So I went to the US for a short trip of gambling, stocking up on American consumer goodness, and book buying. I visited a few fantastic bookshops but the best of all was Calico Cat Books in Ventura, California. Here I snapped up a rare edition of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the 1956 edition of Proust's In Search of Lost Time in 7 volumes, and a very nice copy of Journey to the West. At Starlight Books in Flagstaff Arizona I bought an odd book edited by Italo Calvino of Italian Fairytales, W. Somerset Maugham's book on Kipling, and a first edition of Knut Hamsun's Pan. This was an exciting purchase as it is an extremely rare printing by Knopf from 1921 after Hamsun won the Nobel.
Needless to say I came home with so many books that I had to rush to Walmart with my best friend THL at 3 in the morning to buy another suitcase and repack (after we drove back to Vegas for our flight back to Paris along Route 66) as we were a bit over the max weight limit per suitcase.
One thing I find amusing is that bookstores here in Paris are always trying to be more American and bookstores in the US are always trying to be more European. Europeans read a lot. But don't lose faith America - aside from the Les Pleiades, printed by Gallimard (which are for French people the ultimate editions and rightly so, they're AMAZING and cause me to drool whenever I see them) - American books are much better printed in general.
The real score of my American book buying was finding a first edition Charlotte's Web by EB White for $4.00!!!! No seriously. It even had a printing flaw, where the last chapter's start page had to be written in by hand...would be interested hearing from any collector's if this means anything? I'm adding this on my shelf beside my 1st American Edition of The Trumpet of the Swan, which is my favorite EB White Book.
Needless to say I came home with so many books that I had to rush to Walmart with my best friend THL at 3 in the morning to buy another suitcase and repack (after we drove back to Vegas for our flight back to Paris along Route 66) as we were a bit over the max weight limit per suitcase.
One thing I find amusing is that bookstores here in Paris are always trying to be more American and bookstores in the US are always trying to be more European. Europeans read a lot. But don't lose faith America - aside from the Les Pleiades, printed by Gallimard (which are for French people the ultimate editions and rightly so, they're AMAZING and cause me to drool whenever I see them) - American books are much better printed in general.
The real score of my American book buying was finding a first edition Charlotte's Web by EB White for $4.00!!!! No seriously. It even had a printing flaw, where the last chapter's start page had to be written in by hand...would be interested hearing from any collector's if this means anything? I'm adding this on my shelf beside my 1st American Edition of The Trumpet of the Swan, which is my favorite EB White Book.
You either have a LARGE apartment, or you own a bookstore. What do you do with all those books?
ReplyDeleteRead them, lend them. The usual.
ReplyDelete