| July 26th, 2011 |
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I had two packages arrive yesterday - both deliveries of books, both ordered from the UK.
One came from Amazon UK, containing some Sarah Vowell books. (She's an American writer of American history, but Amazon UK ships free to Australia and Amazon US doesn't.) The other came from a bookshop in a tiny village in Lincolnshire I'd never heard of (and would never have visited in person, because I can't imagine why I'd be visiting Lincolnshire). That was an order via AbeBooks, the website anyone who wants access to second-hand books needs to know about.
I'm currently reading Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation, which is interesting and entertaining. This morning, I was interrupted reading it by Dean, who was about to leave for work, hugging me goodbye; I all-but tossed the book aside, putting it down upended, so that it rested on the tops of the pages with my drink bottle holding it open at the page I was reading.
All the books I just bought are, of course, queued on my reading list. However, there's an odd contrast to point out. If, say, I next pick up the copy I bought of Charmione: A Tale of the Great Athenian Revolution, by Edward Leatham, things will be quite different.
My copy of Charmione was, I think, published in 1859; that's the date on the publisher's mark. It's a handsome copy, with gilt-edged pages that came pre-cut and everything (one of the other books I bought still has its pages uncut after page 350), and may have been a presentation gift. The inside cover has a worn label from the Royal College, Lancaster's midsummer examination in 1874; it is inscribed to or by Eduardo Ackroyd. (It's hard to tell because the handwriting is, in Dean's words, a bit "medical", and the inscription is in Latin.) The inscription is dated to 1875.
I have no idea who Edward Ackroyd was, but I sort of want to find out.
In any case, the odd thing about sentimentality is this:
Charmione was actually cheaper, in 2011 Australian dollars, than was Assassination Vacation.
Despite this, I will treat it with infinitely more care. The Sarah Vowell books are modern paperbacks (well, one hardback), and I give them sufficient care to avoid outright damage of any significance, but... well, I was reading A.V. while I ate my cereal this morning, and I managed somehow to splash a tiny drop of milk on one of the pages. I wiped it off and... that was that.
In contrast, the odds that I will be eating splashable food while reading a book that was printed in the 19th century are pretty much zero. Similarly, I will probably take Sarah Vowell with me to read when the baby's napping when I babysit, putting the books in my backpack for transit and tossing them aside on the table when he's awake; the books I bought that are a century old or more, not so much.
It's not about price, it's about value, and value to me.
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