Like Jack Kerouac ... or Willie Nelson

It's time for us to go on the road (again), and this time we're headed to the Northeast to visit family and make some of our old favorites official Get a Spine stops, as well as taking the opportunity to find some new bookstores on our route.

Generally, we head north through Pennsylvania and into Central New York, with the first destination Cooperstown, home of James Fenimore Cooper (and Willis Monie Books). Then it's off across Massachusetts and up into southern Maine, where we'll be exploring bookstores in Portland and along Route 1 between Portland and Kittery, Me.

After that it's back across Massachusetts to the Northampton/Amherst/Easthampton area, where we'll visit some of our favorites like the Northampton DPW book shed and Raven Used Books, as well as making an effort to visit some of the local places we didn't make it to while we lived in that area for just under a year.

If you've got any suggestions of must-visits on our route, please let us know!

Welcome ... and now we're off

It's been a few months in the making -- time moves differently when you have a new infant in the house -- but today we've officially launched into the world "Get a Spine," the blog that chronicles the search for used classic literature, as well as the tales and people we encounter along the way.

You can read more about us and the blog here, but suffice it to say for now, we've already built a good deal of content that we hope you'll peruse, enjoy, and get to know better for the time being. We're headed out on a road trip (see above) to Cincinnati (with a stop in Louisville likely, and perhaps a visit to Charleston, W.Va., too), which will surely lead to new adventures, new acquisitions and new stories to tell in the coming days and weeks.

Some regular features of "Get a Spine" will include: bookseller reviews from the places we visit; a book events and happenings calendar; a series we're calling "The Spine Nine," which asks the different booksellers we encounter the same nine questions about who they are, what they do, etc.; an "Inside the Book" a "Left in the Leaves" feature detailing the kinds of things one finds between the pages of a used book that aren't related to the story at all; an "Overheard at ..." series, where we post some of the fun/funny/odd/whatever things we hear in our searching; links to resources and other sites/blogs of interest to used book seekers; news related to used books and classic literature; an updated card catalog detailing the contents of our library; and, of course, details about what we find, how we found it, and why we added it to our library. Plus, there will be much more to come as we go.

We hope you'll get as much out of keeping up with "Get a Spine" as we do putting into it. It's a celebration of used books, classic literature, and the people who carry the torch for both.

So enjoy, reach out, subscribe(!), recommend used-book stores for our trip or for future trips, get listed as a blog or resource on our site, or do anything else you'd like to do to be a part of this with us. Our email address is under "Contact" on the right, comments are welcome, and we'd love to hear from you.

Happy reading, and happy travels!

A note about our collection

As we said in our first post, our collection is made up of, in part, the books we each had prior to us getting together.

It wasn't until we became "we" and began collecting books together that we started to develop a more specific approach to building our library. So while there are many works of great literature in our collection... there are also many editions of those works that we would like to replace (if not forget about entirely...), now that we have a common goal and approach in our search.

Like we said in our opening post, we are not opposed to having multiple editions of the same work, so long as we like all the editions. But if we're not happy with our edition of George Eliot's Silas Marner, for instance, we'll be on the lookout for one that better fits our ideas for what we want our library to be.

It's always been the best of times...

It wasn't until after nearly a full year of having lived together that our respective book collections finally met. And from that moment, the shelf space just hasn't been able to keep up with the additions.

We've certainly done our best to keep pace, though. Whether it was buying two bookcases out of the the storage locker of a former-professor-turned-fringe-Massachusetts-congressional-candidate, or re-purposing an old hardware-store paint-display shelf to accommodate our growing collection, we've made sure our books have a home.

That home has been in Massachusetts -- where we did some serious damage via the Northampton DPW's book shack -- and is now in Charlottesville, Va., where, due to the great number of quality booksellers dealing in used books, it is very easy for one to always be in "add mode."

The "Get A Spine" blog chronicles our search for used classic literature (novels, mostly) -- as well as the places we go in our search -- to add to our personal library.

Everyone's definition of "classic" differs, and so we won't presume that ours is the definition. For us, both born after 1975, it almost always (but not exclusively) means anything written pre-1960, and our search generally limits our scope to any edition of a work published before 1970 ... and we really love finding anything published before 1930. And love even more pre-1900, and so on, and so on. We're not after first editions, but we certainly don't ignore them if they're attainable, but our goal is to build our library economically.

We believe foremost that great works of literature are a supreme form of art, but we also strongly believe that a book, in its physical form, can often be a work of art. Of course, the degree to which it is considered "art" is subjective. For us, if something grabs us visually, we're likely to add it to our collection ... even if we have several other editions of the same work. We definitely have our repeats, as this blog will prove.

This blog is intended to be as much about the adventure as it is the acquisition. It is the moments of discovery, of surprise, and of joy that often accompany an outing in search of used classics that create a full story, and give the book a life of its own -- by the memories associated with it -- once it's in our house. And we view our collection as something to one day be passed along to our daughter, who we hope will have the same love of books and literature that we do.

Last, but certainly not least, while "the look" of a book is important to us, we believe the books we collect should be read. Our library is not a museum, and we don't want to live in a world where actual books are only display pieces.