Nifty Gifties

We got some holidays coming up, folks! People are really into giving new books as gifts, but what about rare, out-of-print vintage cool things? Below I'm highlighting some of the most special things of all you won't find anywhere else in the WORLD but the Used Book Cellar. These are rad things you should totally give to those people on your list that have everything. 'Cuz they won't have these:

For the budding grand sommelier, an epic-huge hardcover book "Wines of the World" with full-color photographs, endpapers and a SLIPCASE. Nothin' says class like a slipcase. The book is huge and well-bound so it lies flat. It has a bit of the history of wine, and talks about some ideas for ones to look out for, but as this was printed in 1967, the bread and butter of this book (or cheese and crackers?) is the exhaustive guide to regions, and what kinds of wine come from where, what they taste like, why they taste the way they do. A really fascinating, beautiful book. $20 smackers.

For the funny-man, kooky-lady, anglophile or philosophy major who needs a laugh over the winter break, if I were you I would SERIOUSLY consider The Brand New Monty Python Bok [sic]. This book is rated NC-17 guys, but really there's something for everyone (over 17) here. In standard Python fashion nothing is sacred, all things are satirized and there are lots of pictures. Crude humor. Making fun of monarchs. Sex advice. Rat recipes. Fairy tales. Etiquette tips. Rene Descarte detective stories. Basically, you and anyone worth knowing deserves this book. All this can be yours for just $15 bucks. This is a HUGE savings off of the (fake) list price of £142.48½

For the history buff grampa who's always saying you wouldn't have a chance in a fight against Winston Churchill (I'm in therapy now, guys, don't worry) I present to you The New Yorker War Album. This book was printed in 1942 and is full of New Yorker cartoons lampooning the 1st and 2nd World Wars. Full of subtle humor and slices-of-life from the years of the Great War, this would make a rare, cool gift. $14

The UBC is mad-rich in fancy art books. Big ones, small ones, expensive ones, inexpensive ones. Rare, awesome, etc. We're all over the board! Art is the way to go to impress the cultured ones in your life, and why break the bank to impress someone? Everyone is impressed by the guy or gal who can get a $75 art book for $13. Which is possible here.

So show us the goods, you might be saying? Here is but a SAMPLING dear readers:

I'm obsessed with Penguin book covers, and look at this thing we got in that I DID NOT EVEN KNOW EXISTED: A whole MONOGRAPH of the full paintings used on Penguin covers. Some beautiful, strange stuff in here. Color and black and white. A cool old saddle-stitched book of paintings by Ben Shahn. In 1949 it went for three shillings and sixpence at modern art museums EXCLUSIVELY. But YOU can have it for $5.

For $20 we have a monograph of Anish Kapoor (the shiny Chicago bean guy) that is both physically a beautiful book (shiny endpapers! handwritten notes sewn into the center of the binding!) as well as a fascinating exploration into a VERY contemporary sculptor's process, inspirations and oeuvre.

And for $8 (this is a crazy deal) we have this really large trim-size (I'm talking 15" x 11") book of 16 color plates of French Primitives, beautiful paintings of French medieval life and interest beautifully reproduced (sometimes with metallic ink!). The pages are loose, making each leaf ready for framing!

Thanks for reading! If you have any books you want to turn into cash or store credit, we're here Wednesdays through Saturdays, 10 AM-4PM.

Notes on the Eve of a Terribly Stressful Biology Final (or) Uh-oh, Adios Sanity

Oh, good evening, friends. And how does this evening find you? Well, I hope? You look well, I must say; it would appear that Paris does agree with you. My, look at your pallor, ruddy as anything! Most excellent. Well but then I suppose, the city of lights would bring a twinkle to one’s eye, it is in the name after all. How are we on time? Oh wonderful, just enough to have a drink. What quaint, unique little outdoor café shall we frequent today? Oh how about this one, with the green lattice on the windows, look how lovely it is.

Isn't the weather fine here? A bit wet, this time of year, but I don't mind, I quite enjoy the time spent inside. It does give one so much more opportunity to focus on one's leisure, don't you think? Do you draw? I absolutely love it, although my husband can't stand the charcoal. It does make an awful mess, but it's all so satisfying to get dirty once in a while, don't you find? Oh my, but here's the waiter, yes, I believe I'll have a brandy, thank you ever so. Are you hungry? Yes, and bring along some sandwiches, won't you, there's a chap.

