Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

I took a book home to read last night, the Ancilla to Classical Reading by Moses Hadas (Columbia University Press 1954), because opening it at random produced this gem from Seneca, from his On Tranquility, on the rise in popularity of the home library:

"There was no 'good taste' or 'solicitude' about it, but only learned luxury - nay not even 'learned,' since they had collected the books not for the sake of learning but to make a show, just as many who lack even a child's knowledge of letters use books, not as the tools of learning, but as decorations for the dining-room. Therefore let just as many books be acquired as are enough, but none for mere show. 'It is more respectable,' you say, 'to squander money on these than on Corinthian bronzes and on pictures.' But excess in anything becomes a fault. What excuse have you to offer for a man who seeks to have bookcases of citrus-wood and ivory, who collects the works of unknown or discredited authors and sits yawning in the midst of so many thousand books, who gets most of his pleasure from the outsides of volumes and their titles? Consequently it is in the houses of the laziest men that you will see a full collection of orations and history with the boxes piled right up to the ceiling; for by now among cold baths and hot baths a library also is equipped as a necessary ornament of a great house. I would readily pardon these men if they were led astray by their excessive zeal for learning. But as it is, these collections of the works of sacred genius with all the portraits that adorn them are bought for show and a decoration of their walls."

I'd like bookcases of citrus-wood. Mmmmm. I think the whole paragraph hinges on that wonderful word "enough" in the second sentence. This is our escape-hatch, fellow bibliophiles. Who's to say what's enough? One bookcase? A room full of books? An apartment full of books, say, and a bookshop to boot?

Ancilla, incidentally, is Latin for handmaid. The book's preface opens with: "A whimsical title is probably ominous for a book innocent of whimsy." I'm looking forward to reading more.

After weeks of having nothing, not a single book, lingering on my bedside table (the waiting stacks in the book room notwithstanding), I'm feeling more like my old self, and have finally started a few books I'm excited about reading.  Yesterday I visited a favorite local independent bookstore and came across this:


A Book of Voyages edited by Patrick O'Brian (Norton 2013).  New to me, though the publication date in this country was last year, and the copyright page says 1947.  All to the good, this eccentric anthology of obscure travel narratives, mostly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with sections entitled Pleasant Travels by Land, Unpleasant Voyages, Oriental Splendour, Inefficient Pirates, and other miscellaneous subjects.  The jacket copy hints that some of these real-life tales may have been primary sources for O'Brian's fiction.  I've just started to read his brief introductions to each section, and realized quickly how much I've missed his voice, so to speak.  Maybe this will be the winter I read the Aubrey-Maturin novels yet again, it's been far too long.

My other winter reading project is taking shape.  After delighting in the immediacy and relevance of Boethius, and examining my scant collection of other authors of classical antiquity, I've decided to give it a go and read some Greek and Latin literature over the coming months.  In translation of course, since, although I did take Latin in high school, I retained precisely none of it.  To start with I am returning to an old favorite, a great browsing book, one I am now reading from cover to cover.  I've mentioned it here before, many years ago. The wonderful Ancilla to Classical Reading by Moses Hadas (Columbia University Press 1954).  Which begins at the beginning, thusly (p.3):

"The simplest explanation for the survival of the classics is that ordinary readers have found them worth preserving.  Their vogue has naturally fluctuated with vicissitudes of history and vagaries of taste, but periodic renascences have returned to them with renewed zeal and fresh advocacy."

Regarding the ancients, Hadas continues (p.5):

"Aside from professional and traditional judgments, can vulgar opinion and gossip throw light upon our authors and help bring them to life?"

Gosh, I hope so!  I'm over a hundred pages in, and so far we've discussed the origins of Greek literature, why books were declaimed and then written, and distributed, with some fascinating glimpses of the development of reading as a pastime, and collecting, libraries, and the book trade, in Greece, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Rome.  Drama, poetry, prose, literary criticism, censorship - and this is all just in part one of the book, entitled Production, Reception and Preservation.  I am about to begin part two, Literary Gossip, which covers, chronologically, all the Big Names of antiquity, with copious quotations from their works.  Hadas says early on, again in the spirit of primary sources, "I myself have always believed that text is more useful than commentary, and so have cited ancient authors freely."  (p. vii) Can't wait. 

