Archive | books

i told you i can’t be trusted with money.. when i get a little money i buy books… and i did… i had a good sale today…which didn’t mean i had extra money..it just meant that i was feeling self indulgennt…after 3 days of migraines, panic attacks and crying jags…i hate fucking hot weather and i hate all my pets and my home and my wardrobe…i hate it all… somehow i my sleep i got poison ivy between two fingers  – weird huh? …i hate the entire lot of it.  but books are sacred…i can always rationalize buying more.. i can’t rationalize buying EXPENSIVE or Collectors items…. but i try to buy reading copies that retail some value…which can be a challenge…

After half a sucky day in the road melting for the Census bureau… i’d only been out in the freaking weatehr for 4 hours, but couldn’t WAIT to get in the shower and in my reading chair in front of a fan in the dark with my remote in my fist.  And once I did…i pretended to work while i surfed the net…and loaded up my netflix queue… then i found that the 1st season of Bourdain’s Layover was streaming ….it wasn’t bad enough that i was immediately hungry for a fried hot dog..but the mutherfucker went into bookstores…which made me hit the pause button and watch the titles he was checking out…i had nearly all the books except for the Bemelman’s food essays  which for some reason i missed out on…

So I pulled the laptop over and ordered two books that i may or may not finish.but my life couldn’t go on without them… well at least it felt like that… my little case of OCD usually demands instant gratification…I want the book, i search for the book, i find an original edition with a dust jacket…i buy the book and in a few days I will GET the book..and finding packages in the mailbox is infinitely more fun than putting them in the mailbox and watching the mail carrier ignore them and keep on walking…

Look what I found!

These were making me CRAZY. I remembered them from when I was a kid. They had been VENDED ON A SPINNER RACK in tourist locations as souvenirs. I remember them vividly, or at least I remember standing in front of them begging my mother to let me buy them all. When I started publishing the SicPress series THIS was the image I had in my head. I kept trying to explain to people that these were not vended like other book series at bookstores. I wanted to replicate the image in my head of a spinner rack filled with local titles.

Now comes the interesting part. Once I found these few copies on the shelf at a local library I had enough to look up the rest of the series. I had remembered nothing about them, except that they were local titles. The series was called New Historical Series, with many of the books written by the same man. Turns out that these were from the late 60s and 70s out of Wakefield, as stapleback pamphlets. But the ones by Leo Bonfanti, which is most of them, became part of another series of books from OLD SALTBOX publishers in Danvers, somewhere in the 90s….Which I had seen many times on the shelves at the GLOBE CORNER BOOKSTORE in Boston, which no longer exists.

I don’t know why I didn’t put 4 and 4 together. Old Saltbox STILL vends their books on spinner racks in tourist locations. The strange part is that they haven’t expanded to include the internet. Their books appear spartanly on Amazon but not vended by them, usually by third persons at inflated prices. From their website, it looks like they are still pretty cheap. Now My brain is adding 4+4+5….I’d like to get the library and the farm store to carry MY OWN spinny rack, but these would also be a great profit making books as well, especially I used them to shore up my own titles. I think MORE local interest books is always better than less.

It’s an interesting bit of information, I wish i was better funded I would definitely buy these and distribute them, along with my books.

I KNOW I had all of tolkien’s work in paperback…i KNOW I did..cause i read em. But they aren’t on my bookcase. I must have culled them in a fit of cleaning. I probably WON’T reread them again cover to cover again, not in paperback. But seeing the HOBBIT the other day reminded me WHY I keep some of the books I Like even if I won’t be reading them again.

So stupid me who really shouldn’t be wasting money started cruising online for cheap replacement copies. I had my heart set on THIS particular series edition, the one I actually read. The Ballantines with the art from the 60s and 70s. Alas it is REALLY hard to find exact editions online…most people when listing cheap copies don’t indicate cover art nor all the information from the verso. Why bother for a book under $5 and listed by ISBN, there are very few idiots like me who are insisting on a certain LOOK for their BOOK. But if I am going to replace MY COPY and look at it everyday, I want it to make me smile.

I did find a SET of Lord of the Rings very very cheap, even with shipping they were under $7 for all 3. It only the 1965 date listed but when it arrived it was a mixed bag of covers. But continuing to search by keyword combinations I THINK I found all three with the cover art I want. They should arrive soon

Yes I hang my head in shame that THIS kind of thing taunts me and that it becomes an overwhelming desire to accomplish the task. I wasted about $20 on the orders…which some weeks is a lot of money. My rationalization is that I don’t BUY as many books as I used to, and I have been culling so much over the years that the books I KEEP should be ones that DO make me smile when I look at them.

A lot of the books I KEEP are particular editions. Their physicality is just as important to me as their contents. In some cases I have been know to eschew a hardcover edition for a paperback one. Especially if the paperback edition, takes up less room or in most cases took me a while to find.

I certainly won’t trade a paper copy for a digital one. In fact if I read something digitally that I Like, I would replace it with a paper copy for the shelf. Or at least I intend to If i read something digitally that I like. So far, it’s just stuff.

It seems if I am busy I don’t think to blog something, if I am not busy the odds are good i’m too depressed to think of something creative. Monday I did the spay/neuter clinic until late, typed until late, Tuesday I went back to the clinic to help install a new floor until late, Wednesday..damn i can’t remember most of Wednesday, can you? I do remember typing and typing.

I manage to push The History of the First Church of Methuen to proof phase and now I am trying to get some more material transcribed.    On the PLUS side, the local farm stand – slash- store has agreed to carry all my books whenever I get around to buying a spinning wire rack.  But I already decided to bribe myself . . . I can’t buy that unit until I have 24 titles ready to fill it; so about 5 more to go.    Tomorrow I am furthering my research on the Short Historical Works of Robert H Tewksbury…dead these last 113 years, he left some scattered writings that are screaming for collecting. I also have my eye on five or six other titles…the GOAL for 2013 is to have the spinning rack in the store well before November 1st, which includes the store owners’s grandmother’s two historical fiction novels.   It’s good to have a goal right?

My goal for today was to actually get a lot more material typed….alas the universe had other plans..the weather is warm and I was gifted with a smacking migraine.  It is probably my own fault, i stopped drinking Red Bull, Coke and Pepsi etc.. a few months ago, thinking I could keep the migraines at bay if the only caffeine I am getting is in the headache pills.  I’m a little pissed…if I am going to get them anyway, I may as well be drinking what I like.  On the other hand my electric tea kettle IS getting an extra workout, perhaps I need to be making my tea with caffeinated water?

Tomorrow I have a luncheon date to get ONE of my titles into a giftshop in Andover…i need to do more other titles outside of Methuen and Lawrence, not going to get rich this way am I?

I had made up my mind to finish some of the ugly projects that i had put aside during the year.  By ugly i mean the ones that weren’t as much fun as others.  I did finish the proofing of the Phelps biography as tedious as it was, then i took up the History of the first congro church. which is a few houses away from me.  its an important book i do have to publish it. It covers the early period in town when it was a theocracy.

The author Dr. Hayward, godblessem, didn’t hire an editor and had a penchant for run on and fragmented sentences.  which was problematic enough…but there’s 30 pages of roster in the back which im still typing 900 lines left.

once thats done i can move on to other books.  hopefully more with my own name on them.