We each have our own grail-quests.
Mar. 2nd, 2003 10:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyBefore 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
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Date: 2003-03-02 10:57 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2003-03-03 07:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-02 04:21 pm (UTC)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.