Immediately to follow, waiting on the bedside table (remember the bedside table?), is the gorgeous, massive hardcover Latin Literature: A History by Gian Biagio Conte, translated by Joseph B. Solodow (Johns Hopkins University Press 1994).  I see from my secret code inside the back cover of the book that I bought this in 2006 for ten bucks.  I've thought about selling it, since even the softcover is a pricey item these days, but it's just so comprehensively beautiful that I've always kept it, throughout all the moves and culls of past years.  And I find that the first sentence of the foreword, by Elaine Fantham, puts all doubt to rest (p.xxiii):

"The book you are holding in your hand is an extraordinary achievement.  If you care at all about Rome and its literature, pagan and Christian, this book will soon become your friend, and before long you will wonder how you ever managed without it."

Keep this book, KEEP it!  It practically shouts at me to do just that.  Would that I had done so with all the Loeb Classical Library editions that have passed through my hands over the years.  I think the only Loebs I currently own are a few volumes of Virgil, won by my grandfather as a Latin prize at his prep school. I do have a shelf of other classics, mostly poetry, to slowly work my way through. Between those, and whatever else I can turn up locally, and the Patrick O'Brian novels waiting patiently in the wings, I should be occupied for the foreseeable future.  This must sound absolutely insufferable - All she does is read! - which is so, so not the case.  Trust me on that.

All my ancient literature reading plans seem to be on hold.  The Aeneid, Moses Hadas's Ancilla to Classical Reading, and The Norton Book of Classical Literature, edited by Bernard Knox, are all hogging prime real estate on the bedside table.  With stacks in the hinterlands of the book room, waiting.  But I've been forgoing them all for new stuff, since I keep wandering into bookstores (and lingering over Patrick O'Brian still, too, not wanting the series to end, even as I know it will).  In the last few weeks I've read brand new books by Mary Oliver, Anne Lamott, and Maira Kalman, and read brand new-to-me secondhand books by Jonathan Lethem, William Plomer, and Paul Monette, ditto books about David Hockney, Picasso, and Beatrix Potter.  They are mostly wonderful, but I must forgo full reports for now, since not only did I pound my thumb quite dreadfully with a hammer, while putting a tarp on the woodpile, I also drilled it with a drill bit while framing paintings, and I cannot easily hit the space bar on my keyboard at this time.  In short, typing hurts.  So I will merely send out my best wishes for a warm and cozy holiday season, along with a few pictures of same from around our old Maine house.


Every year I take some favorite Christmas books off the shelf and let them see the light of day for a few weeks.  The Rockwell Kent book is a new addition this year.  As is this vintage Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle figurine - she seemed to be calling for some candy canes, too.  Happy to oblige:


Our Christmas tree has many birds on it.  Just one in the nest on the lamp, though, a felt chickadee, resting near a row of living room reading, atop the printer's type case that used to hold court in my bookshop:


We had some extra strings of lights this year so I tumbled them across the top of the dresser where we put up holiday cards as they arrive.  Can't have enough light around during this dark solstice week:
     

In his Ancilla to Classical Reading, Moses Hadas says (pp.135-136):

"Comments or opinions here offered are in no sense authoritative, and by no means justly apportioned.... For modern and more systematic opinion on ancient writers the reader will naturally turn to more formal histories of literature; here nothing more than marginalia to such histories can be expected."

And in A Book of Voyages, Patrick O'Brian says (pp.xv-xvii):

"Most books of voyages say in their prefaces that they intend to be useful.  'Let us have no unnecessary ornamentation at the outset of a work in which we propose nothing but the weighty and the useful,' begins one; they hardly ever speak of giving entertainment.

The intention of this book is quite different; its aim is to give the reader pleasure.  It makes no claim to being a scholarly work, and it has no didactic purpose."

