Book Sale Haul and Material Culture Post

[radiantfracture]

It is a morning like wearing an upturned iron pot that drips condensation directly into your mind. The Beautiful Shed refuses to be warmed or comforted. There's nothing for it but to make a book-buying post with minor material culture notes.

The local newspaper's book sale happened last weekend. You will be delighted to know that the sale is usually held in the curling rink. Cheap rent, big space, authentic cultural aura.

The sale is one of the iconic events on the city calendar, with the Moss Street Paint-In (local artists line the titular way with booths and demonstrations) and the Symphony Splash (the symphony plays on a barge in the harbour, culminating in the 1812 Overture with real cannon fire from the nearby naval base).

I have to be careful, faced with the rows and rows of heaped books, with more stacked in boxes beneath the tables, or I get trapped in discovery anxiety -- you know: must look at everything so as to miss nothing. Instead, I try to surrender to serendipity. I try.

There are themes in every sale, and one can't help but speculate -- who moved? Cleaned house? Split up? Got together? Who died (peacefully, after a brief illness)? Who grew suddenly tired of old preferences and began anew? -- all to create this momentary pattern. This year there seemed to be a lot of A.S. Byatt, which is admittedly not a very dramatic finding.

I spent more money (and concomitant time) than I intended, for they had two levels of paperback pricing: pocketbook and large-format. However, the prices are still fantastically cheap, so I escaped at the cost of a pricey brunch. My only quibble was finding out afterwards that I'd paid $2.00 for a Dover Thrift Edition of Bartleby that cost only $1.50 new. (It's all in a good cause.)

The 2017 Haul

• Annharte. Being on the Moon. (1990) Annharte, an Anishinabe poet, is one of the poets in the anthology I used in teaching Indigenous Literatures and Oratures. I don't know her work well, so this presented an opportunity to deepen my knowledge. Signed by the author!


• Byatt, A.S. The Game and The Shadow of the Sun. (1967, 1983) (1964, 1991) -- honor the pattern. Also, they were about British academics. (Goodreads is not so sure about my choices.) Sun is one of those nice solid Vintage editions that came out I think with/because of Possession. Game is orange-spine-era Penguin.


• Clarke, Lindsay. The Chymical Wedding. (1989) I had no prior knowledge of this book's existence, but John Fowles claims to have liked it, and Michael Wood said "the very craziness or the Hermetic Quest is turned into a sane metaphor, representing a glimpse of how symbolic the world actually is, how much it is made in our image, littered with fragments of our dreams," and I thought "Yeah, all right." (Goodreads is fairly positive.)


• Eliot, T.S. The Sacred Wood. (1960). As booksales are for the cheap acquisition of classics, and as it is fun to read old criticism. A dramatic University Paperback with vermilion woodcut trees on age-stained ecru air.


• Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. (1984, 2001). To remedy my lack of having read Erdrich. When opened at random, full of beauty.


• Lathers, Marie. The Aesthetics of Artifice: Villiers's L'eve future. I'm actually not that interested in artifice-for-its-own-sake -- more in self-creation and inhabitation -- but I picked this up and read from the Foreword (by John Anzalone, a person of whom I know nothing): "Defiantly unconventional, despite his deep-seated traditionalism, Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam produced a body of writing so uncomfortable for canonically determined hierarchies that for a time it seemed in danger of disappearing altogether." This is a convergence of an author, a forewordist, and a subject I have no knowledge of whatever, but sometimes these convergences produce beautiful inkblooms in the mind, where mystery must be filled in by supposition.


• Le Sueur, Meridel. The Girl. (1982) Seems to have been damaged in a fire: a river of smoke runs up the gutter of the dedication page. (Goodreads cautiously approves.)


• McEwan, Ian. The Cement Garden. (1978, 1980) I'm not a particular fan of McEwan, and I don't know his oeuvre that well -- I found Sweet Tooth a little disappointing -- but I liked the film of this book a lot when I saw it in my hazily distant past. A nice old weird-looking Picador edition.


• Melville, Herman. Bartleby and Benito Cereno. I really just wanted to have actually read "Bartleby," rather than nodding and chuckling knowingly whenever someone says "I would prefer not to."


• Meredith, Richard C. We All Died at Breakaway Station. (1969). One of two purchases from the SF table. Here's a sample from the back cover copy: "these brutally injured officers had been restored to temporary, artificial life ... because no intact man or woman could be spared from the main conflict" (to take a hospital ship back to Earth). Um, yes please.


• Merril, Judith (ed). Judith Merril's England Swings SF. (1968) -- for this, I broke my rule about no dilapidated/stained/smelly books. It was dusty, and someone had spilled an alarming substance on its first few pages at some point in the 1970s, but it is an intoxicatingly self-delighted artifact of New Wave SF. (Only 12 ratings and one review on Goodreads! A true Find.)


