks Cliff, I'm sure many others will also benefit from that post.

I'm salivating like a dawg...

Yer welcome, dawg...

Dover Publication's having a 60-80% clearance sale on selecting items, so my mom and I ordered The Beckoning Fair One, The Book of Beasts, The Communistic Societies of the United States, The Journal and Ordeal of Cabeza de Vaca, Navajo Native Dyes, Flatland, a cut-and-assemble model of the Emerald City of Oz, a book on collecting/preserving plants, and The New Atlantis and The City of the Sun for under $40 including shipping.

Dover Publication's having a 60-80% clearance sale on selected items, so my mom and I ordered The Beckoning Fair One, The Book of Beasts, The Communistic Societies of the United States, The Journal and Ordeal of Cabeza de Vaca, Navajo Native Dyes, Flatland, a cut-and-assemble model of the Emerald City of Oz, a book on collecting/preserving plants, and The New Atlantis and The City of the Sun for under $40 including shipping.

I almost finished my current read on the bus into work this morning, and I forgot to bring a second book to jump into on the way home (usually I'm more prepared, with a backup book in my backpack!). Oh gosh darn, and there are two decent bookshops near work.

Not quite a haul, but I will now be re-reading 1984 on the bus on the way home today. Haven't read it since 1984, looking forward to seeing it with more mature eyes.

Every year my school hosts the Frizee lectureship, an endowed lecture series in the Religious Studies field (my major area of study :) ). Last year Huston Smith came and it was amazing. Got a copy of his book the Soul of Christianity, even got it signed and had a short chat with him. He's getting up there though and he was having some issues. We're going to lose a great, great scholar of religion when he passes on.

Anyway, this year Reza Aslan, author of No God but God gave the lecture, and it was once again well worth skipping my normal Wednesday night activity. Picked up a copy of his book How to Win a Cosmic War. Still don't have a copy of NGbG, but definitely going to pick up a copy after last night and read it. Would have bought both, but didn't realize I had as much money as I do, (a couple refunds finally came through, plus a generous bit of cash from the parents) and I owe a couple friends some money anyway, so it may have been for the best.

Huston Smith is one of my heroes. Just picked up a copy (through inter-library loan) of THE WAY THINGS ARE. And I have a very bad VHS copy of a 5-part series on religion he did for PBS way back when. Indispensable...

Found a strange quartet of books at Goodwill:

The Baron in the Trees by Calvino

Typee by Melville

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Teachings of the Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith by LDS

Now, THAT'S a haul, Karl...

Typee is an incredible novel.

I did a book haul on my blog here.

Good space books. Drool-worthy...

Typee was the first (and, currently, only) book I read by Melville. It's a great, extremely interesting book.

Grabbed Lolita (annotated, noice), Family Matters, and a Jasper Fforde book, The Big Over Easy, for my girlfriend.

The Annotated Lolita is a great find. Great for anyone who doesn't have Nabokov's command of multiple languages and arcane literary references. If you're interested, the same publisher also released a Lolita screenplay by Nabokov for the Kubrick movie. The Enchanter is an earlier version of Lolita, shorter and more raw.

Not this version of "Family Matters", of course:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCnWnY7vAW4

reply to message 197

Here is a link to google maps:

http://maps.google.ca/maps/place?hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=alhambra+book...

I do not know if they have a store website.

It is in Old Strathcona, at 101 Street and 81 Avenue.

Thanks for the tip. Much appreciated.

i've been very pleased w/ Abebooks - found several out of print items i've wanted for myself or as gifts at very reasonable prices and (mostly) w/out shipping:

hugging the jukebox poems by Naomi Shihab Nye
Absences - my favorite collection of poems by James Tate
Merlin Dreams - an amazing collection of riffs on Brit legends..i've seen it go for over $50.00 and found a copy for $3.97.
A visit to William Blake's inn: poems for innocent and experienced travelers by Nancy Willard - why this Newberry award winner and wonderful homage to Wm. Blake is out of print is beyond me - but i'm glad younger friends are having kids so i have an excuse to push books into their homes...

"now I lay me down to sleep
with bear and rabbit, bird and sheep.
If i should dream before I wake
may I dream of William Blake"

the poems take their form from the songs of innocence and experience.

First post and apologies for not knowing how to make links yet.

My greatest haul was the AAUW's Book Sale in Bloomfield Hills, MI back in the '80s when BH had one of the highest per capita incomes in the US. Many first editions some signed then before I could unpack them our little rental was flooded out, boxes of books swollen to twice their normal size. I could save my LPs as they could be washed but the books were soggy toast.

Recently-

Reading books from an estate purchase which makes for interesting random reads I just finished, Edna Ferber, "Saratoga Trunk"; Geoffrey Wagner, "The Sands of Valor"; Ludwig Bemelmans, "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep"; Irvin S. Cobb, "Cobb's Bill of Fare" I started his "A Laugh a Day Keeps the Doctor Away" as I enjoyed the first one but the collection of jokes hasn't aged well, (plenty of darkies).

Gabh an latha,
Richard Dietzel

An now I see the quite obvious tip on Touchstones; my mom would say "if it had teeth it'd bite you".

I will try this out with a less recent read The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror (Version 2.0). This was a fun read for my book club after the downer The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Gabh an latha,
RD

Welcome, Richard!

I snagged 4 old Modern Library books at the local library books sale.

$4.50 got me Growth of the Soil, Introduction to Aristotle, Man's Fate and Diana of the Crossways. Those art deco bindings sure are purty on the bookshelf.

Damn. That's a bit annoying...

Was in town this morning and popped into Waterstone's. Yellow Blue Tibia, Adam Roberts, was in the 3 for 2 promotion, and I wanted it. So I had to pick another two books from the promotion. Ended up going for Nineteen Seventy-Four, David Peace and Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, Kazuo Ishiguro.

This afternoon, went to the supermarket and, as I usually do on my trips there, popped into the four charity shops on the way. One of them had just had a new lot in, and I walked out with five: Starswarm, Galaxies Like Grains of Sand and New Arrivals, Old Encounters, all by Brian Aldiss; Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo; and a DH Lawrence omnibus containing Women in Love, The Ladybird, The Man Who Died, The Captain's Doll and The Rainbow.

So that's the TBR shot up again...

A true haul, if there ever was one. Eclectic, even eccentric.

I always want to like Adam Roberts' novels more than I end up doing so. Having seen what's been written about Yellow Blue Tibia - plus the fact that it was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award - I've been after a cheap-ish copy of the book to see if it could be the one I like as much as I expect to. It's just a shame Miéville's The City and the City - or any of the other shortlisted books - wasn't in the 3 for 2 promotion...

The three Aldiss collections were paperbacks from 1985 and in excellent condition. Couldn't resist them. There were a couple more Aldiss books, and I nearly added one of them to the pile. Happily, I didn't - as when I got home I found out I already had it. As for the DH Lawrence, my father has been after me to read his novels for years (Lawrence's, that is; my father hasn't written any novels), but it wasn't until I finally got around to reading Lady Chatterley's Lover recently that I discovered that he's not only very good but also similar to a lot of the mainstream fiction I like a great deal. So I planned to read more by him.

Just grabbed Joshua Cohen's latest: Witz, published by Dalkey Archive Press.