Praise be!  Since I revel in marginalia, and dislike didactic purpose...  I mean, bring on the unnecessary ornament!  All this is to say that since we last spoke, I have had a million and one things to do, and the only things I truly want to do are snack and read ancient poetry and Patrick O'Brian novels.  Thus I find myself reading his Aubrey-Maturin series for the fifth time (I think - it's been at least seven years since I last read them), and in fact have already finished the first two, Master and Commander and Post Captain.  I cannot even begin to tell you how utterly satisfying I find them.  All I will say is, if you haven't yet sallied forth into his fictional realm, adventure awaits, alongside oceans of splendid writing.  Not convinced?  No interest in the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars?  Well, do back-of-the-book blurbs ever convince you to read a book?  How about these:

"The best historical novels ever written."  - Richard Snow, New York Times

"Master and Commander raised almost dangerously high expectations; Post Captain triumphantly surpasses them... a brilliant book."  - Mary Renault

The novels are about the British Navy, certainly, but really they are about that which never gets old.  Human nature - disappointment, triumph, ambition, passion, jealousy, self-control, friendship, love.  It's not for nothing that he's considered by many to be a latter-day Jane Austen.  Sometimes I think that his writing is what would have occurred had the naval officers in Jane Austen's Persuasion been able to tell their own version of events.  Well, as I travel around the world and back with Patrick O'Brian's cast of characters this winter, I will continue to investigate classical authors too.  I don't have to look far, though.  This week, in Post Captain, I smiled to see mention of "...half-remembered instances of courage from Plutarch, Nicholas of Pisa and Boethius..." (p.109), and a translation of a fragment of Sappho (ibid p.433):

"'The moon has set, and the Pleiades; midnight is gone; the hours wear by, and here I lie alone: alone.'"    

In pursuit of more reading about Moses Hadas, I came across this wonderful essay, by his daughter Rachel Hadas, which makes me want to seek out some of his translations.  And in pursuit of more Patrick O'Brian, I found this, which I read long ago and was happy to rediscover, the Paris Review interview from 1995.  Here is a little bit, a very pleasing little bit:

Nope, same old same old.  Which suits me fine.  As Stephen Maturin says, often, in Patrick O'Brian's novels, "May no new thing arise."  (New things being generally suspect and usually disruptive.) Thus in the coming year I am hoping for more of the same - reading, writing, painting, gardening.  Oceans of quiet.

To that end I have cleared my decks, not for action necessarily, but for clarity, certainly.  This is the time of open horizons.  My painting studio is clean and awaiting the arrival of new work.  Nothing remains on my bedside table except my current reading in ancient authors.  I am making headway in one book in particular, The Norton Book of Classical Literature edited by Bernard Knox (Norton 1993).  I brought this home from my book booth at the antiques mall.  I see from my bookseller code inside the back cover that I've owned this book since 2005 and bought it for two dollars at a library sale.  I had it priced at eight bucks, then marked it down to six.  And still no buyers, after all this time, so home with me it has come once again.  And glad I am, since it has proved to be a perfect extended introduction to the ancient writers of Greece and Rome.  Bernard Knox says in his preface (p.23):

"This book is no more than a sampler.  The texts have been chosen with one idea in mind: to whet the reader's appetite for more."

He does just that, giving us a chronological anthology from Homer in the late 8th century B.C. up to Marcus Aurelius and Saint Augustine in the early centuries A.D.  Since I'd already read The Iliad and The Odyssey some years back, I skipped over his selections from those and began with Hesiod (7th century B.C.?), and since then, a week ago, with the help of a mild cold picked up at Christmas and lots of subsequent rest time, I've logged over five hundred pages in this wonderful book.  And encountered so many authors I'd never read anything to speak of, unless quoted briefly elsewhere - Hesiod, Archilochus, Alcman, Solon, Anacreon, Simonides, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, well, the list goes on and on.  I have read bits of Sappho, Pindar, and Plato before, but never with any kind of sustained attention.  And in this particular book I still have the literature of Rome ahead of me - Lucretius, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Livy, Ovid, Juvenal, etc.  I thought this was going to be a textbooky kind of collection, classics-lite, but no, not at all.   

