Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

I'm back, and my trip was almost, almost, book-free, if you can believe it. However, as we were driving through New Hampshire to Vermont on Route 2 on Saturday, Ryan spotted a library sale, so we pulled over and took a look. I ended up buying one box and a bag of books, and we missed the dollar-a-bag opportunity by fifteen minutes. I'd already cased the joint and picked out what I wanted, and then they told us that everything we'd picked up already wouldn't count - it was 11:45 and the dollar-a-bag started at noon. There was one other person in the room. But, such is life. I really can't complain, because the books were only one dollar for hardcovers and fifty cents for paperbacks. I spent around twenty-five dollars and got some very good books, the best of which is a scholarly bibliography of the maps and atlases of Westchester County (New York). I've had this book before and seem to remember selling it for around eighty bucks. Also, I picked up two Andrew Wyeth art books (he's a part-time Mainer), a few poetry books, an early children's book illustrated by Kate Greenaway, and a bunch of good general stock. The library itself was worth a visit, apart from the book sale. The main entrance is a booklover's fever-dream - oak shelving, panels, and columns everywhere, window seats under curved bay windows, two curving oak staircases heading downstairs, a few fireplaces thrown in for good measure. The Weeks Memorial Library, named after a local senator/town bigwig.

I had plans to visit a few bookshops in the Burlington area, but never made it, between marathon busyness and visiting with my aunt and uncle, both of whom I adore. My aunt's favorite bookshop in town is The Crow Bookshop. It sure looks good, and she says the prices are reasonable. Next time, perhaps.

The marathon report: Ryan ran around 3:41, due to the extreme heat and humidity. He took it easy after mile sixteen when he knew he wasn't going to be able to sustain his race pace much longer - he's a smart runner who didn't want to join the many folks who ended up in the hospital that day due to heat exhaustion and dehydration, and was proud to finish his first warm-weather marathon. We were cheering him on - between miles two and three the marathon route goes right by my aunt and uncle's house, so we all stood on the front steps with tea, coffee, and warm croissants (for us - he was eating Gu carbohydrate gel - blech!) to cheer him on and take pictures. Then we met him at the finish, on the waterfront. It was mobbed, seven thousand runners overall and thousands more family members and friends milling around. Free Ben and Jerry's for the runners, a Vermont tradition apparently. We scooped Ryan up and took him home to recover. He ran an easy four miles last night, and feels pretty good.

More Vermont news: it was my uncle's birthday on Monday, so we got up early and took him to breakfast out at the Seward-Vanderbilt-Webb estate and inn, Shelburne Farms. The food was mostly organic and local, and more importantly, very tasty, and afterwards I spent some time in the library examining the family book collection. The leatherbound sets! Shelf after gleaming shelf of them, it was intoxicating... I spotted a few wonderful early travel books too, and it was good to see old standards mixed in, of literature, reference, history, all obviously much-read. We lounged around for a while, drove around the 1700-acre grounds to see the barns, which are truly out of this world. Barn seems too short and small a word for these buildings - there should be some other word, really. Some French word indicating a certain chateau-ness. Next we took a tour of my uncle's lab (he's an astrophysicist who runs his own small company - he makes holograms, and his workplace is the ultimate Rube Goldberg set-up: cement blocks and duct tape, lasers, five-foot pieces of film, you name it). Very cool. Then home to Maine later that day.

I'm back in the shop getting caught up, and yesterday I received an email from an antiquarian bookseller in The Netherlands who is interested in trading a few booksellers' tickets with me, if I have any duplicates (and I do have a few, common to New England). He told me a bit about his collection, which contains roughly - are you ready for this - 17,500 tickets. He's been collecting for twenty years. I am paralyzed with jealousy. I will recover at some point, possibly not today. But soon, especially since things like this keep turning up with happy regularity:

A huge ticket/label from a bookseller, binder, and stationery store in Portland, Maine, it measures a whopping 4 x 6 inches and has lots of bookish detail, including a bookpress in the lower left corner, atop a huge ledger, etc., and a few muses and swags of fruit and flowers for good measure. I like seeing the storefront in the center, too. On my next trip to Portland I'm going to take a look at 53 Exchange street and see how much it's changed since Victorian times. Not much, I'm guessing - that area of Portland is now called The Old Port, largely renovated, chi-chi shops and such, but most of the original buildings remain intact. But back to the label: it was a gift from a bookseller pal who knows I watch for such items, and is affixed in a small leatherbound journal, blank except for a few quotations from Milton and Macaulay, and a short digression on the difference between Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian columns, all handwritten out in beautiful copperplate. Old stuff is endlessly fascinating, isn't it?

More soon, I've read a few good books this week.