Yes, this post was indeed supposed to happen over the weekend, but through circumstances beyond my control (well, being absent-minded certainly seems to be beyond my control), it's only appearing now!
The
look behind the scenes and the pics from before the sale started were fun (see here
if you missed it), but let's be real—the books themselves are what we all care
about. So here's the whole mess I brought home:
As
I mentioned last time, not quite such a haul as last year (thank heavens, really!), but still great fun,
and first off, I have to share two lovely books that I'm including with the
sale books but that were really lovely gifts from Deborah, who does the
wonderful Book Barmy blog. Have a look:
Both
GRACE LIVINGSTON HILL and LOUISE PLATT HAUCK will belong on my
American Women Writers list (if I ever get back around to that), and both books
look like great fun. And the dustjackets are to die for (I will fetishize them
some more for you when I've read them). Thanks so much, Deborah,
for making book sale day even brighter and more exciting than usual!
At
the book sale itself, there weren't actually a large number of really
exceptional finds, but rather late in the sale, I happened to glance at one of
the boxes under a table and see a suspiciously old hardcover, with two more
dusty old books under it. And lo and behold!
Two
of these three are by authors on my list. The book with a dustjacket, of
course, is a SHELLEY SMITH novel,
one of several of her novels to have been released in e-book in the past couple
of years. I have at least one other Shelley Smith novel on my shelves,
languishing unread, but how could I pass up a dustjacketed copy?
The
second of the books is more obscure and therefore right up my alley. MARY DURHAM wrote eleven mysteries in
the 1940s and 1950s, about which little information has been available, so I'm
delighted to have the chance to read one!
And
the third might be the most obscure of all, since I can find little about its
author, KATHERINE MCCOMB, except
that she wrote at least a couple of other mysteries and a few romances. The
Library of Congress only lists two of her titles, not including this one, Death in a Downpour, published in 1960.
Is it a great lost treasure? Well, probably not, but you never know!
Then,
shortly after, I came across the CELIA
FREMLIN paperback. I've always meant to read The Hours Before Dawn, her most famous novel. I didn't find that
one, but Appointment with Yesterday
seems to have been well-received too. She's apparently more suspense than
mystery, which may or may not work for me, but it should be interesting.
I
also picked up a couple of other books specifically relevant to or of significant
interest for this blog:
The
first—MARGARET HALSEY's With Malice Toward Some—is really also
thanks to Deborah, who pointed it out to me when we chatted during the sale.
I've been meaning to read Halsey's humorous book about travelling in the U.K.,
and now I have no excuse not to (except the two thousand or so other books on
my TBR list!).
This
year, as always, Andy was with me at the sale and had his list of authors to be
on the lookout for. I've never thought to put MABEL ESTHER ALLAN on his list before, but I've been reading a fair
amount of her this year, and some of her later works in particular seem to have
had success in the U.S., so I thought why not? I didn't really expect him to
find anything, but I underestimated him. The
Flash Children, the beginning of one of Allan's late series for younger
readers, wasn't my highest priority (why couldn't Lost Lorrenden or Glenvara
or another of her vanishingly rare titles from the 1950s have just happened to
turn up?), but I'm happy enough to get to sample her later work.
And
while Andy was perusing the children's section, he also picked up a few other
older books, all American, that he thought might appeal to me. I had to Google DORIS GATES' Blue Willow, but one look at a reference to it as a Grapes of Wrath for young readers made
clear I'd have to give it a try. I know I've also come across CORNELIA MEIGS before, though I can't
recall how or in what context. Wild Geese
Flying isn't one of her best-known works, it seems, but I was intrigued
enough to give it a try.
The
two JANET ALDRIDGE books are new to
me and pretty bedraggled. What little I can find out about the Meadow-Brook
Girls series suggests they could easily go either way—great fun or purely
dreadful—but I knew I needed to peruse them a bit more.
Now,
ordinarily, a beat-up copy of a WILLIAM
INGE novel wouldn't seem like a "find" in particular. Inge, as
some Americans and probably very few Brits will know, was primarily known as a
playwright—author of Picnic (for
which he won the Pulitzer Prize), Bus
Stop, and Come Back, Little Sheba,
all of which were probably more widely known for their film versions than for
the plays they were based on. He also won an Oscar for his screenplay of Splendour in the Grass. He's not known
particularly for his fiction, which consisted of only two novels. Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff was the first,
about a high school teacher who has an affair with an African-American janitor,
with many repercussions.
So
what makes a copy of this novel, a little worse for wear despite being a first
edition, something of a find? What about this?:
Too
bad he lost control of his pen a bit and blotted the first name, but if you
can't make it out, yes, it does say "Bill Inge." Which makes this the
second vintage author inscription I've come across this year at library book
sales—I've been meaning to post about the first for a while, so hopefully this
will inspire me.
Then,
a few more books that are perhaps very loosely related to the blog:
SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER is one of very few
authors I might actually enjoy reading letters by and to, so The Element of Lavishness, including her
correspondence with long-time friend and New
Yorker fiction editor, was a nice acquisition. And I have an
on-again/off-again love affair with Aussie CHRISTINA
STEAD, so it's fun to have a nice-ish copy of one of her late novels, Miss Herbert, which I haven't yet read.
I
have a real fondness for the rather quiet, low-key travel books of EMILY KIMBROUGH, and have read a number
of them, but Floating Island is one
of those I haven't read yet, so that's a nice find. And I have a peculiar
fascination with Ottoline Morrell, a Bloomsbury figure and all-around
eccentric, and actually had MIRANDA
SEYMOUR's bio of her on my TBR list. And finally, although it's surely one
of the bleakest books of the past year or so, based on the reviews I've come
across, I already meant to read MARGARET
DRABBLE's The Dark Flood Rises,
and a pristine hardcover cover was too much to resist.
The
biggest group of books from this year's sale are an array of contemporary (or
at least more recent than my blog's period) mysteries, including several that
are the first in their respective series, which is handy. None of these are
rare or extraordinary, but it's always nice to stock up on relaxing reads at
bargain prices.
Finally,
just a few odds and ends:
I've
actually read the Capote, the Baldwin, and the Mann books before, but thought
re-reads might be in order. I can't quite imagine what possessed me to buy the
Kerouac—I think I bought it once before—but I did sort of like On the Road
when I read it ages ago (probably at a more appropriate age, honestly, when I
was young and restless), and thought if I re-read it it might as well be the
more complete, less edited scroll version. I'll probably just donate it back in
a few months, but who knows? And I meant to read some Patrick Modiano when he
won the Nobel Prize a few years ago, and never did (of course), so Missing Person looked kind of intriguing.
