Book Hauls!

[JunkMonkey]

I got to go to the Big City the other day - well Inverness - but at a 56k population that's big for round here.

Came back with a shed load of DVDs (with which I will not bore you) but also ratty old paperbacks of:
Agent of the Terran Empire by Poul Anderson
Earth Invader by Randall Garrett
The Road to the Rim and The Hard Way Up by Bertram Chandler
The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

and what looks like a classically dreadful piece of non SF trash:

 

[Extollager]

My copy of the expanded critical edition of Tolkien's Adventures of Tom Bombadil arrived from Britain yesterday.

The volume tells how the book originated in a suggestion, on behalf of "us old 'uns," from Tolkien's aged aunt, how Tolkien chose Pauline Baynes to illustrate the book, how he selected poems for inclusion, early variants of some of the poems, etc. There's even a very, very brief prose fragment indicating that Tolkien might have attempted a story about Bombadil before he wrote The Hobbit. It's remarkable to see Tolkien expressing doubts about the poem "The Sea-Bell," surely one of his finest poems or perhaps his very best poem. The endpapers are the Pauline Baynes dust jacket design without lettering, a piece that is one of my all-time favorite works of Tolkien-related art. The book is in small format, about the height of an 40c old Ace paperback though wider. In my experience there has sometimes been a happy convergence of woods, wet weather, water, and memory: "round rings spattering in the running river" coming to mind.

 

[dask]

Super freebie from the library:

Reading it now.

 

[Extollager]

Ponty's Magic Mirror Maps has arrived.

http://www.troubador.co.uk/book_info.asp?bookid=2161

Unfortunately, my first impressions are that it is terribly padded and amateurish in the bad sense. I would recommend that anyone considering the purchase of a copy should wait and see a review or two.

Also received a copy of the Penguin Classics edition of McKenna's translation of Plotinus's Enneads.

 

[Connavar]

Finally time to read the complete text and not the many children versions.

 

[Vince W]

Found this today:

 

[Extollager]

Received Lo and Behold: Photographs and More, a book of pictures by Elliott Landy and others of Bob Dylan and the Band from around the time of the Basement Tapes sessions in 1967. The book comes with half a dozen CDs of music made at a house in New York state called Big Pink.

 

[dask]

Finally time to read the complete text and not the many children versions.

Love the classic pulp designation.

Found this today:

Who in the world is Anthony Cheetham?

 

[Vince W]

I think Anthony Cheetham was an editor/publisher and now Chairman of Head of Zeus publishing.

 

[dask]

Thanks. Name didn't ring any sf bells. Cover doesn't look familiar either and the 75¢ era was when I really got going as a collector.

 

[Rodders]

I have just received the deluxe version of the new Star Wars posters book. I'm a little annoyed at Amazon as they put the book in the box with not packaging so there are dents and dings all over it.

I also got the New Star Wars Costumes book.

 

[BigBadBob141]

REF:Connavar
Love the cover description of Robinson Crusoe, "Solitude was driving him nuts!", very literate (lol).

 

[Extollager]

Murray's Caught in the Web of Words, about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Somewhere my eye was caught by information about this book 35 years or so ago... I've had a copy out from the library at least once or twice... maybe with my own copy I will get it read.

 

[Vince W]

Just picked this up:

Very interested to get stuck into this one.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Went to a library book sale and got Steel and Other Stories (2011), a collection by Richard Matheson (apparently published to cash in on a new movie adaptation of the story "Steel" called Real Steel), which brings together stories from the 1950's to the 2010's; The 1990 Annual World's Best SF, the last one edited by Donald A. Wollheim, featuring stories from 1989 (such as J. G. Ballard's outstanding "War Fever"); and Revolt in 2100 by Robert A. Heinlein, a collection disguised as a novel first published in 1953 (my edition is from 1989) and bringing together three related works from 1939 and 1940 (the short novel "If This Goes On --" and the long stories "Coventry" and "Misfit.")

 

[Extollager]

John Julius Norwich's A Short History of Byzantium.

 

[Vince W]

These arrived today:

Includes Gravy Planet, the original title for The Space Merchants.

 

[Extollager]

Thanks for showing us those covers, Vince, although the first and last remind me of my lack of taste for the type of story that, it seems, Galaxy printed all too often. To wit:

Reading Around in Groff Conklin's Anthologies

--but see too Victoria's response to my disdainful remark.

 

[Bick]

Nice - they look in good condition too (The Galaxies).

 

[Vince W]

They are in good condition. I won't be afraid they'll fall apart when I read them.