Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

JM, Folio Society today, next thing you know it'll be calf-bound first editions.

I know--this could be the end of me.

Those Heritage editions are lovely but I can't help but want the proper, signed Limited Editions Book Club editions when I see them. I have a couple (the awesome Edward Bawden-illustrated Salammbo being my favourite; I have it without the beautiful slipcase but it was a gift...).

First editions are a mug's game. Really well-designed books are great, though.

Charity shop fun times, hopefully a fiver well spent:

Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment
Nabakov Pnin (finally reading Lolita; this fucking guy.)
Zola The Kill
A book of Dylan Thomas poetry.
Wilde The Happy Prince & Other Stories
Hollinghurst The Swimming Pool Library

Crime & Punishment is worth way more than a fiver on its own.

Yeah--that and the Nabakov alone and you're well ahead of the game!

xp to tim - i'm in the same boat... i have a couple limited editions club books, and they are way nicer than the heritage ones.

a trio of $1 purchases:

territorial rights - muriel spark
weymouth sands - john cowper powys
ocean of sound - david toop

I did some poetry grubbing over the weekend. You'd think I'd have enough by now, but no... I had some trade credit at Powell's Books and it was burning a hole in my pocket.

Collected Poems of Muriel Ruykeser, used paperback in good condition, $10. I usually veer away from women poets, just because they tend to handle language in ways that don't quite sit right with me. I don't really know why this is. But I am willing to be persuaded about Ruykeser's work.

Almost Paradise: New and Selected Poems & Translations, Sam Hamill, new (remaindered) paperback, $8. He's better known these days as a poetry editor, I think, but he's a local PNW poet and we share many influences.

Making the Scene: Selected Poems, Kenneth O. Hanson, new paperback, $7. A local poet, locally printed, and (again) has many of the same influences.

Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation, Sherod Santos, used (like new) hardcover, $5. I must own six or seven of these anthologies of Greek poetry in translation by now, both plain and fancy. This is one of the fancypants ones, but well done in that style.

I keep buying books that I already have because I don't think to check the shelves.

Have done a load of book shopping in the last week - due to being too ill to crawl to my computer I post about about my efforts now:

Last Sunday a nice bout of book shopping w/ILB head woof which doubled as FAP

Tibor Dery - The Story of a Dog
Jiri Grusa - The Questionnaire
Hrabal - Closely Observed Trains

I wonder if ever Czech novel released in the West has an intro written by Josef Skvorecky, whom I've not read.

Then walking by Lower Marsh street later in the week (there is a 2nd hand bookshop there) I saw that Crockatt & Powell Bookseller was closing that very day and clearing their stock with everything at 50% off so i got:

Knut Hamsun - Hunger
MR James - Casting the Runes and Other ghost Stories (on Oxford classics - good to finally get something by him with an OK cover, as good as I think you can get at the mo)

Finally: Mishima - Death in Midsummer and Other stories (read Patriotism off it so far and its so good that I don't whether there is any point in reading any of the others, but of course I will)

MR James - Casting the Runes and Other ghost Stories (on Oxford classics - good to finally get something by him with an OK cover, as good as I think you can get at the mo)

Publishers do love their John Atkinson Grimshaw for ghost stories - I can think of five books offhand that have his pictures on (Oxford Book of Ghost Stories, Oxford World's Classics Through a Glass Darkly, Wordsworth Collected MR James, Oxford World's Classics MR James, er.... make that four - I know there's more.) Rightly so - he's excellent, but it does become a little predictable.

Also, I must admit, xyzzzz__, I abhor that edition of MR James (Michael Cox I believe - who edited the Oxford Book of Ghost Stories I think). For a start, enough with the asterisks in the text already! So much of a good ghost story requires a gradual removal of both the reader and the main character (often willed in his or her case) away from mundane and material reality, to be jolted out two, three or four times a page in most cases is a gross imposition. You feel uneasy ignoring them, but all too often when you turn to the back you find it's to define something you could look up in a dictionary (if, indeed, you don't already know it) or some chatty bit of facetiousness or opinion. (Including one note that simply stands 'I have not managed to locate this quotation').

