Friday, March 18, 2011

Are the Book Gods Irish?


Lest you think I actually wrote a post about a day in which there were no books involved, let me clear that misconception up immediately. We began our St. Patrick’s Day merriment at 7 a.m. yesterday at Sully’s where the Guinness flowed like the waters of the River Liffey. At such a tender hour even the lighter Jameson’s or Harp didn’t entice me, which could I suppose, call my essential Irishness into question. Now THERE’S a disturbing thought. Let's not dwell on it. I more than made up for it in my enjoyment of the music anyway. There's nothing like a rousing chorus of Finnegan’s Wake to get the blood dancing a Haymaker’s Jig in your veins, no matter what the hour.

Later in the day we stopped off at the antiques mall to bring some new books and tidy up the place a bit. I dragged over a 19 volume set of mysteries written from the 40’s to the 60’s primarily for two reasons – A.) if I listed them online someone from Europe would be dying to have them shipped for $14.95 air mail and B.) the bright red bindings called out like the blast of a siren song at two a.m.. We displayed them on the top of a bookcase where I hoped they would grab some attention over the weekend. But guess what? They won’t be there over the weekend, as they turned up on the sold list last night. Amount of time in the store – a record six hours. Had I known they’d be THAT popular I’d have hauled them over strapped to my back in in the frozen depths of January.

By late afternoon we were off to the rural wilds of Ohio to a book sale of dubious distinction. We got there early to find exactly one person in line, an ebay seller who wondered what he’d been thinking to have made an almost two hour trip to such a hole in the wall. By starting time the line had grown to a magnifcent fifteen people, only five of whom were dealers and that includes both Eric and me. Seconds before the doors opened a very nice man made an announcement – no scanning allowed. Oh joy! Oh rapture! Oh sublime bliss! Never mind that one guy cheated and scanned on the sly – the atmosphere was so rare that someone truly should have snapped a few photos for the Smithsonian archives just to prove that at least once in 2011 a book sale occurred at which the participants were polite, calm, and even jovial.

As for the books, they didn’t immediately blind me with their light, but because the crowd was small and the atmosphere that of a neighborhood diner it was possible to go slowly and really look at the offerings. The prices were crazy good so Eric loaded up on lots of nice new-looking books for the store while I, like Ramona Quimby’s cat, was, even more  picky-picky than usual. Nonetheless, I wound up with one fairly big box full to the top, seven books of which are headed to the mall. None are WILDY good, but all are good enough and these days that alone is impetus to pay homage to the book gods. My favorites are the three pictured above on my Connemara blanket purchased in Ireland in 1974 – a first edition Daddy Long-Legs from 1912, a 1956 facsimile of the first edition of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol published by Columbia University Press with color illustrations and a slipcase, and A Yankee Trader In the Gold Rush; The Letters of Franklin A. Buck, a first edition from 1930. And get this – we parted with only a hundred dollars and acquired 77 books.

In all these years it has never occurred to me to question the ethnic heritage of the books gods. If pressed, I would have said Greek or Roman, but after last night I’m beginning to think they may have formed from the eerie mists of ancient Connemara on the night of the summer solstice. Either that, or I was blessed with the luck of the Irish on St. Patrick's Day.

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