• Tonks, Rosemary. Bedouin of the London Evening. (2014) Bloodaxe Books. Poems and an interview with Tonks in the back. I believe I first read of Tonks' poetry and this collection only a few months ago in the TLS, so this was fortuity manifest and was obeyed. (Her name always makes me think benignly of the Harry Potter character.)


• White, T.H. The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once and Future King. (1988) There were actually two copies of this -- one in a random fiction pile, and one with SFF. This scholarly edition (U of Texas P) is an unbeautiful but intriguing artifact in a bright vermilion cover. (Vermilion again!) Prologue by Sylvia Townsend Warner (!!)


• Yeats, W.B. The Poems of W.B. Yeats. (1966) A nice little hardcover, just a hand high, green, smelling of horse-glue. Probably the best artifact here for material culture. The owner's signature on the flyleaf in black ink has imprinted its mirror image in yellow on the inside front cover: M (E? G?) Y (F? J?) Williamson, in an upright but emphatic hand. A Macmillan (Canadian) edition. I wanted a proper Yeats -- my last one is a Dover all marked up from class.

There are more important things to be said, but they cannot be copied from the copyright page of an aged book, so they will have to wait.

{rf}

Comments

[shewhomust]

Even allowing for any bias you brought with you, you do appear to live in an exceptionally erudite locality.

[radiantfracture]

Well. There were about a hundred thousand books I did not buy, and several I put back.

{rf}

[bibliofile]

Crap, that is a LOT of books. You showed remarkable restraint. (I've been known to buy books by the bag at sales that big.)

[radiantfracture]

My brother gave me a wheelie bag this past weekend, so I may be doomed.

[cosmolinguist]

I love that you had a rule about dilapidated/stained/smelly books, and that you had to break it.

[radiantfracture]

I'm doing a sort of New Year's wander through my archive, and I think this is the first comment you ever left in my journal -- and it's also always been one of my favorite little bits of random conversation. It comes to mind every so often and makes me feel happy.

[cosmolinguist]

That's so lovely, thank you for letting me know. I am delighted that it has stuck with you.

[larryhammer]

"Bartleby" is worth the read, says one who only just got to it a few months ago.

So is having a good, solid edition of Yeats. Physicality helps to give the poems weight, plus makes it more satisfying when you need to hurl them with great force. (I have, shall we say, an ambivalent relationship with his works.)

[radiantfracture]

Ha.

What did you like about "Bartleby"? And what bothers you about Yeats?

(My small green book doesn't seem to have "Crazy Jane talks to the Bishop", though it has some others of Jane's, so I will have to get another to go with it.)

I have a not at all ambivalent relationship with Yeats' ludicrous reading voice, with which he infected both Pound and Bunting.

[larryhammer]

"I would prefer not to."

More later, when I'm not running out the door, but some of the comments here (including in comments) encapsulates some of my attitudes towards Yeats.

[larryhammer]

So to build on the quote in in the linked post: Yeats is not just "possibly the best young-male-twit-in-love poet of the language, ever," but also possibly the best old-guy-quasifascist-reactionary poet of the language, ever. Thus my ambivalence.

[radiantfracture]

Fascinating translation history in that post! And you're quite right -- the Yeats flows so much more freely. As soon as I began reading it my heart sank gently into repose.

[larryhammer]

His version is a beautiful poem. Even twits can do that.

[sovay]

It was dusty, and someone had spilled an alarming substance on its first few pages at some point in the 1970s, but it is an intoxicatingly self-delighted artifact of New Wave SF.

It's awesome. I also have a crumbling paperback copy—I'm not sure it exists in any other form. The really hilarious part was having just heard of Kyril Bonfiglioli for the first time a few days previously (I still haven't gotten around to trying the Charlie Mortdecai novels) and then discovering one of his rare science fiction stories in the table of contents. Thank you, universe.

[radiantfracture]

I had no idea of that connection! I thank you as well as the universe.

[highlyeccentric]

I have an important question: was there ICE on the curling rink while the book stalls were also on the curling rink?

I would like to imagine Canadian bookbuyers sliding around on ice while selecting paperbacks.

[radiantfracture]

Please feel free to imagine it, though alas it was not so.

[bibliofile]

Judith Merril rocked, both as a writer and an editor. Most likely not a boring choice.

Damn I read the TH White when it came out, but I remember nothing from it.

"Bartleby" is a good story. That line is not only easy to remember, but it resonates well with the larger points IIRC.

Yay, Louise Erdrich. I haven't read all of her books, but Love Medicine seems a good enough place to start.

[radiantfracture]

Thank you for the vindication -- the books are still sitting on my table, and I was starting to feel a sort of creeping embarrassment about what, however well I try to curate it, is still a compulsion. Shoring up books against the apocalypse, etc.