Nothing wrong with having them as end notes that you can turn to after finishing the story (unless your memory is exceptionally porous, you should be able to remember enough of the details to make reading such notes a relatively simple business), but they can't decide whether they are notes for the imbecile or notes for the scholar, and please, stop interrupting! I'm trying to read here!

Sorry to have missed you the other day, I had work, curses, but glad to hear you got a good haul.

Yes it is Michael Cox. I guess when I look for a nice paperback I think of the 'feel' of the page, the font, that the words aren't horribly squeezed in and the cover - that it has a picture that is intelligently selected for how the book might make you feel (I have read and know bits about MR James, but haven't read him so this is guess work.)

I get at what you mean re: asterisks (didn't notice them at the shop). But I never go back unless its something I feel I have to know at this minute, but very rarely - it does stop the flow, true. Footnotes are way more important when reading something like Marx.

What ed of his Ghost Stories do you have Gamaliel?

(It was a good day and you were missed; I saw a copy of Montherlant's The Girls at Skoob. Anyway, there will always be another time.)

Ah, you are stronger willed than me! And it's not so bad really. I've got a number of editions in fact, not through any desire to collect them, but for some reason when the will to read him comes on me, which is at least annually, I never seem to have a copy about me.

The Collected Wordsworth edition (before he went back into copyright) was very good, although lacked some of the extras containing as it did only Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, More Ghost Stories, and A Warning To the Curious (I think).

I've also got individual Penguin copies of GSOAA, and GSOAA + MGS. If I every buy any of these again I like to think it would be in a pre-1939 hard cover edition. There's a wonderful early edition of Le Fanu's Through A Glass Darkly with lovely spacious wide-leaded text, which I covet for the same reason - you can sink into their atmosphere so much more easily, on cold winter days, with a glass of something sustaining next to you.

I haven't read The Girls, I'm quite often in Skoob so I'll have a butcher's the next time I'm down there, cheers for the tip.

btw, Gamaliel, have you seen this discussion of M R James stories (ILX was created by the people who run Freaky Trigger)? Many of the contributors were/are readers/post on ILX, still.

You may find it of interest.

Cheers xyzzz__, I'm doing a bit on ghost stories at the moment, so this is excellent.

"Three Nights In Havana: Pierre Trudeau, Fidel Castro, and the Cold War World" by Robert Wright
"City of Quartz" by Mike Davis
"A Perfect Spy, John le Carre
"Balkan Ghosts," by Robert Kaplan
"The Great Game: the Struggle for Empire in Central Asia," by Peter Hopkirk
"Will You take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell's Blue Period" by Michelle Mercer

A quarto book on Flemish painting, second hand from Oxfam, with quite beautiful reproductions and from what I could tell from a couple of minutes' skimming, decent text as well. It was still £25 though and I'm currently feeling mildly guilty, guilt that I am assuaging by telling myself that because I seem to be coming down with a filthy cold, it's a worthwhile investment for holing up indoors for the next few days and poring over.

If I get restless later, I might pop out and find a copy of Ada or Ardor, a Family Chronicle. I tried reading this years ago, when I read loads of Nabokov, but couldn't get into it. I'm feeling like I want to now.

That probably means I'm going to put The Apple in the Dark by Claric Lispector on the back burner for the moment.

Clarice. I'm blaming the cold.

this month's deductions:

eric ambler, 'dirty story'
lillian ross, 'picture'
beryl bainbridge, 'the bottle factory outing'
a.l. lloyd, 'folk song in england'
various, 'economics: an anti-text'
marshall jevons, 'the fatal equilibrium'*
liu shao-chi, 'on the party'
donald moore, 'far eastern journal'
jean rhys, 'wide sargasso sea'
nabokov, 'pnin'
'guy debord and the situationist international: texts'
pound, 'the cantos'
eugene ionesco, 'the hermit'
'musical instruments of south east asia' (old oxford asia series thing)
graham greene, 'a burnt-out case'
stendhal, 'memoirs of an egotist'
pound, 'selected prose'
samuel delany, 'tales of neveryon'
anthony powell, 'afternoon men'
oct 1963 issue of analog
feb 1964 issue of galaxy
2 x penguin modern painters

at this rate i'll be out of pocket to work here /:

* one of the worst books i have ever read btw

Hilarious title though, thomp. What's that folk song book like? I strongly recommend Reg Hall's I Never Played To Many Posh Dances, if you haven't read it.

