books glorious books

[truepenny]

I really do feel like the urchins in Oliver! on this subject.

Final phase of the massive used-bookstore-closing sale began today. Everything basically dirt cheap.


Bernstein, Burton. Thurber: A Biography.

Childers, Erskine. The Riddle of the Sands.

Clunn, Harold P. The Face of Paris. (Published sometime in the 1950s, this could only qualify as a reference book for a fantasy writer.)

Dickinson, Peter. Perfect Gallows.

Hammett, Dashiell. Five Complete Novels: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, The Thin Man.

Haycraft, Howard, ed. The Art of the Mystery Story.

Heffernan, Nancy Coffey, and Ann Page Stecker. Sisters of Fortune: Being the true story of how three motherless sisters saved their home in New England and raised their younger brother while their father went fortune hunting in the California Gold Rush. (Despite the overly-protesting nature of that subtitle, this is history rather than fiction: edited letters.)

Holmes, Charles S. The Clocks of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber.

Kinney, Harrison. James Thurber: His Life and Times. (Yes, I really did buy three different books about James Thurber. Yes, I did it on purpose.)

Kliban, B. Never Eat Anything Bigger than Your Head and Other Drawings.

Lathen, Emma. By Hook or By Crook. (Which I already had, but it was the only Lathen in hardback and I was just fed up of having to remember that, oh, yes, it's not with the rest of them, it's over there. Now all my Lathens are in the same place. Ha.)

Levertov, Denise. Relearning the Alphabet.

Luchetti, Cathy, and Carol Olwell. Women of the West.

Mallowan, Agatha Christie. Come, Tell Me How You Live. (Yes, that Agatha Christie. Writing about traveling with her husband on his archaeological expeditions in Syria and Iraq.)

Marquis, Don. archyology.

Marsh, Kate, ed. Writers and their Houses. ("This book," begins the introduction, "is about famous writers whose houses are open to the public--their lives, their work and the homes in which they lived. The contributors are in the main themselves well-known writers." The opening essay is P.D. James on Jane Austen.)

McCrumb, Sharyn. If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O, She Walks These Hills.

Nijinksky, Vaslav. The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky.

Olson, Tillie. Silences.

Pearsall, Ronald. The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality. (This may be terrible, but I don't care. The endpapers alone--the "Sin Map of London in Victorian Times"--are worth $3.)

Peters, Ellis. Monk's Hood, The Leper of St. Giles, One Corpse Too Many, The Hermit of Eyton Forest, The Holy Thief, The Pilgrim of Hate, An Excellent Mystery, The Devil's Novice, The Raven in the Foregate. (Since I already know I can read Peters like eating popcorn, it seemed an opportune moment to lay in a stash.)

Rogers, Pattiann. Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems: 1981-2001.

Searle, Ronald. The Female Approach: The Belles of St. Trinian's and Other Cartoons. (I've been wanting to find the Belles of St. Trinian in a collection for years, since I first saw the selection reprinted in Murderess Ink.)

Sillitoe, Linda, and Allen Roberts. Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders.

Solway, Diane. Nureyev: His Life.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexsandr I. The Gulag Archipelago.

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder. Rev. ed.

Thurber, James. The Genius of James Thurber, Thurber Country, Credos and Curios, The Beast in Me and Other Animals.

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny. A Precocious Autobiography.

Comments

[lisajulie.livejournal.com]

Great haul!

I adore The Riddle of the Sands. I adore it to the point that I have two copies, so I can read one and refer to the maps in the other. It is a book I buy copies of to foist off on other people.

[gwynnega]

Ooh, Silences. I practically memorized that book when I was around eighteen. I well remember the amazing lecture/readings Tillie Olsen did at UCLA back in the eighties...

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I think I have that Dashiell Hammett collection somewhere! Mine was red and black and maybe beige, I think, on the dustcover. That's where I read all my Hammett, back in high school.

And, mmm, Ellis Peters, too!

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Red and black, with the Thin Man (looking uncannily like William Powell (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001635/), gosh, imagine that) and Asta on the dust-jacket. Avenel Books.

Worm in the Bud

[oursin.livejournal.com]

This is not a very good book (ooooh, look at the funny naughty Victorians, they weren't so straitlaced after all: I think it may be the Ur-version of this particular bit of pop-hist, which appears every few years), but there's some wonderful material in it. However, Pearsall, may he be damned to the lowest pit of hell, does not include any citations, so actually finding anything he quotes would be a nightmare. He's very good at digging up Victorian porn: he published another book, almost entirely naughty piccies, very little text let alone context, called something like Tell Me, Pretty Maiden. I suspect men like him are why anyone who wants to use 'Cupboard' books has to sit right under the librarian's glare in the BL.

Re: Worm in the Bud

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Somehow I am not surprised to hear it.

But now I have a Sin Map of London. For some reason, this is just making me ridiculously happy.

I'm easily amused.

[scootermark.livejournal.com]

I'm slightly disturbed that I've only read one book on this list (The Gulag Archipelago). I bow to your superior erudition but hope to equal it someday. :) (Maybe it'll help if I stop rereading books I've already read.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, remember, the reason I'm buying them is that I haven't read them either.

And just because I've bought them doesn't necessarily mean I will read them. It should, but it doesn't.

[libskrat]

I didn't see archyology anywhere! You suck and I hate you!

Except I don't, of course. Toujours gai...

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

It was either at the very bottom or the very top of one of the bookcases in the poetry section. And it's a skinny little thing. Easy to miss.

I would say I'm sorry, but I'd be lying. *g*

[hunningham.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on the Thurber. Smart and funny. I've lost "Let Your Mind Alone" (mis-shelved, lent out, left on a bus, eaten by wild animals, vanished into a wormhole?) and desperately want to re-read Thurber's take on the self-help guides. I remember the damming "this is a man who would use the Theorem of Pythagoras instead of a ladder", but want more.