Viva Firenze (Massachusetts) -- Pt. I

One of our favorite little towns is Florence, Mass. We lived equidistant from the centers of Florence and Northampton, and while Northampton is not a burgeoning metropolis by any means, it is much bigger than Florence, making Florence always seem like the place to go for some peace and quiet.

One of the places we really love in Florence is Bookends, a two-story (first floor and basement) used-book store on the main drag. We'd done some Christmas shopping there in the past, but hadn't ever really shopped for ourselves there, and now that we were "official," we had to make Bookends a stop on our trip.

The fiction section is on the first floor, so as we normally do, we split up and started from one end of the alphabet. A bonus for us about Bookends is that they have a nice little kids room right next to the fiction section, in which we could let our daughter play semi-unattended while we browsed.

As I worked my way backward from Z, I made it all the way to the M's before finding anything I wanted to hang onto, and that was a 1936 copy of Gone with the Wind. Our copy is not a first edition, though it is a later printing in the year of its original publication, and by the original publisher. All things considered, it's in pretty good shape, and looks like it has earned it's 76 years of existence. I've not ever read it, and haven't seen the movie all the way through, but something just seemed appropriate about putting it on my list of "to reads" now that we're living south of the Mason-Dixon line.

I also found us another Riverside Edition, The Rise of Silas Lapham by William D. Howells, and grabbed a Modern Library copy of  The Best American Humorous Short Stories, because we all need a little comedy in our lives. 

Deborah did the rest our damage at Bookends, grabbing some Austen, Conrad, Dickens, Fitzgerald, London, a Riverside Edition of Conrad's Lord Jim, and more.

We also had the chance to talk to Bookends' owner, Grey Angell, which you can read more about -- as well as see the remainder of our "Books added" (stupid Blogger tag limits!) in Part II here...

Books added: Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald; White Fang by Jack London; Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad; The Rise of Silas Lapham by William D. Howells; The Best American Humorous Short Stories ed. by Alexander Jessup

Publishers (in same order): Scribners; The MacMillan Company; Houghton Mifflin Co. Riverside Editions; Houghton Mifflin Co. Riverside Editions; Random House Modern Library

Years: 1972; 1909; 1958; 1957; 1943

Where obtained: Bookends

Price: $20.00

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

Wuthering twice

Back in April, I discovered a really interesting edition of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre with illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg. It was our first introduction to Eichenberg's wood engravings -- they are beautiful and haunting and we love them. The Jane Eyre we found was apparently part of a box set with Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and so we've been on the lookout for Jane's companion ever since. We imagined it would be a long time before we found it to complete the set -- especially on its own.

We're in Cooperstown, NY, this week, visiting family and doing a bit of book hunting, and Tuesday we made a trip to Oneonta, NY, and stumbled upon Rose and Laurel Bookshop when we stopped on Main Street to have some lunch. When we walked in I noticed a section of large books in sleeves, and I made a beeline for them to scan for the Wuthering Heights.

On first glance it seemed they were all of the newer sort, so I moved down the shelves. For some reason my eye darted upward once more, and there, resting on its side on the top shelf, I saw that green spine with gold letters that looked so much like the Jane Eyre spine... only much thinner. I snatched it and gasped, then ran over to Kristian with it behind my back and said, "Guess what I found?!" I was practically jumping up and down. He was as shocked as I was that we actually found it -- we were both a bit open-mouthed. But as we calmed down, we realized that the front cover did not have an engraving the way the Jane Eyre did -- otherwise they seemed the same. Same size, Eichenberg illustrations all throughout. (We had previously found a mini-version of the Eichenberg-illustrated Wuthering.) Though we wondered why and if it was truly the match, there was no way we were walking out of the shop without that book. We might never come across it again... we were so excited! We did find more at the Rose and Laurel, but Kristian will tell you more about that.

With that now checked off our list, we made a quick visit to Willis Monie Books, the used bookshop in Cooperstown. Sadly on this day, our daughter was due for a nap when we had an opportunity to sneak down there, so we were sort of pushing our luck with the visit and had to rush through it.

We split up, and I was one aisle over from where Kristian was looking. We weren't there 10 minutes when I heard a groan and then Kristian called me over. He had a book behind his back and a sort of rueful grimace on his face. "What did you find?!" I asked. From behind his back he produced Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Eichenberg illustrated, with a brooding Heathcliff engraving on the cover. Unbelievable! This was the one! For a book we thought we might never find, it took less than 24 hours to find two! We discovered that the one without a cover illustration was actually the older version, by two years, published in 1943. The one with the cover illustration, the one that also has the matching Jane Eyre, was published in 1945. Tag, you're it, 1943 version of Jane Eyre...

Book added: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (x2!)

Publisher: Random House

Years: 1945; 1943

Where obtained: Willis Monie Books; Rose and Laurel Bookshop

Price: $5.00; $6.00

'Man, you guys are fast'

On my suggestion, we decided to wander over to Random Row this afternoon, as it had been a few weeks since we'd visited. We arrived to find them gearing for an evening of an old silent movie showing with improvisational piano accompaniment. There is always something going on at Random Row.

As I scanned the fiction shelves, a Jane Eyre with an interesting spine jumped out at me. But it wasn't just the spine that was interesting. When I pulled it off the shelf, I saw the the cover was printed with an erie engraving of a line of uniformed schools girls, eyes downcast save for one, whom I presume to be the title character herself. It gave me a little thrill to look at, so I flipped through the pages and found similarly dark, sinister-looking engravings depicting different scenes from the book. They are fantastic.

I decided I had to have it. I showed it to Kristian and he wholeheartedly agreed with me. He had been busy too, and handed me a hardback copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray to replace our nondescript paperback version -- also with some interesting illustrations.

The owner remembered us from our Sherlock Holmes score a few weeks back, and when his eyes fell on our finds he exclaimed, "Man, you guys are fast! I just put those out today... " He was particularly chagrined about the Jane Eyre, since, as he informed us, the engraving artist, Fritz Eichenberg, is something special. Watch out, Random Row, we're fast.

We later looked it up on our own and learned that it originally came as a boxed set with Wuthering Heights. So now we're on the lookout for that, too.

Book added: Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

Publisher:  Random House

Year: 1943

Where obtained: Random Row, Charlottesville, Va.

Price: $10.00

Book added: The Picture of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde

Publisher:  Illustrated Editions Company

Year: 1931

Where obtained: Random Row, Charlottesville, Va.

Price: $10.00