In fact, is that Bert Lloyd's book? I meant to read it ages ago, but never got hold of it.

I have also bought today, The World of Jonathan Swift, with essays by Pat Rogers, Irvin Ehrenpreis and Geoffrey Hill, for £5 and The Judas Window by Carter Dickson for a friend who's just had a baby and who was requesting detective fiction of that period while she's on maternity leave. £3.

Must stop.

got mildly drunk last night and was thinking about how old goriot was such a great book imo and why don't i read more balzac. so i got these three cheap on amazon: colonel chabert, cousin bette, the wrong side of paris.

I gave a large part of my library (in reality less than 10%, and probably quite a bit less) the boot last weekend. Paul McCartney's Many Years From Now arrived yesterday, which I have assured myself is to be the last new arrival this side of Christmas.

As the other participant, must say the London book-shop + pint expedition was a good Sunday afternoon. Came away with a slim volume of Swinburne (didn't have a portable selection before), The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden and the best of Elizabeth David (driven by slightly delusional logic: 'I like cooking. I should cook more. This'll bring an inspiring element of literary snobbery to kitchen, then I'll cook more.' RONG. )

Gilbert Highet, Poets in a Landscape. Boring title, great book. I see NYRB will bring out a new edition this spring, but I bought the amazingly solid, built-like-a-tank 1957 Knopf edition, the kind they don't make anymore.

Incidentally, having mentioned John Atkinson Grimshaw upthread - three of his paintings are in the window of Robert Green, a fine art dealer on Bond Street, if you're in London and happen to be passing.

it is the bert lloyd book, and i haven't read it yet. ho hum

"Uranium Frenzy: Boom and Bust on the Colorado Plateau" by Raye Ringholtz
"The Boat" by Nam Le
"In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire," Mike Davis
"Complete Short Stories," Graham Greene
"Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle east, and the Caucasus" by Robert Kaplan
"The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia" by Lutz Kleveman

charity book fair!

harvard classics: plato, epictetus, marcus aurelius (i doubt i'll ever read this) and don quixote part 1
balzac - lost illusions
dorothy l sayers - 4 novel collection
stephen king - nightmares and dreamscapes
franzen - the corrections
the civilization of the middle ages
stephen jay gould - the mismeasure of man

I really, really enjoyed The Corrections. I thought it might be a struggle at first, but it turned into a real pleasure.

Dropped in on Portobello Road Oxfam Shop over lunch. Zoom by Simon Armitage, Earthquake Weather by August Kleinzahler.

Sold a bunch and bough for Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales (plus half a pint's worth of beer money), which sounds way more appealing than Gulag Archipelago, although yes I'll probably end up reading a volume and hating myself...

hating myself...

It goes with the territory, amirite?

I enjoyed The Gulag Archipelago, though it had turned into a bit of a slog by about page 500. Persevered, and then couldn't believe it when I got to the end only to find out it was the first part of a trilogy.

Office haul of free books: We, Three Tales by Flaubert, Essays of Elia (awful feeling I have two copies of this already, but this is a prettyish Hesperus thing), Pushkin's Tales of Belkin, a small biography of Pushkin and Kitty Hauser's Bloody Old Britain, about pioneer of aerial photography.

Popular Fallacies was excellent, off that, I should get Essays of Elia out of the library again.

I went in the LRB bookshop and saw lots of NYRB titles at 20% off, so I got Platonov's The Foundation Pit : the ed has a detailed intro, an appendix with translated passages deleted by the author and 10-15 pages of extensive notes. Love the cover.

Georgics, Virgil, translated by David Ferry, bilingual edition, new (remaindered) paperback, $7.

Office haul of free books: We, Three Tales by Flaubert, Essays of Elia (awful feeling I have two copies of this already, but this is a prettyish Hesperus thing), Pushkin's Tales of Belkin, a small biography of Pushkin and Kitty Hauser's Bloody Old Britain, about pioneer of aerial photography.

What wonderful office is this? At mine the free book table is an old Dan Brown and 'Moonwalk: the Michael Jackson Story'.

What wonderful office is this? At mine the free book table is an old Dan Brown and 'Moonwalk: the Michael Jackson Story'.

