Amateurs, Donald Barthelme. Kangaroo Pocket Books (1977). No cover artist or designer credited. 207 pages.
I’ve written a few times about my slow acquisition of someone else’s library. This person lives in Perry, Florida, a small panhandle town south of Tallahassee, and I guess he drives into Jacksonville at least once a year to sell books at the bookstore I frequent. I’ve talked to the bookstore’s owner about him a few times. Sometimes, I’ll spot a spine and think, Yeah, his name and address are going to be stamped on the inside cover. And there it was this Friday when I picked up his mass-market edition of Amateurs. His by-now familiar habit of checking off volumes by the same author is on display here too. He also put neat pencil dashes by some of the stories in Amateurs, including my favorite from the collection, “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby.” He also checked off “The Educational Experience,” which, in this Kangaroo edition of Amateurs, sadly fails to include Barthelme’s collage illustrations that accompanied the piece when it first ran in Harper’s
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