Saturday, May 24, 2008

Not much

at this year’s bookfest, the annual offering of secondhand books held at the Showgrounds & organized by one of the local charities. I picked up a few things — an autobiography of Stephen Spender, the complete plays of Joe Orton, In Search of Genghis Khan by Tim Severin & a mystery novel by Michael Dibdin (tho not one of his Inspector Zen series).

Only a few tables, groaning in the main with National Geographics, Readers Digest condensed books, children’s books, a plethora of text books (reflecting (a) that this is a University town & (b) that text books represent planned obsolescence in a captive market) & Mills & Boon romances. Not much else. Except, surprisingly, a rather extensive collection of reasonably recent German literature — Brecht, Dürrenmatt, Böll, et al — which, unfortunately for me, were all in German which ich spreche kein.

1 comment:

richard lopez said...

same sort of finding here in sac, tho i've got lucky a few times and picked up a few tomes that i'd have not got in any other fashion, such as a paperback copy of dante's inferno translated by dante gabrial rossetti.

if you don't get to the fairs real early the second-hand book dealers have already scooped up most of the interesting stuff. you would think poetry, being what it is, would escape the eyes of second-hand booksellers but alas it gets picked over too.