I do the sub-editing for (job-keeping circumlocution time) the customer magazine of a major British bookshop chain. Lots of books come in, but they're mostly of the Brown/Moonwalk variety. This was a good batch.

(I've been tempted to start an ILB thread where I post extracts of unedited shit from the magazine, but professional principle wins out against office boredom & cheap lols.)

Probably wise, but if you ever give in, I look forward to those cheap lols.

Bght a Kindle! I think I'll order all the books by Dostoyevski first. For about 4 dollars. :-)))

Allow me to crow a bit. A year ago I bought a copy of Infinite Jest for $1. It was pretty banged up, so by the time I finished reading it, it was quite literally falling apart in my hands. Today I bought a replacement copy that is in good shape... for $1!

latest ones (prolley a month ago):

Balzac, The History of the Thirteen
Balzac, A Murky Business

I'm facsinated by Richard Nixon: Alone In The White House (by Richard Reeves). I'm at the part where, in 1969, Pres. Nixon begins to aggressively woo "the politically powerful white middle class" by attacking those "who oppress( ) them with high taxes, spiraling inflation and enforced integration, while rewarding the very poor and very rich." I'm sure this strategy isn't unique, but Nixon -- by actively pursuing George Wallace's constituency -- seemed to raise these wedge-issues into an art form (in ways the GOP has successfully exploited over the next 30 years):

Three days later on October 19, at a $100-a-plate Repulican fund-raiser in New Orleans, Vice President Agnew, delegated by the President but reading words he has mostly written himself, began the hard-hitting rhetorical phase of Nixon's dividing of America, saying "The recent Vietnam Moratorium is a reflection of the confusion that exists in America today . . . A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals."

* * * *

The next night, at another $100-a-plate dinner that drew twenty-four hundred guests in Jackson, Mississippi, (Agnew) continued, this time with help from Safire and Buchanan back in the White House: "For too long the South has been punching the bag for those who characterize themselves as liberal intellectuals . . . We have among us a glib, activist element . . . nattering nabobs of negativism . . . snobs for most of them disdain to mingle with the masses who work for a living . . . . Americans cannot afford to divide over their demagoguery -- or be deceived by their duplicity -- or to let their license destroy liberty. We can, however, afford to separate them from our society -- with no more regret than we should feel over discarding rotten apples from a barrel."

I imagine Agnew meant to say "For too long the South has been a punching bag . . .," but what's quoted above is the way his words appear in the text. The book is a cold look into policial expediency and calculation.

For my kindle: Dostoyevski (entire oeuvre), Chesterton (same),... Oh and Charlaine Harris

Getting an e-reader looked quite tempting when I was browsing Amazon for Chesterton books and got a damn "lol on kindle u can get his complete works for a buck o_O" message. Of course, it'd be free on other readers.

Err, anyways, my most recent purchases:
Thomas Berger - Who is Teddy Villanova?
Christopher Benfey - American Audacity: Essays North and South
Leonardo Sciascia - Equal Danger

Free on Kindle too if you go to manybooks.net.

i bought books for myself today! i never do anymore cuz i'm always just buying stuff for my store. but the used bookstore around the corner is having a three day sale (50% off everything!) and i thought i'd load up on some sci-fi. their sci-fi section is really big.

here's what i got. a mix of hardcovers and paperbacks:

the ice people - rene barjavel (hardcover)

an alien heat - michael moorcock (hardcover)

the hollow lands - michael moorcock (hardcover)

masters of atlantis - charles portis (hardcover. really wanted this! don't think i would have thought to look in the sci-fi section for it.)

earthworks - brian w. aldiss (hardcover)

satan's world - poul anderson (hardcover)

2 big fat softcover phil k. dick short story collections - the eye of the sibyl and second variety

space tug - murray leinster (paperback)

talents, incorporated - murray leinster (paperback)

the man who ate the world - frederik pohl (paperback)

destiny doll - clifford d. simak (paperback)

and two penelope fitzgerald trade paperbacks that i haven't read: innocence and the beginning of spring

35 bucks for everything. i was happy.

man, if you are ever looking for some andre norton paperbacks that store is the place for you. they must have over 50 norton paperbacks. pretty crazy.