Friday, November 21, 2008

My Annual (Library of America, etc.) Orgy


Every year, not unlike Christmas, our Employee Shopping Days roll around again (thank you management,) and, while I always intend to use this opportunity to buy edifying books for widows and orphans, I instead indulge myself in an orgy of entirely selfish consumerism.  True, I bought a single title, as a token to assuage my guilt, for my partner: Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, by E. Patrick Johnson, but everything else was for me.

And, as I do every year, my first priority is always to add to my collection of the complete Library of America.  I've been collecting this series since they started publication, many years ago.  Every year they publish four or five new titles, so I have to get those too.  Doesn't matter if I like the authors.  Doesn't matter if I will ever read the individual volumes.  Gotta have 'em.  I look at it as an investment.  (These books are the only material goods specifically mentioned in my will -- no lie.)

If you don't know the series, Library of America publishes the classics of American literature and history in an ongoing project to preserve, promote and, I suppose, defend our cultural heritage.  It is an admirable undertaking and done superbly well.  The books are beautifully made, of durable materials, and meant to "last a lifetime."  They will certainly outlast me (thus the provision in my will.)  As a collector, they are my pride & joy.

As a reader, some years are better for me than others, the worst being the year I had to buy Kerouac, Alcott, and Lovecraft.  Very little joy there, I can tell you.  But I did my duty.

This year has been (for the most part) happier:

Collected Stories and Other Writings, by Katherine Anne Porter.
This goes to the top of my night-stand reading pile as soon as I
finish with my reading for my Christmas Readings this year.

Collected Poems: 1956 - 1987, by John Ashbery.  A favorite of my dear friend Richard, himself a poet, and someone to
whom I will now be forced to pay more serious attention.

 
Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s, by Philip K. Dick.  This purchased reluctantly and soon to be added to my shelf
of LIAM acquired "more in sorrow..." titles.

I'm disappointed not to be able to add the second volume
of A. J. Liebling to my collection, as, for some unknown
reason, it seems never to have arrived, either at the bookstore or with the
distributors, despite a September publication date.

Finally, (although tomorrow is another Shopping day, as Scarlett might say nowadays,) I rounded out my selection with a beautiful remainder about the great director Jean Renoir, and two handsome volumes of essays by George Orwell: Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, and All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays, both compiled by George Packer and attractively produced.

Santa has already been better to me than I deserve.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:08 AM

    Nice choices! I just got the second volume of Raymond Chandler and am loving it. It also made me wonder if there's any rhyme or reason to the different colored bindings on the various volumes. Chandler is blue, Emerson is green, Franklin is beige, etc. Does anyone know what the different colors represent?

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  2. So far as I can tell, the color choices on the cloth bindings are arbitrary. I buy the editions with the black dustjackets, not the slipcased versions. I like the standard look of the series all together on the shelf. The slipcases take up valuable fractions of an inch in shelf-space.

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