Book finds in Trinity

I picked up a few curious books at the otherwise disappointing annual Trinity book sale last night. Despite being populated by the usual slightly aggressive, musty, mainly male crowd, there was no doubt a more limited range of books on offer this year than on previous occasions. Given that the organisers are dependent on donations, quality can never be guaranteed but it was hard work finding anything of great interest among the stacks of post- WWII macroeconomic textbooks or C.P. Snow novels. Pushed to categorise my buys (by of course a wholly imaginary entity - it's not a question I think I will have to field anytime in the near future), I would place 'Goodbye to the Hill' by Lee Dunne in the bawdy (this book also is a rare example of Irish erotic fiction, a genre whose history perhaps deserves more analysis if only to ask why there is so little of it), the letters of Simone Weil(above) the religious, S.J. Perleman essays the comic, 'The Man of Feelings' by Henry MacKenzie the sentimental and 'An Evil Cradling' by Brian Keenan the true.

Book finds at the Hodges Figges Sale

Hodges Figgis always has a deadly sale in January but so far, because am utterly skint after the excesses of Christmas and am trying to spend fuck all even to the point that I tried to haggle with a vacant checkout assistant in BT2 over the price of a pair of jeans, I have not been able to pick anything up. There is a fine selection of books on offer, putting both Easons and Waterstones( even though it is owned by the same company) to shame. Anyway I succumbed to temptation yesterday evening after a particularly bleak day and bought Journey to the Orient by Gerard de Nerval and Les Onze Mille Verges by Guillaume Apollinaire. The latter title is untranslatable because 'verges' refers both to the male member and virgins. The English alternative cheerfully offered by publisher Peter Owen Modern Classics is 'The Amorous Adventures of Prince Mony Vibescu', which goes some way to catching the mood of this carry-on style pornographic romp from I would have thought the most unlikely of sources, a celebrated avant-garde poet. Written when Apollinaire was like me stony broke, the novel, if you can call it that, amounts to one improbable, comical sex scene after another as our hero, Prince Vibescu has his wicked way with the ladies of Paris while not forgetting in turn to be serviced by many of its male denizens. The repetitive task of describing shag after shag clearly got to Apollinaire because with each vignette the action becomes more fantastical, the sheer accumulation of bodies and positions a ruse to hide the mundane purpose of the exercise.
Meanwhile, de Nerval's book is about a trip he took to Cairo, Beirut and Constantinople in 1844 in search of hashish and Eastern women. Published five years later, it was only translated into English in the late 1990's but clearly pre-dates Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson similar narcotic inspired odysseys by a century. That's Apollinaire looking grumpy in the above image.

Book finds in Madrid

I did more than buy books in Madrid - it was wholly incidental to a rather enjoyable week - but the Pooter in me dictates that the purchase of these libros should be recorded. So in a cluttered second-hand bookshop in the La Latina neighbourhood, I came across three old Oxford University Press paperbacks all formerly owned by one Andres Ramiro, who bought them in 1971, probably in Lisbon. 'Five Pre-Shakespearean Comedies' and 'Five Elizabeathan Tragedies' caught my eye because they contained some of the first plays I studied in the rather ambiguously titled and long since defunct 'Drama to Marlowe' course in Trinity. 'Ralph Roister Doister', 'Gammer Gurton's Needle', 'The Spanish Tragedy' and 'Arden of Faversham', which is reputed to be the first work of detective fiction in English literature, evoke a particular moment -namely the winter of 1993- even though I barely understood them at the time and would no doubt struggle with them again now. They do furnish a room though. As will 'The Italian' by Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe, picture above, whose 'Romance of the Forest' was featured in a course I studied on literary responses to the French Revolution.

Book finds on Wicklow Street

I picked up three deadly second-hand books at the weekend in the Secret Book and Record Store on Wicklow Street. First up was a hardback copy of the second volume of Richard J. Evan's history of the Third Reich, which he is writing as a consequence of his involvement with the Deborah Lipstadt and David Irving libel trial, an experience he describes in Telling Lies about Hitler. I read the first installment last year and look forward to getting stuck into this one even though it weighs in at over seven hundred pages. Next was 'English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980' by Martin J. Wiener, which argues the disdain writers displayed for commerce in the period mentioned stymied British economic development. Written in the early 80's and clearly influenced by Thatcherism, it is something of a historical curiosity. Finally 'Aspects of the Novel' by EM Forster (pictured above), a collection of lectures the author gave in Cambridge in the late 1920's. The book was the subject of one of the first lectures I went to in Trinity, in which Forster's famous definition of the form as 'a prose fiction of a certain length' was held up as proof that trying to define a 'novel' is a fruitless task. I notice today the London Independent use a quote from the book as its thought for the day: "History develops, art stands still".