Northampton, where Old is new to us

Our three-week trip concluded, we returned home to host some guests from Spain for a few days, and now we've had some time to breathe and get caught up to date on our bookstore travels in the Northeast. Up first, our trip to Old Book Store in Northampton, Massachusetts.

We'd been to Old Book Store before. Maybe a few times in the 10 months we lived in Northampton. I remember being disappointed on a Monday or two (yes, more than once -- silly, I know) when I would take a walk from my terrible job and head toward Old Book Store, only to be disappointed to find it closed.

As we made our way to Old Book Store on our first stop in Northampton on this trip -- our first time in Northampton as "Get a Spine" -- I had a good feeling about what we might find.

After three minutes inside, my feelings were justified, 10 times over.

As we have mentioned time and time again, we collect a certain style of Riverside Editions from Houghton Mifflin. We collect them both for their look and the quality of the intros and other materials they include with each work. We've had a hard time determining exactly how many and what novels were published in this style, but using the various lists in the back of each one we add, we at least knew a The Last of the Mohicans was out there somewhere. We figured it would be hard to find, especially since we were looking for it...

Yet there it was at Old Book Store, right before my eyes. I couldn't believe it, I told Deborah she wouldn't believe it... yet it was true. And in probably the best condition of any Riverside we have collected. It's practically new. Just awesome.

After that, anything else we left with was gravy, and we found some pretty good gravy at that, including two more Riversides, a Modern Library Grapes of Wrath and one of Deborah's favorites, Love in the Time of Cholera, published in the year it first appeared in print in English by the original English-language publisher (we think it's not a first edition, but a later run that year).

As we checked out, we introduced ourselves to the store's owner (as we normally do), and proceeded to have a very nice conversation with Grant Walz about his bookstore, and the future of used-book collecting and used-book store owners. We can't say it was an optimistic conversation about the future, but we can say that it was a really enjoyable meeting, and we were glad to meet Mr. Walz, and at the very least, maybe give him a little more hope about the future than he may have started the day with.

Books added: The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper; The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck; Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith; Six Eighteenth-Century Plays

Publishers (in same order): Houghton Mifflin Co. Riverside Editions; Random House Modern Library; Alfred A. Knopf; Houghton Mifflin Co. Riverside Editions; Houghton Mifflin Co. Riverside Editions

Years: 1958; 1943; 1988; 1971; 1963

Where obtained: Old Book Store

Price: $12.00 total

We will not forget to return to Popeks

One website we discovered while creating Get a Spine is called "Forgotten Bookmarks." We had had a similar idea to have a series on Get a Spine to tell about the various items we find inside of the books we acquire, and we call that series "Left in the Leaves," but Forgotten Bookmarks is the gold standard by which our idea had to be measured ... and honestly, we might not even win the bronze in comparison.

It's a great site, very well done, and almost always has a fun/interesting post about something found inside the pages of a used book.

While preparing Get a Spine for launch and digging a little bit deeper on Forgotten Bookmarks, I discovered that the site was run by the same person who owns a used-book store about 20 miles from where I grew up in Central New York. So that bookstore, Popeks Books, quickly became a must-visit on our trip to the Northeast, and Tuesday we had our first opportunity to check it out.

We were fortunate to meet the bookstore's extremely nice owner, Michael, and talk to him a little bit about his bookstore and how he got into the book business. We hope that we'll have a Spine Nine from Michael to share soon, but suffice it to say for now that the origin of Popeks Books is one of the better stories we've heard about people getting into the used-book business.

The short version is that there was an auction about 30 years ago, and at this auction was a van that was on the block for $100... but there was one catch. It was full of used books. The Popek family wanted the van, got the books with it, and then needed to do something with them, so...

As it also turns out, Michael's cousins were high school acquaintances of mine, one being a couple of years older and the other being in my class of 95 people. Small world.

