Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

This week flew by. Here's a mini round-up:

The shop's been busy with early summer browsers, though most of them aren't buying much. However, one collector of signed books went around quickly, piled up a tall stack, and bought them all, god love him. Many tourists are in evidence, in general. It's almost the season.

I am not setting up at the Portland Book, Print, and Paper Show this year (for the first time in many years), but I still strongly encourage folks to attend - it's currently the only bookfair in Maine and is a great opportunity to see - and even own! - some fine books. It's this Sunday at the Holiday Inn by the Bay. Attend! See books! Talk books! Buy books!

Anne Fadiman spoke on All Things Considered the other afternoon, speaking about her new book but also commenting on her past books, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader among them (a lovely little book for the book-obsessed). She said that the self she portrays in Ex Libris is slightly caricatured, "a heightened me." Sort of her best bookish self. Nice. Her new book is At Large and At Small (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) a collection of "familiar essays" written in the spirit and tradition of Lamb and Hazlitt. Nice nice nice. Can't wait to read it.

What else, what else. I've been positively wallowing in new booksellers' tickets (new to me), with groups coming in from several North American friends and - soon - from a new friend/collector in the Netherlands. I reciprocate of course and send my duplicates off in return. A most satisfactory hobby, in the best sense of the word (hobby). I think I've got around seven hundred tickets at this point, including those in the books I have at home. I'll post some of my new ones soon, if anyone's interested. Or even if not, come to think of it.

I took the day off yesterday, for two reasons: I needed a day off after days and days in the shop, and the weather was perfect - sunny and seventy degrees and dry. I went to a few quiet places on the coast and took photos to make paintings from later. I saw two osprey and a bald eagle. The eagle I watched for half an hour or so, as he/she sailed around between an offshore island and the mainland beach I was sitting on. Found some beach glass and a smooth stone to bring home to remind myself I need to see the ocean and its spaciousness, regularly. A beautiful day. I brought a book with me, but I barely looked at it. Just a page or two at the beach. I swear.