We each have our own grail-quests.

[truepenny]

Before I developed fiscal responsibility, I used to go bookstore trolling on a frighteningly regular basis. I am reminded of this today because digging out the David Kirby poem has induced great crashing waves of nostalgia for the days when I spent hours combing the used bookstore(s) for obscure volumes of poetry like that one and bought everything I found.

Used-bookstore-trolling is an art, and it's one I used to be extremely good at. My best-ever coups? One: in the last hour of a library sale, where they were giving the books away because otherwise they had nothing to do with them, finding a book on the particular corner of history that MH is most interested in and taking it because, hey, free, and then getting home and having his face light up because it was (a.) tremendously important and influential, (b.) out of print, and (c.) scarcer than hens' teeth. Two, when trolling for Prelims books, finding the Oxford Complete Poems of Robert Sidney (Philip's younger and much more minor brother), which see (c.) above. (Also, I have a Thing for the lesser Sidneys like Robert and his daughter Mary Wroth.) And then, of course, the day that heres_luck's dissertation director dragged me, all but physically, down to a used bookstore near campus and demanded that I buy the 4 volume complete John Webster which had been shelved with the dictionaries (Noah, John--a Webster's a Webster, right?). And another library sale, where I got the 12 volume Golden Bough for $2 a volume. I haven't read much of it, but I love having it on my bookcase where I can just look at it from time to time and purr.

An art, a passion, a vocation. Used bookstore trolling. I still have a list as long as your arm of books I'm looking for and still have a dangerous propensity to get sucked into bookstores as I pass them. But I practice better frugality now, and do not succumb to the sirens' singing. ... At least not often.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I admire your continence. I can't walk past a used bookstore. Heck, I can't walk past a charity shop that might have a shelf of books. Sometimes Rysmiel and I go on used bookstore trawls on quiet weekends. I navigate by them, they glow on my mental map of cities like illuminated capitals.

I have never given it up, even at my poorest. I once spent 50p of my last pound on a Phillipino dictionary. (No, I didn't need it, but how often do you see one?)

In fact, I am so passionate about them that Rysmiel and I got married in <a href="http://www.hay-on-wye.co.uk>Hay on Wye</a> the used book capital of the world. And yesterday, in Libraire Astro, a used bookstore on St. Catherine, where we were trying to fulfil Rysmiel's quest to buy a copy of Ian McDonald's <cite>Desolation Road</cite> for everyone, I saw a copy of <cite>The King's Name</cite>, just sitting there like a real book. It's a very odd feeling.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, I backslide horribly. Especially at cons, where there's all these books that you can't even find in used bookstores most likely. Dreamhaven is a prime offender in this regard.

The key, really, is not being on campus and therefore not being within walking distance of bookstores. Because if I walk past them, the little chorus starts up: It wouldn't hurt just to look ... I fall for that one every single time.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yeah, see? Exactly.

[penmage.livejournal.com]

It wouldn't hurt just to look...

I always fall for that one, too. Who was it who said that temptation is not so weak anywhere as it is in a bookstore? I know I'm paraphrasing, but, well. Yes.

[penmage.livejournal.com]

I can hardly pass a used bookstore without noticing. This past summer, my family went to Maine, which is filled with lots of small towns, all with really good-looking used bookstores. I'd be sitting in the backseat of the car, reading a book, minding my own buisness, and suddenly my head would jerk up - and we'd be passing a bookstore. it never failed. I don't think I missed one.

I compile lists of my favorite used bookstores. There are some wonderful ones in Israel - I'll go to them to find out of print books I can't find anywhere else in the world.

And I love the dictionary section. I can spend hours and hours and hours perusing it, leafing through it, reading the dictionaries.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Never go on holiday with people who don't stop for bookshops.

When carandol and I were coming to the end of our marriage and were grumping at each other a great deal, we went out for the day with some old friends, and though we started to day without much charity for each other we managed to bond again around the fact that these friends could walk past bookshops. Indeed, they kept doing it, while Carandol and I took turns in asking them to wait just a moment while we popped in here.