Books
I got a copy of Word on the Street by John McWhorter, which I think was highly recommended by Phil Agre once upon a time. This is a book about Black English and about linguistic change and dialects; it was originally published as Word on the Street: Fact and Fable About American English, and now as Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of a "Pure" Standard English.
I thought this book would be upsetting to me, and it is. (The less-than-one-sentence account of why: I use "whom". Of course, that's not the whole story.)
It's a very good, very stimulating book.
I got a bunch of other books, including a civil procedure textbook. Who knew that I would be buying law books?
My father sent me a retrospective catalogue by H. P. Kraus, showing some of the highlights in what Kraus had dealt with in his bookdealing career. (Mr. Kraus died in 1988, but his bookdealing business is still around as H. P. Kraus, Incorporated, of New York City. Kraus dealt with standard unbelievably rare books like Shakespeare folios and Gutenberg Bibles, but he also was involved with even rarer materials -- he was the owner of the Voynich Manuscript before he donated it to the Beinecke Library at Yale. (I've visited the Beinecke and seen a Gutenberg Bible there, but not the Voynich Manuscript.)
I'm getting more interested in bibliography and book dealing. When I was younger, my father sometimes said that he hoped I might join him in his business. I wasn't really interested then, because I was looking to work with computers. But I really like books, and now I think I could see going into book dealing.
The book business is extremely colorful, full of extremely colorful characters. There's so much amazing stuff that's being sold privately and is of great interest but only to a very few people who know its significance. (In many cases the significance will be of the book as artifact rather than the book as text, still something I have a fairly hard time with.)
One of the nice things about used and rare dealers is that they sometimes have the opportunity to preserve things that otherwise might be thrown away or lost -- and sell them to collectors who'll appreciate them, or sell them or donate them to libraries that will preserve them and make them available to the public.
My father doesn't have the world's most dramatic stories about this, but he does have a fairly good collection of German Jewish prayerbooks (in Hebrew and German) from before the Holocaust. He's been donating some of these recently to synagogues and Jewish organization in Germany. Some of them were preserved by refugees whose children might well have thrown them away if my father hadn't expressed interested in them. So that's something.
He also goes to library sales and library basements and tries to take what he can of pre-20th century materials that are being discarded ("pulped", you know; that recycled paper you're using might not be utterly innocent, and "the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise"). So I have a little collection of ex-library 18th and 19th century Latin and Greek materials, most of which are of no great historical significance, none of which are in very good condition, but almost all of which are very hard to find. On Advogato, I mentioned in some detail my copy of De Vita Pythagorica by Iamblichus in Greek and Latin, together in one volume with various other ancient biographies of Pythagoras. When we hear stories about the life of Pythagoras, they probably come to us third-hand or fourth-hand from one of the authors reprinted in that book. Some day I hope to read them (at least the Latin, if not the Greek).
