This past Friday, after some spring semester-is-almost-over-time-to-clean-out-the-office-and-take-all-the-plants-home cleaning, I converted some of the review copies, old anthologies, and textbooks in my office I’d crammed into a box into bookstore credit.
I didn’t intend to pick up anything while browsing, but I couldn’t resist a second copy of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions. I’d never come across the 1985 Penguin Books edition before, and it matches nicely with the edition 1985 Penguin reissue of J R that I found on a dollar shelf in Atlanta a few years ago. This 1985 edition of The Recognitions is a bit stiff in the hand; I’m glad I first read it in the ’93 Penguin Classics edition (with the William Gass introduction that everyone should absolutely skip until after they’ve read The Recognitions for the first time).
I also hit an unshelved seam of Alasdair Gray novels, just sitting in a stack on the floor in the sci-fi section, and picked up The Fall of Kelvin Walker, which I’d never heard of, and a third copy of Lanark. I lent the first copy of Lanark I owned and read to someone who never returned it. I have doubles now, but as a wise man proclaimed, “Triples makes it safe. Triples is best.”
Near the Gray novels, also unshelved, was a copy of Literal Madness, which collects three Kathy Acker novels: Kathy Goes to Haiti, My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Florida.
It is probably a terrible compulsion to crowd my shelves with duplicates of novels I’ve read several times already. There’s a part of me that imagines I will one day have a small bookselling space with a very specific inventory of titles I will ultimately refuse to part with, and which my children will not-so-reluctantly have to throw away after my demise. I also imagine being able to hand one to a friend, suggest they read it without any anxiety over its return. (If you are reading this, Lanarkklept, the book is now yours, has been for years. I hope you read it.)
Biblioklept 