Once again, our daughter's napping schedule meant this visit would be fairly brief, but to be honest, there's so much at Popeks Books that we'd need a good couple of hours to feel like we gave the bookstore the attention it requires. So we'll definitely be back, though we did score a few items on this visit:

• Deborah found, on the 50-cent rack, an interesting amalgamation of Natty Bumppo's life throughout James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales." It's called The Leatherstockig Saga, and it takes all of the parts throughout the five books that specifically pertain to Deerslayer/Hawkeye/Pathfinder/Leatherstocking and puts them together in the chronological order of his life (which is not the way the books were first published in their day) to trace the path of his life throughout the five novels. I don't usually like abridged versions of anything, but I have to say that I am pretty interested to check this one out sometime.
• another Riverside to add to the collection! Joseph Andrews  by Henry Fielding. 
• a Modern Library double-William Faulkner collection, containing the novels The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. I've once sat on the town square in Oxford, Mississippi reading some Faulkner, so I am kind of excited about this find. 
• last, but definitely not least, we added two John Steinbeck works, one being an upgrade over a high school-era copy of Of Mice and Men, the other being our first copy of The Grapes of Wrath. Both are in great shape, with the copy of Of Mice and Men being a second-printing done in the work's original year of publication, 1937. There is the number "200" stamped on the inside of the back cover,  but it's hard to tell if this means anything as far as determining the origin of the printing. Regardless, it is an excellent find, and I can't imagine we're likely to come across a better version of this classic that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. The edition of Grapes is also excellent, it's an 11th printing, done in 1940, one year after the work was first published. It's missing its dust jacket, but the cloth cover has an interesting illustration of the migration during the Dust Bowl. I've never read Grapes, but as a fan of Mice and The Pearl, reading Steinbeck's epic has been high on my list for quite some time, so I am excited about this find.

Score one for Popeks Books, and consider us always interested in coming back anytime we are in the area.

Books added: Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding; The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner; The Leatherstocking Saga edited by Allan Nevins; Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Publishers (in same order): Houghton Mifflin Riverside Editions; Random House Modern Library; Avon; Covici Friede; Viking Press

Years: 1961; 1946; 1982; 1937; 1940

Where obtained: Popeks Books

Price: $18.00 for the five

Tasty finds at the Iris BookCafe

If the possibility exists that we can find some good books and get some good food at the same place, we're there. Such was the case Friday at Iris BookCafe in Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine neighborhood.

We're not food reviewers, so we'll just keep it short and say that we didn't eat any better anywhere in Cincinnati than we did at Iris, even if all we had were two sandwiches and two cups of coffee. But everything was fresh and delicious, and the seating out back was really, really nice. A real garden oasis in the city.

As for books, the book store is moderately sized, and there is a sort of companion book/record store next door. For us, the fiction section was kind of in the middle of the layout, two decent-sized bookcases full of various works.

Given the number of books we had to choose from, we did well at Iris, walking out with seven new additions. First, a replacement copy of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina published in 1946 that is not only a significant upgrade from our much more modern version, but which also has illustrations done by Fritz Eichenberg, the same wood engraver/illustrator we'd been collecting. These are color illustrations, not engravings, and are very cool.

We also added a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short stories (1989) that is similar to a Hemingway collection we currently own; The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow from 1964; a Modern Library edition of Sinclair Lewis' Arrowsmith, for which he won the Pulitzer, published in 1946; a 1922 copy of Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome: and a first-edition, third printing of John Steinbeck's The Moon is Down from 1942.

Last, but certainly not least even though it's true crime and not fiction, I had to get a "new" copy of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, a first printing "Book-of-the-Month Club" selection from 1966, the year after the story first started appearing in The New Yorker. I picked up that book one night in college and didn't put it down until it was done, but had loaned my copy only to never see it again... so I had to have this one, which is much better anyway.

All in all, Iris BookCafe was a real find, and a great way to start our book hunting on a Friday in Cincinnati.

Books added: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg); The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck; The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow; Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton; Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis; The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli; In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.

Publishers (in same order): Doubleday & Company; The Viking Press; The Viking Press; Charles Scribner's Sons; Random House, Modern Library; Charles Scribner's Sons; Random House

Years: 1946; 1942; 1964; 1922; 1946; 1989; 1966

Where obtained: Iris BookCafe, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Price: $30 for the seven