Recent Acquisitions

Durham County Library Book Sale

• Imaginary Lands edited by Robin McKinley.
• The 1981 Annual World's Best SF edited by Donald A. Wollheim. (Wollheim always had such odd taste, and this volume is no exception. About half his selections are quality; the rest are just completely mediocre and instantly forgettable.)
• Moonsinger's Friends: Stories In Honor of Andre Norton edited by Susan Shwartz. (A festschrift. The editorial material is fannily fawning and overly gushy.)
• Plutarch's Lives translated by John Dryden. (Modern Library; good condition hardcover.)
• World of Our Fathers: The Journey Of The East European Jews To America And The Life They Found And Made by Irving Howe. (This big paperback looked in good condition until I got it home and was looking through it; then the spine cracked. Never trust a paperback. I ordered a used hardback online this morning.)
• Mysterious New England by the editors of Yankee Magazine.
• Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. (Modern Library. Do I ever plan to actually read any Lewis? Doubtful.)
• The Decameron by Boccaccio. (Modern Library.)
• War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy. (Modern Library. The Constance Garnett translation.)
• The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings by Jan Harold Brunvand.
• Gabriele d'Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, And Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes-Hallett.
• Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Science Fiction of the 19th Century edited by Isaac Asimov, Charles G. Waugh & Martin Greenberg. (As far as I can tell, Asimov only contributed the introduction, which cannibalizes other of his essays. The individual story intros seem to all be Waugh and/or Greenberg, since they are actually informative.)
• The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout.
• The Portable Renaissance Reader edited by James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin. (Despite what I said above about paperbacks, this one seems to be in good condition for its age.)
• Medieval Russia's Epics, Chronicles And Tales edited by Sege A. Zenkovsky.
• Conan Doyle: A Biographical Solution by Ronald Pearsall. (I think this is my third Doyle biography. Probably have that area covered now.)
• Dreamtigers translated by Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland.
• A Universal History of Infamy by Jorge Luis Borges.
• As They Were by M.F.K. Fisher. (Essays.)
• The Eye Of The Queen by Phillip Mann. (Have never heard anything about this one way or another; just got it because I used to see it listed in those Science Fiction Book Club ads in the SF mags. Who says advertising doesn't work - eventually?)
• Skyscraper: The Making Of A Building by Karl Sabbach.
• Talleyrand: A Biography by J.F. Bernard. (My second Talleyrand bio.)
• Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin.
• Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life by Hugh Brogan.
• The Swords of The Spirits Trilogy by John Christopher. (Found all three volumes scattered around on the table.)
• Alastor by Jack Vance. (Omnibus of Trullion, Marune, and Wyst. Already had all three in individual pbs.)
• Starfish by Peter Watts. (Brrrr!)
• The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson by Daniel J. Boorstin.
• A Diary From Dixie by Mary Boykin Chesnut.
• The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 by Alistair Horne.
• Quag Keep by Andre Norton.
• Star Guard by Andre Norton.
• "Our Crowd": The Great Jewish Families of New York by Stephen Birmingham. (The great German-Jewish families of New York, that is. Read this as a teen.)
• Wilson by A. Scott Berg. (Woodrow Wilson, that is.)
• Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence by Garry Wills.
• 1948: Harry Truman's Improbable Victory and the Year That Transformed America by David Pietrusza. (Really tired of these hyperbolic subtitles. The worst one, I think, was one about the Garfield assassination: The Destiny of the Republic. Really? Really? Can't they just admit not every historical event is necessarily utterly transformative; maybe they can just be interesting? Isn't that enough?)
• Alexander of Macedon by Harold Lamb. (Thought this was going to be pulpy historical fiction, which would be fun, but actually it's a biography. Oh, groan. Looks utter crap.)
• The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah. (Ghanaian novel.)
• Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South by Fawn M. Brodie.
• Another Life: A Memoir of Other People by Michael Korda. (Memoir by the famous publisher. Inexplicably, stuck inside there's a postcard with the famous pic of Oscar Wilde in velvet breeches. Weird!)
• Among The Believers by V.S. Naipaul. (Islamophobia avant la lettre.)
• The Decline of Imperial Russia 1855-1914 by Hugh Seton-Watson.
• The Works of Haggard by H. Rider Haggard. (King Solomon's Mines, She, Allan Quaterman, and Cleopatra in one omnibus volume.)
• Drums Along The Mohawk by Walter D. Edmonds.