Ok, so I can’t resist posting this week’s haul. Because Book Traffic on Leliegracht is going out of business, and has a 75%-off sale. Yes, 75% off. So I spent a truly delightful hour or so browsing, and found:

  • Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, a novel written in the 1860’s protesting Dutch colonial policy. I’ve been looking for this for ages, ever since our Dutch teacher took us to the bust of Multatuli (on the same street, coincidentally) and told us about the history. This is a gorgeous edition (Van Oorschot, first printed 1949), with proper nouns in small caps (yes, apparently all of them!), low-and-high quote marks (as the wikipedia page lists for Germany and Austria — these were also used in the Netherlands, obviously), and both quotes and dashes for dialogue.
  • Two Kiwi offerings: Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (which I’ve started at least twice, but never finished), and a 1987 Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry.
  • The Milagro Beanfield War, by John Nichols. I’ve got a soft spot for the Robert Redford film of this story, not least for its succession of beautiful still images (the coyote angel dancing with his concertina, or sitting in a rusted-out pickup cab waiting for Amarante to notice him; the senile brigade ready to shoot the balls off Jerry the forest service cop… any of these would make a magnificent poster). From the looks of things, the book is less of a family story: “Two days after that, just as Herbie was beginning to think a cease-fire had been declared, Stella Armijo, Joe Mondragón, and Onofre Martínez castrated the Armijo’s three little pigs.” (The cover copy has the Chicago Tribune comparing Nichols to Steinbeck, which wouldn’t be your first association with the film.)
  • Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Brummel. The first of these (which I typeset from the Project Gutenberg text, printed, and bound in card covers, back in the day when I had no money but a big print quota) is the source for “I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.” I don’t know the second, but I expect to enjoy it.
  • 1958 Year’s Greatest SF and Fantasy, with a selection of articles on the Sputnik launch as well as a bunch of well-known stories (“The Fly”! Asimov’s “Let’s Get Together,” Rog Phillips’ “Game Preserve”, Aldiss and Kuttner and Ionesco and Budrys).
  • Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which I’ve been meaning to read for ages.
  • And finally, a cheap knockoff edition of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, more properly known (according to the title page of the first edition), as

The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.; comprehending An Account of His Studies and > Numerous Works, in chronological order, A Series of Epistolary Correspondence and > conversations with many eminent persons; and Various Original Pieces of His > Composition, never before published. The whole exhibiting a view of literature and > literary men in Great-Britain, for near half a century, during which he flourished. > > In two volumes.

Total cost: €12. Gloat gloat.