Not bad for being lazy

After a successful visit to Old Book Store, we made our way next to Raven Used Books in downtown Northampton. We had already made a long drive that morning and eaten a yummy lunch at one of our old favorites, Bueno y Sano, so by the time we made it to Raven, I was feeling a bit tired and ready to be done. I did a lazy scan of the fiction section -- so lazy in fact that Kristian picked out a Riverside -- a good one, The Mill on the Floss by George Elliot -- on his way through that I had missed. He playfully chided me for my laziness and I defended myself by producing a nice hardcover edition of Collected Stories of William Faulkner, published in 1950. We both enjoy a good collection of short stories, so I was pardoned.

As he continued to retrace my steps along the fiction shelf, he mentioned that he had noticed a smaller shelf of old hardcovers behind the cashier's desk, so I wandered over to check it out. When they keep books behind the counter it usually means they are out of our price range, but it is always fun to see what they may have hiding there. My eyes fell immediately on a very interesting old spine for Bleak House. Now, Bleak House is one of my favorite books -- the story is amazing, with so many layers. I highly recommend it. Dickens was genius, a magician with a pen. But back to this book. I asked to take a look at it and was delighted to find that not only was it in great shape, but it was printed in 1883, and it was $15, which is absolutely in our price range. So that rounded out a nice little purchase at Raven Books -- not bad for being lazy.

Books added: Bleak House by Charles Dickens; The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot; Collected Stories of William Faulkner by William Faulkner

Publishers (in same order): Estes and Lauriat; Houghton Mifflin Co. Riverside Editions; Random House

Years: 1883; 1961; 1950

Where obtained: Raven Used Books

Prices: $15.00; $5.50; $6.00

There's no place like home...

Wednesday marked the first official Get a Spine visit to the local used-book store where I grew up, Willis Monie Books in Cooperstown, NY. As Deborah talks about here, we had one very interesting experience on our visit, and as she also mentions, the stop was kind of a quick one due to our daughter's need to nap. Thankfully, many more opportunities to browse at Willis Monie await us in the future.

So in addition to what Deborah discusses, we were able to quickly round up a few nice "new" works for our library in the short time we did spend there:

• a 1953 edition of Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway. I know it's nonfiction, but Hemingway is second to none for me, and good older editions of his works are pretty hard to find at reasonable prices, so getting Green Hills for $5.00 was just fine as far as I am concerned.
• an illustrated Modern Library edition (1944) of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. This one is in great shape, and appears to have been a Christmas gift from a student to a teacher in 1944.
• a 1925 copy of The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington. This is one Deborah highly recommends, and we hadn't yet owned our own copy. As an aside, this book smells great.
• lastly, an upgrade over our current copy of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. The one we had already was a flimsy paperback, and this is a hardcover published sometime around 1950.

Like I said, it was a brief visit, but we'll have tons of opportunities to keep going back.

Books added: Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway; The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington; Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman; Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Publishers (in same order): Charles Scribner's Sons; Doubleday, Page and Company; Random House Modern Library; Harcourt, Brace and World

Years: 1953; 1925; 1944; 1950(?)

Where obtained: Willis Monie Books

Price: $18.00 for the four

Sometimes no plan is the best plan

Our first stop on our trip to Central New York wasn't a planned one. On Tuesday, we were in Oneonta, NY -- home to Hartwick College, the State University of New York at Oneonta, and the James Fenimore Cooper Society, as well as being the former home of the National Soccer Hall of Fame -- to have a little lunch before hitting a bookstore we had planned to visit.

But our parking spot in downtown Oneonta just happened to be in front of a bookstore called "The Rose and Laurel Bookshop." So after a bite to eat, we hit The Rose and Laurel before hitting our known destination.

While our daughter latched on pretty quickly to a Steinbeck novel, Deborah and I collected seven works to take home with us. One of them Deborah talks more about here, while the other six were a random collection chosen for different reasons:

• Eichenberg! As we've mentioned many times, we have started to be on the lookout for Fritz Eichenberg-illustrated/wood-engraved works, and we found an awesome copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, which is an all-time favorite. This edition appears to date from about 1940 or so.
• a visually striking and well-preserved 1887 edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, with "an introductory account of the work by the author."
• another Riverside Edition for our collection, A Modern Instance by William Howells, published in 1957.
• a 1950 Modern Library edition of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, which is a definite upgrade over our current copy. I've not read Brothers yet, but I am definitely looking forward to reading more Dostoyevsky.
• George Orwell's Animal Farm, another personal favorite, likely a book club hardcover edition from 1946, the year after it first appeared in print.
• A copy of David James Duncan's The River Why, which Deborah picked up in order to return a loaned copy back to the person who gave it to her.

So, all in all, this was a very successful stop that we hadn't planned on making. Count us as fans of The Rose and Laurel Bookshop!

Books added: Crime and Punishment  by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe; A Modern Instance by William D. Howells; The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Animal Farm by George Orwell; The River Why by David James Duncan

Publishers (in same order): The Heritage Press; Houghton, Mifflin and Company; Houghton Mifflin Company Riverside Editions; Random House Modern Library; Harcourt, Brace and Company; Bantam Books 

Years: 1940(?); 1887; 1957; 1950; 1946; 1984

Where obtained: The Rose and Laurel Bookshop

Price: $30.00 for the six

Tell Big Brother that I am looking for him

Somehow, somewhere, in some way, my copy of George Orwell's 1984 went missing in the last couple of years. It could have been all the moving around, I could have loaned it and forgotten to whom ... I'm not sure.

All I know is that -- because I consider 1984 to be one of the most important works of fiction ever written (lending credit to the theory that I loaned it to someone who hadn't read it) -- I have been looking for a replacement, and though not the one I ultimately desire, today I found a suitable, temporary substitute at the McIntire Rd. Book Exchange.

It's a Signet Classic edition, though a bit newer than the ones we sometimes collect, this one being actually published in 1984 as a "Commemorative 1984 Edition." So that's something interesting, at least. Oh, and this edition has a foreword written by Walter Cronkite. Talking "newspeak" with America's then-favorite newsman.

So that'll work for now, but what I really would like to find is a hardcover published sometime within a decade of when 1984 first appeared in print, in 1949.

On a different note, one thing that we've found McIntire Rd. to be very good for is anthologies, and since I am big fan of short story anthologies, I'm always looking for different collections. We found two such items today.

One is a bit more textbook-ish, titled "Ten Modern Masters" (1959) and featuring Sherwood Anderson, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Henry James, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Katherine Mansfield and Frank O'Connor. It does, however also contain A) an appendix --  "Stories for Comparison and Contrast" -- featuring the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Guy de Maupassant, Rudyard Kipling, Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway, and B) a final section of excerpts from journals, letters and essays of the authors. Score.

The other anthology is titled "The World's Best" (1950), edited by Whit Burnett, which as you might imagine, is a collection of work by authors from all over the globe, arranged by geographic region. Short stories, essays, biographies, poetry,  plays, and more comprise this near 1,200-page volume covering 105 authors (called the "105 Greatest Living Authors") and more than 20 countries. It's an intense collection, one we are thrilled to have added, and even more excited to start reading.

Books added: 1984, George Orwell (1984); "The World's Best", Whit Burnett, ed. (1950); "Ten Modern Masters", Robert Gorham Davis, ed. (1959)

Publishers (in same order):  New American Library, Signet Classic; The Dial Press; Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc.

Years: see above

Where obtained: McIntire Rd. Book Exchange, Charlottesville, Va.

Price: Free!