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 09:13 am (UTC)Just out of curiosity, have you an OED?
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Date: 2003-03-02 09:25 am (UTC)*bats eyelashes*
*rabidly curious*
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Date: 2003-03-02 09:30 am (UTC)As it happens, I have access to the OED online through the University, so I am not OED-less for all practical purposes. But it's not the same as owning it (and my access will go away when I finish my dissertation and get my degree and for the kind of money an online subscription costs, you might as well buy your own hardcopy). However, for the time being, if ya got obscure words you want looked up or first usages or the like, I am your gal.
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Date: 2003-03-02 09:34 am (UTC)Bring it on, baby. *g*
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Date: 2003-03-02 10:09 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2003-03-02 10:54 am (UTC)And your opera-score coup is a thing of beauty. I wouldn't want opera scores myself, but I get a vicarious thrill of of your having found them. So, yay!
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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: 2003-03-02 11:04 am (UTC)* You might have to scrounge up a magnifying ball/glass, as I cannot find the magnifying ball that came with it just now.
* It stays mine, but it lives with you, until for some reason I really miss it or something like that, in which case I will give you as much warning as possible.
* You agree to help somebody who asks for the OED info on a word, and you perform this service no less than once a fortnight. (Caveat: help too much, and let it cut into your creative/productive time, and I will start growling at you, says the Lioness who intends to maximize her own pleasure in a world supplied with Truepenny's work.)
* You have an OED teaparty with me sometime at a convention. (I think an OED teaparty would be one where there is tea, conviviality, and much looking up of words, with discussion arising therefrom.)
If this seemeth good to thee, speak.
* to quote the fannish reference, "Joke, Moshe!" (translation: I am being facetious.)
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Date: 2003-03-02 11:05 am (UTC)But only about the sinfulness. I would not joke about the OED.
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Date: 2003-03-02 11:11 am (UTC)Hmm. This may have to be arranged. If you would be at all amenable to the suggestion, that is. (I already know he would be.)
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Date: 2003-03-02 11:42 am (UTC)My only question/caveat has to do with the following:
* You agree to help somebody who asks for the OED info on a word, and you perform this service no less than once a fortnight.
Is that meaning I'd have to go out and hunt people down--Hey, you! You want a definition? Yeah, I'm talking to YOU, punk!--or just that if people ask, I answer? I'd be happy to be an OED oracle, but am not so much about the missionary work.
Other than that, all systems are go go go!
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Date: 2003-03-02 11:45 am (UTC)TRUEPENNY: {shocked} Well I should hope not! Such matters are NOT suitable for frivolity. Really!
EXIT, STAGE LEFT, with much maiden-auntly flouncing.
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Date: 2003-03-02 11:48 am (UTC)I would LOVE that. Love it with an insane and brightly colored passion.
Um, in other words, yes, please!
(But you have to come, too.)
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Date: 2003-03-02 12:54 pm (UTC)However, a t-shirt with the legend
OED ORACLE
"Hey, you! You want a definition?
Yeah, I'm talking to YOU, punk!"
is now momentarily, deeply, delightedly faunched after.
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Date: 2003-03-02 12:57 pm (UTC)Actually, I think we might be able to drag papersky and the Obble along if we got lucky and played our cards right. Ooh, and rysmiel. And Zorinth, maybe even. And....
The possibilities are, as they say, mindless.
It has the look of an Expotition.
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Date: 2003-03-02 01:52 pm (UTC)It was Mr. Ford who walked into The Strand and emerged with a copy of Phoebe Spinrad's The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage. The author posted to the Fidonet Writing Echo at the time, and the book was her thesis, with a very small print run, and I needed it to write Tam Lin. I didn't even have to go to New York.
Pamela
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Date: 2003-03-02 04:18 pm (UTC)You know the drill. I always, always walk out poorer, even if it means no dinner for me that week.
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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.
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Date: 2003-03-02 04:24 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2003-03-02 04:34 pm (UTC)Maybe the Thursday afternoon of Minicon? And we could have lunch in you know, that place, that place by Dreamhaven with the pipes that's so American I can't quite get my head around what it is. Zorinth hasn't seen that.
When Beth was visiting me in Swansea once, we were walking along the seafront, and there was a little clutter of stalls selling oddments for a good cause (Lifeboats) and we were walking past and suddenly we both veered over at the same angle, having spotted a box of books. This is what is technically described as a "tropism".
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Date: 2003-03-03 06:57 am (UTC)That's a yes vote of sufficient emphasis [ emphaticity ? ] to temporarily knock the words out of the way.
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Date: 2003-03-03 07:02 am (UTC)St. Patrick's Day last year. Doing what all real Irish people do on Patrick's Day, which is look at books. Wandering into an antiquarian book thing under the misapprehension that it had an affordable second-hand element.
1860s translation of Dante's Inferno into moderately good quasi-Miltonic. Footnotes dedicated to the dissing of every previous translation. Gustav Dore engravings. One hundred and eighty-three of them.
It was not sensibly priced, exactly. But I did restrain myself from both the Dali-illustrated six-volume boxed set of the Divine Comedy, or the shelf with the complete works of Darwin in first editions - that, I think, may be a present to myself should I ever become a full professor. Boith of which were an order of magnitude more.
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Date: 2003-03-03 07:06 am (UTC)Most excellent.
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Date: 2003-03-03 07:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-03 07:12 am (UTC)You people (including
Not being a fox in a fable, I don't think those grapes are sour. I want! Dammit.
Wiscon?
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Date: 2003-03-03 07:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-03 07:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-03 07:53 am (UTC)When
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Date: 2003-03-03 08:00 am (UTC)Oh do come to Minicon!
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Date: 2003-03-03 09:35 am (UTC)*stomps around in a circle*
Unless something marvelous happens in the next couple weeks (i.e., I sell something), I don't think I'm going to be able to afford Minicon.
Damn!
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Date: 2003-03-03 09:46 am (UTC)Meanwhile, I shall deploy the forces of good. Obble, if you read this, will you please to tell Lydy that she might want to cross her fingers, since my saying yes to her Interesting Proposition would be made vastly more likely by having Truepenny at Minicon.
And Truepenny, you may certainly stay at Lindenhaus if that'd help. Though I warn you that there will be much giggling. And books. And sparkly things. But you know that.
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Date: 2003-03-03 05:22 pm (UTC)certain people's talents
Date: 2003-03-03 05:49 pm (UTC)He has that talent in other areas as well. I myself have seen him, on a shopping trip in Minneapolis with me in search of Nice Things To Travel To London With, put his hand into an undifferentiated mass of polyester nightgowns on the clearance rack and pull out the one all-cotton pin-tucked floor-length inset-lace perfect traveling nightgown for a Lioness.
But he most often does it with books.
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Date: 2003-03-04 06:51 am (UTC)