Why read all this dusty old stuff, anway?  Does it matter?  Does anything matter?  I dismiss these as January thoughts and instead look at the beautiful language I'm encountering, and its relevance.  I will be forever grateful to Bernard Knox for bringing to my attention lines such as these:

"... it is best to do things
     systematically,
 Since we are only human, and disorder
      is our worst enemy"     - Hesiod, The Works and Days, "When to Plow" (p.195)

"The fox knows many tricks, the hedgehog only one.
 One good one."     - Archilochus, 14 (p.206; thoughts of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle naturally arise)

"...oh I wish, I wish I could be a seabird
 Who with halcyons skims the surf-flowers of the sea water
 with careless heart, a sea-blue-colored and sacred waterfowl."     - Alcman, 1 (p.214)

"...In the honey and spice of a summer night."     - Alcman, 2 (p.215)

"She was in love with what was not there; it has happened to many.
 There is a mortal breed most full of futility.
 In contempt of what is at hand, they strain into the future,
 hunting impossibilities on the wings of ineffectual hopes."     - Pindar, Third Pythian Ode (p.260)

"I will be small in small things, great among great.
 I will work out the divinity that is busy within my mind
 and tend the means that are mine.
 If it were luxury and power God gave me
 I hope I should find glory that would rise higher here after."     - Pindar, ibid (p.263)

My skin prickles, hedgehog-like, as I read along - human nature seems to have changed so little over the centuries.  What interests us?  Love, fate, death, war, travel, humor, nature, human relationships, divine relationships.  Ways and means have changed, but the essentials remain.  And great writers remind us of this, again and again, no matter how long-ago they are.   (I know I say this regarding almost all the books I mention here - please bear with me as I continue to err on the side of praise.)

As I got into reading the tragedies and drama, Homer came back to mind, and I remembered how repelled I was at all the blood and thunder of his epics.  But that, along with every type of murder and mayhem you can imagine, is a huge part of these old stories, and judging from what's on tv at the moment (not that I have a tv...), we like a certain amount of this as entertainment, and always have.  I find myself usually falling on the side of the pastoral, instead.  I am loving the poets, their lyrics about nature, love, and the twists and turns of fate.  I am grimacing my way through Antigone and Thucydides.  The ancient gods set up terrible situations for hapless mortals and let them play out, intervening or not, if justice or whim calls for it.  They are worth looking at too (obviously, not to sound like a complete simpleton here), squarely in the face, although maybe just once.  That might be all I can stand. 

The work of the translators Knox has chosen from must be mentioned, for it is their choice of language I am responding to, as well as the storylines.  His choices are old and new, including Lattimore and Fagles, and some are more poetic and some more severe, but all readable in the best ways.  The long introduction by Knox and his brief paragraphs introducing each author throughout the book are also so well-written and interesting, they left me wondering (as happened with Moses Hadas in his Ancilla to Classical Reading a few months ago) who he was and why he was championing the classics.  I've seen his books before but never read any, so I had no idea.  His 2010 New York Times obituary enlightened me, as did this New Republic essay by G.W. Bowersock, "The Warrior-Humanist."         

I'll ask myself again, Why read the classics?  Well, winter is a severe time, and a beautiful time.  Life itself is severe and beautiful.  These ancient authors mirror that state of affairs and I long for it, it feels like water and food and sunshine.  In fact when my sister was ill last fall, I read some passages from The Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius; 524 A.D.; the book that got me started on this year's winter reading project) aloud to her, and at one point asked if she wanted me to continue.  She said "YES, it's like cool water in the desert." 

As usual, I could go on and on, and another day, I'm sure I will.  Until then:

"...the great unwritten, unshakable traditions.
 They are alive, not just today or yesterday:
 they live forever, from the first of time,
 and no one knows when first they saw the light."     - Sophocles, Antigone (p.374)     

Day five of my favorite books – and what can I possibly choose to round off the week? Well, this is the last list before I leave tomorrow, so it will have to serve as a catch-all for many subjects on the theme of living well. Brain food to help both the mind and spirit grow through life: favorite children’s books, cookery and home life, poetry, belles lettres, anthologies, and other odds and ends. These have educated me in the art of living:

Children’s books I still love to read as an adult:

A Child’s Garden of Verses – Robert Louis Stevenson. Everyman, New York 1992. Stevenson could do it all, really – children’s tales, novels, poetry, letter-writing. These poems are still what I love best.

