Last week, after lots of particularly hard work, Josiah & I rewarded ourselves with a trip to Powell's. I got such a nice little stack of books - mostly things I had already been really wanting, but a few surprises, too!
Even better, they were mostly old copies, which are such a good deal (and I usually like better anyway!)
In the stack:
-Modern Library volumes of Thomas Hardy (I never pass up a Modern Library edition of anything we like or would like to read someday - they make perfect reading copies, and the lovely old cloth-bound editions are easy to find and usually less expensive than their modern day paperback counterparts)
-Two 1930's children's books (I never seem to be able to leave without a few of these!)
- A pretty 40's edition of A Little Princess. I'm interested to see what revisiting that one will be like, since I've been re-reading The Secret Garden, Wind in the Willows, Matilda, and other childhood favorites of mine with interested findings (I like some of them much more and some much less than I did 20 years ago.)
-New Vanessa Davis! This was the big surprise of the trip - I only have small anthologies and zines with her work and I'm inordinately excited about a big honkin' volume of it. I find her sweetly self-deprecating sensibility really relatable, but that's not the only feather in her cap - she's also a great storyteller and artist.
-The annotated Wind in the Willows.Hooray! I asked for a copy of this for Christmas, and Josiah gave me a beautiful 1930 edition, which I've read and re-read and keep going back to. I liked the stories when I was small, but I'm absolutely in love with them now. I'm not sure about what that says re: the adventures of Rat, Mole, Badger & Toad holding the interest of actual children, but this grown-up lady finds them one of the most lovely things ever type-set.
My sweet (but slightly crumble-y) copy:
And I'm so excited about to investigate the annotations of my new copy! I was given the annotated Alice when I was 18, and was nerdily delighted by the huge amounts of minutiae and sidebar notations. I really recommend these editions for anyone who has read the stories (others in the series include Oz, Grimm, The Secret Garden) over and over and is still curious about the particular influences of the personal life of the author, the influence of the time period, and other odds & ends.
-At the bottom of the stack is the new Lula, which I have to say, made me fall in love with that magazine again. I hadn't bought an issue for the last year, but I grabbed this one kind of out-of-the-blue, and it's one of their best issues yet. Not to disparage the magic pixies that Lula is filled with, but it was really nice that so many other ladies were featured, like Miranda July, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Sophie Calle. (Okay, maybe they're all magic pixies in their way.) The Exene Cervenka interview kept me up late reading. That she can still come up with interesting and eloquent things to say about the LA punk scene is astounding!
Oh!
Also in the haul from that day, the Adventures of a Cat Whiskered Girl is a really excellent little chapter book that was probably strewn about in the sea of books on the floor next to my bed at the time of this photograph.
Also somewhat book-related: I think I get to go see the new Jane Eyre tonight (finally!) I've been so excited for it - I hope I haven't over-hyped it in my mind.
I hope you have a nice weekend ahead!
