Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

Even though my brain tells me that the words are what really matter, I get hooked anyway by specific editions of certain books - I'm still taking another look at some of my favorite books from kid-dom, and my current copy of The Secret Garden (of which I would have a picture here, if Blogger would kindly upload it for me - I've been trying on and off all afternoon to no avail) is a replacement I bought myself a few years ago to supplement the actual copy I had at age ten. I still have my old copy, but it is almost unreadable. The spine is completely gone, the first twelve or fourteen pages are missing and have been as long as I can remember, and the signatures are slowly coming unsewn. I can see threads unraveling. Not good. It was almost shocking to get the new (to me) book in the mail and see it as a complete and entire book once again. I read the first section, which I hadn't in, well, sometime since the pages went missing, and I was also shocked at how harsh the beginning of the book is - Mary's parents die of cholera and she's abandoned, no one likes her, and for good reason - she's quite hateful, has no manners or skills, and yet by the end of the book we love her. There are umpteen other versions of The Secret Garden, many books and a few films, but this is mine, the buckram green cover with the ivy and keyhole, and the naturalistic and pleasingly loose illustrations by Nora S. Unwin, Lippincott, 1949. This was the copy I was lucky enough to be imprinted with as a child, and while I can appreciate the Tasha Tudor-illustrated version, or the lovely Godine version from the 1980s (Graham Rust illustrations), I won't be reading those any time soon. I don't know why I get attached to a particular versions of books, but I do - for reasons sentimental, nostalgic, ephemeral, personal, that's what books are. My books. How I love them. This happens again and again. I suppose that's how I ended up with a few thousand around the house, and a few more thousand at the shop.

A bit of shop news: a man was in yesterday looking for a graduation gift for a once-homeless boy that he and his wife sponsored through college. He told me that this boy didn't go to high school, and yet here he is about to graduate from college. He was looking for something timeless, and went with a large hardcover copy of The Odyssey, Pope's translation, with illustrations by Flaxman. It's hard to beat Homer. I hope this turns into one of his particuar favorite editions.