Now We Are Six – A.A. Milne. Dutton, New York 1988. Pooh is very dear, but like the above, I love the poems more than the tales.

The Adventures of Tintin – Hergé. Little, Brown, Boston 1980s. Twenty in all? I’d read twenty more if he’d written them. My favorite evening read when I want something familiar and comforting.

The Reluctant Dragon – Kenneth Grahame. Rand, McNally, Chicago 1966 (circa 1900). Like the story of Ferdinand the bull, a tale of a peace-loving beast, a gentle, shy monster who still manages to save the day.

He Went With Marco Polo – Louise Andrews Kent. Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1935. The one book that lit a fire in the child-me to see the world. I have, though largely through books.

The 13 Clocks – James Thurber. Simon and Schuster, New York 1950. Deeply strange, and I still love its weirdness.

The Phantom Tollbooth – Norton Juster. Knopf, New York 1989. Ditto.

The Dolls’ House – Rumer Godden. Viking, New York 1962. Pathos in a doll family. Rumer Godden’s novel China Court should have been on my fiction list on Wednesday (it hinges on rare books, and has a fascinating, complex structure). Godden is often bittersweet.

The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett. Lippincott, Philadelphia 1949. Who doesn’t love this book, and Sara Crewe (The Little Princess). These books were IT for me when I was young.

The Wonder Clock – Howard Pyle. Harper, New York 1888. I think I got most of my ideas about beauty and style from the illustrations in this book, and perhaps from Andrew Lang’s series of color fairy books. A wonderful series of tales for each hour of the day.

Cookery and home life:

The Gastronomical Me – M.F.K. Fisher. World, Cleveland 1948. I don’t really get people who aren’t much interested in what they eat. I’m not a cook, really, but I know what I like, and I enjoy eating almost as much as reading. So reading about food is doubly good. Fisher isn’t just a food writer; she's an incredible writer who just happens to choose food as a main theme. I love her prose style, she is a master.

Mainstays of Maine – Robert P. Tristram Coffin. Macmillan, New York 1944. Bowdoin professor, poet, essayist. This book combines his love of his home section of the Maine coast with his memories of the best of Maine food. I re-read this book often, its exuberance and vitality is palpable.

The Transcendental Boiled Dinner – John J. Pullen. Lippincott, Philadelphia 1972. An extended essay on the fine art of cooking a Maine boiled dinner.

The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection – Robert Farrar Capon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1989. Like the above, Capon writes an entire book about cooking just one dish. One of the best books about true epicurianism.

How To Cook a Rogue Elephant – Peter Van Rensselaer Livingston. Little, Brown, Boston 1971. I kept this book for its title, which I love seeing on the cookery shelf in my kitchen every day. WASP-y, upper-crusty recipes and stories.

Pot on the Fire and Serious Pig – John Thorne with Matt Lewis Thorne. North Point, New York 2000 and 1996. Two books of essays for the true chowhound. I often give these books as gifts.

The Tummy Trilogy – Calvin Trillin. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 1994. Witty, deeply funny, simultaneously light and serious. For Trillin, Food = Life. He will go anywhere and try anything in search of an authentic dish. And then write about it for The New Yorker.

Home Cooking – Laurie Colwin. Knopf, New York 1988. Novelist Laurie Colwin also wrote essays about food and cooking for Gourmet magazine. This collection is wonderful; her stories about food, home life, and travel are funny and fine.

More Home Cooking – Laurie Colwin. HarperCollins, New York 1993. A second collection, equally fine.

The Epicure’s Companion – editors Ann Seranne and John Tebbel. McKay, New York 1962. Fat anthology ranging from ancient authors to Dumas and Flaubert.

Carl and Karin Larsson: Creators of the Swedish Style – editors Michael Snodin and Elisabet Stavenow-Hidemark. Bulfinch, Boston 1997. One of the best books I’ve seen about how to completely construct the kind of life one wants for oneself, from clothing to home architecture, furniture, books, and art. Lovely illustrations.

The Old Way of Seeing – Jonathan Hale. Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1995. A wonderful book about why certain old New England buildings and homes are pleasing to the eye, and fit in their landscapes, and why new mcmansion versions do not.

