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!