Vermont and NY Acquisitions
From a September Day Trip
A fun day trip to St. Albans, VT, on the other side of Lake Champlain. I recommend The Eloquent Page book store there. The Runciman book, volume on Empress Zita, and an 1893 Graduale Romanum (posted on Sept. 24) were obtained there. The others come from a garage sale in Rouses Point, NY. Runciman is a thorough and accessible historian who has written much on Byzantine matters, the Crusades, and other aspects of Christianity around the Mediterranean. Empress Zita was the widow of Bl. Emperor Karl (Charles). (Excellent book by Charles Coulombe.) I hadn’t been aware that she lived for a number of years in Quebec.
Oh boy! This came from the garage sale. “He reveals Teilhard’s life to be a personal search for unity between God and the world” (from the back cover). Garden City: Image, 1968, pb, 1965 Cdl. Cushing imprimatur.
Other books from the sale include My Meditations on Saint Paul, one in the Confraternity of the Precious Blood series; Fulton Sheen’s Life of Christ; The Colelcted Works of St. John of the Cross; Paul Horgan’s masterpiece novel A Distant Trumpet; and A Seal Upon My Heart: Autobiographies of Twenty Sisters, edited by George Kane (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1957, blue cloth, 1956 imprimatur).
Oh the joys of book hunting!
*****
Thinking back over my life (how did I get to be as old as I am!), I remember books I once had. Most are now long-gone, sold, traded, given away, or even (not often) trashed. That original set of Tolkien published by Ballantine, a Christmas gift when I was a teenager, as I remember. Scads of fantasy and science fiction, like many works by Michael Moorcock and Roger Zelazny and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard. The utterly creepy novels and stories of H.P. Lovecraft. More recently, the many books on Eastern Orthodox saints and theology and spirituality. Or works of history from numerous authors. There was the five-volume literary biography of Dostoevsky, four volumes purchased at Crow Books in Burlington. I won’t forget the multi-volume red-covered set of books by Teddy Roosevelt, obtained in Montana on a road trip. I think of picking up Thoreau’s Walden/Civil Disobedience in Berkeley when I was in the Navy (homeported in Alameda), and how I had a number of the Oz books which I loaned out to my shipmates. How I bought a copy of The Portable Emerson in San Francisco’s Ghiradelli Square the day I was discharged from the Navy. Ah, memory. For about five years I sold books, mostly on Amazon but also on eBay. My best find was a copy of an obscure book by E. B. White and not published under his name: Less than Nothing - or, The Life and Times of Sterling Finny (1927). That one netted me over $300! But it’s not about the money, it’s about the words, the contents, the covers. In my younger years I hesitated to even give a new book a good flex, not wanting to sully its new quality. But now, I realize that new qualities always get sullied—it’s called old age. Happy reading.