Buildings of Delight – Alec Clifton-Taylor. Gollancz, London 1988. Quirky and unique residences and buildings in England, from all historical eras. Written with joy.

Poetry:

archy & mehitabel – Don Marquis. Doubleday, Doran, Garden City, New York 1928. The cockroach and the cat, they will never go out of style.

Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman. Small, Maynard, Boston 1897. The best American poet? One of the best, let’s say that. Superlatives are difficult.

Harvest Poems 1910-1960 – Carl Sandburg. Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York 1960. Sandburg’s short poems about nature are among my favorite poems ever.

The Captain’s Verses – Pablo Neruda. New Directions, New York 1972. Love poetry at its most verdant and passionate. Read this, then find Neruda’s books of odes – more love, for everything, not just for another person.

What the Light Was Like – Amy Clampitt. Knopf, New York 1985. A few Maine-themed poems in this collection haunt me.

House of Light – Mary Oliver. Beacon, Boston 1992. Really, anything she writes is so beautiful, but this little book is the one I pack on every trip I take. The first poem is one of my favorites of hers.

An Altogether Different Language: Poems 1934-1994 – Anne Porter. Zoland,
Cambridge, Massachusetts 1994. Poems about nature, family, God, art. Quiet and deep.

Where Water Comes Together With Other Water – Raymond Carver. Vintage, New York 1986. His poems are tough, painfully truthful, often difficult, and usually elegiac. If you’re a woman, read them to learn what it’s like to be a man. If you’re a man, read them to learn how to be a man. No offense meant to men or women.

Essays, anthologies, and miscellanies:

The Practical Cogitator or The Thinker’s Anthology – editors Charles P. Curtis and Ferris Greenslet. Houghton, Mifflin, Boston 1950. One of the best anthologies I know of, and the perfect bedside-table book, either for one’s own room or a guest room (but buy several because guests will want to take copies home with them).

Time and the Art of Living – Robert Grudin. Ticknor & Fields, New York 1988. Unclassifiable essays of great beauty.

Intimate Things – Karel Čapek. Putnam, New York 1936. One of those books I was pricing at the shop, and I opened it randomly and started reading, and realized an hour had passed and I’d read half the book. I took it home.

What Am I Doing Here – Bruce Chatwin. Viking, New York 1989. The best collection of Chatwin’s short pieces: journalism, interviews, essays, tales. I had to add him to every list this week, he is that important to me.

Prefaces Without Books – Christopher Morley. Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin 1970. Morley wrote prefaces for many books, both for reprints and for friends. He is often at his best in short descriptive pieces such as these.

Letters of Askance – Christopher Morley. Lippincott, Philadelphia 1939. Essays on many topics.

Forty-Four Essays – Christopher Morley. Harcourt, Brace, New York 1925. More essays, I couldn’t choose just one book.

Inward Ho! – Christopher Morley. Doubleday, Page, Garden City, New York 1923. Short, often tiny, pieces about poetry, writing, authors, and philosophy of life. Perhaps my all-time favorite Morley book. Almost pocket-size.

The Old Court Suburb – Leigh Hunt. Lippincott, Philadelphia, n.d. (circa 1815). A master essayist, and dear friend of the poet Shelley.

One Man’s Meat – E.B. White. Harper, New York 1950. The other master of essay-writing.

The Bottom of the Harbor – Joseph Mitchell. Little, Brown, Boston 1960. A primer for anyone interested in learning how a perfect piece of descriptive journalism is put together. The magic, though, is unlearnable, and he had it in spades.

Book of Uncles – Robert P. Tristram Coffin. Macmillan, New York 1942. A collection of tales about Coffin’s favorite Maine uncles. Sounds strange, but boy is this a fine book. Another one I started reading at the shop, and took home that night to finish. And kept. A recurring problem for me.

How Proust Can Change Your Life – Alain de Botton. Pantheon, New York 1997. A little life philosophy: how to use Proust to solve real-life dilemmas.

A Theory of Everything – Ken Wilber. Shambhala, Boston 2000. One straight philosophy book, for some balance. Wilber is one of the great thinkers of today, and shuts himself away from the world for long periods of time to try and figure out What It All Means. Then he writes books to help us figure it out, too.

Ancilla to Classical Reading – Moses Hadas. Columbia University Press, New York 1954. Who the heck were all those dead white guys, anyway? Who lived when, and who wrote what during which empire? Who was best friends with whom? And why should we care today? This is a fine companion for anyone sneaking up on the classics of Greek and Roman thought and literature.

The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes – editors Iona and Peter Opie. Oxford 1951. Scholarly, but still very high on the browsability scale. The stories behind famous and not-so-famous nursery rhymes. The Opies are known for their collection of children’s books, games and toys, and folklore surrounding the life of children.

Wodehouse Nuggets – selected by Richard Usborne. Hutchinson, London 1983. A hilarious compendium of quotes culled from P.G. Wodehouse’s works. Cheers me immensely and immediately, when I need cheering. I can’t think how I came to leave Wodehouse off the fiction list the other day.

Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement – Derwent May. HarperCollins, London 2001. Deep geek for booklovers and TLS fans.

The Art Spirit – Robert Henri. Lippincott, Philadelphia 1930. I refer constantly to this book about painting and living as an artist. I can open it anywhere, start reading, and be reassured and aided by this master.

Hawthorne on Painting – Charles Hawthorne. Dover, New York 1978 (1938). My other essential art book, after the one listed above. Along with Mary Oliver’s poetry book House of Light, I pack this on every trip I take (both books are very slim and light in softcover). As a painter, this book has been the most useful to me of anything I’ve ever read.

And let’s end this, finally, with some bookish reference books, perfect for browsing:

The Atlantic’s 50 Best Book Reviews – editor Sage Stossel. Atlantic Monthly, Boston 2004. Entertaining and wide-ranging.

Anthology: Selected Essays from the First 30 Years of The New York Review of Books 1963-93 – editors Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein. New York Review of Books, New York 2001. Like the above, but a bit more hip, if book reviews can be such a thing.

The Reader’s Encyclopedia – editor William Rose Benét. Crowell, New York 1948. Essential! I use mine almost every day. It’s still in print, in a new edition that I don’t use half as often as my good old brown 1948 copy.

Bartlett’s Quotations – Christopher Morley edited this twice, so I prefer those editions. Morley even inserted some fake quotations, happy hunting! 11th edition: Little, Brown, Boston 1938. Another perfect bedside-table book, endlessly browsable.

The Lifetime Reading Plan – Clifton Fadiman. World, Cleveland 1960. Educate yourself, here’s how, from the most well-read man in twentieth-century America.

Books About Books – Winslow L. Webber. Hale, Cushman & Flint, Boston 1937. A bibliography of books about books. My want list in a nutshell.

The List of Books – Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish. Harmony, New York 1981. Great books in all topics, this book makes my week of lists look paltry, miserly, and lean.

The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors – editors Laura Miller with Adam Begley. Penguin, New York 2000. Who the heck are all those hip young things writing good novels and winning literary prizes? And why should we care today? Find out here.

An Almanac of Reading – Charles Lee. Coward-McCann, New York 1940. Good reading suggestions throughout the year, in a gentle, whimsical almanac format.

Ex Libris Carissimis – Christopher Morley. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1932. He lists “85 Golden Florins” at the end - a fine reading list.

That’s it! I’ve been packing and re-packing for tomorrow, checking items off tiny lists, and generally losing my mind. It really does seem that it takes twice as much energy to get ready for a vacation as it would have if I’d just stayed here and lived my regular old life for an extra week. But once I’m there, it’s all worth it.

The lists - what a mammoth project. I hope people find it useful. When I re-open the shop on the 28th I will immediately return to writing tiny little blog posts of three lines each. Seriously, though, thanks to everyone for suggestions and comments – mull it over and add more of your favorite books while I’m gone! Surprise me! I haven't delved much into nature books, history, philosophy - I ran out of week - so feel free to add books in these subjects, too. After a vacation, my abrupt return to civilization will be greatly eased by the delight of hearing about who loves what books. Thanks for reading this week, bookish friends.