My, life has been so much more relaxing since I succeeded from the reality of my Allston-based existence into this Hemingway-fueled fantasy world in which get to walk around wealthy European towns and drink expensive alcohol. Perhaps I'll call in to work later to tell them I couldn't possibly do a thing, not today, not with the weather the way it is, so perfect for a stroll down the pier or a horse-drawn taxi ride around the park. Besides my hands are only just beginning to heal from their arthritic state - all that paper writing and page turning, you understand. Wreaked havoc on my joints, I'll tell you that much! No, no, now I just hang around in my boudoir until a strange Count brings me champagne and forces me to have an expensive dinner with him in return for nothing but the pleasure of my exquisite, youthful company. Or one of my unique-yet-familiar-in-their-wealth friends (or enemies, rather hard to tell) pops round and we get drunk and talk about something terribly masculine like boxing, or women and how complicated they are.

No, of course not all Hemingway stories are like this, but I've just read 'The Sun Also Rises', and in doing so decided that I wanted my life to be one long evening, as well, so I constructed this terribly delightful personal universe in which I am the lady of leisure I've always dreamed of being. A lady who lunches, even! Can you imagine? All of my wide brimmed hats, expensive sunglasses, and bangles? Not that Hemingway would say a word about those, of course not; 4 or 5 sentences about what a taxi cab was passing as it drives into the garage but not a stitch on the splendor of my professionally done fingernails. Never mind. I am excited, I do suspect that as we get deeper and deeper into this collection I shall swiftly retire to the country, perhaps do some game hunting. Oh my I will need a gun, won't I? I imagine there will be some villas, some remote locations. More girls. More guns. I'm so very excited. Oh look! The brandy is here, wonderful, wonderful. A toast, why not? A toast!

To the Cinema

Few books are better than the movies and only a select others truly measure up to the book.  The Invention of Hugo Cabret definitely fits within the category.

When I first heard Hugo was going to be a movie, I was a bit disappointed.  If you've seen this book, you know that its charm lies within the design.  Part written novel, part wordless picturebook, author and illustrator Brian Selznick shows you what is happening.  The book opens as the moon moves across the Paris night sky, and narrows down to the train station where we follow a boy who lives inside of the station walls.  Text is added when illustration would not be the most effective story telling or if dialogue is needed.  Really, it is one book of its time, rising a great debate of why it won the Caldecott.  Hugo is great for readers 8 and up, or any avid reader of children's books.

I won't give away the differences between the book and the movie, but there are very few.  The mystery and discovery of cinema remains a prominent theme in the movie.  The characters looked and acted the part -- especially Isabelle.

I still advocate to read the book before the movie, but this movie adaptation is well worth it -- especially in 3-d (where the special effects are not overused, but still draw you into the story of young Hugo).

Destination: Close Your Eyes and Point

Bookstores contain worlds within them, offering readers stories beyond the borders of their experience. The new collection of maps at Booksmith, on display in our events' space downstairs, is, well, "mapping" this natural relationship between a reader and the world.

As I stood in Booksmith's basement, contemplating the impressive 73"x48" National Geographic Executive Wall Map, tracing the contours of countries on the Michelin World Map, admiring the continental color scheme of the World Tyvek Wall Map, I was remembering another map, one that hung in the basement of my childhood home, in what my family called "the ham radio room." Here my dad disappeared for hours on end to pursue his hobby as a ham radio operator, talking to distant countries in a mysterious Morse code that often interrupted our television’s reception, blurring the faces of a sitcom into a rhythm of snowfields and static.

I saw the world for the first time in that room, on the large map that hung on the wall. The multicolored countries, pale pink, mint, and lemon, were pock marked with pin holes, but only two pins remained in my earliest memory, and soon even these were plucked from the map. Their tiny navy blue and red heads indicated, I told my friends proudly whenever they asked to see my father’s mysterious cave, the only two countries in the world my dad had not yet contacted. I recalled this boast recently, when, upon showing a friend my personal library, I replied to a question by saying, with the same satisfaction, that there were only two or three books on the shelves that I had not read.

As I perused the maps in the basement of Booksmith, I wondered about the influence this early knowledge of a wider world had on my sisters and I. Each of us take whatever opportunity we can to see new parts of the world, studying and teaching abroad, or traveling for adventure whenever our budgets allow. A good map can take you to places you never dreamed of going, simply by planting a certain image, an awareness of a whole yet to be seen, a sense that your knowledge of the world is as yet fragmented, incomplete, perhaps even—I thought as I contemplated Booksmith's "Who Said 'North' was 'Up?'" map—upside-down.

 "The life of an individual is in many respects like a child's dissected map," wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Many of these pieces seem fragmentary, but...If I could look back on the whole, as we look at the child's map when it is put together, I feel that I should have my whole life intelligently laid out before me."

This passage is situated as an epigraph to Graham Greene's Journey Without Maps, a travelogue of his journey to the uncharted African coast of Liberia. Greene begins his tale at the consulate, getting his passport stamped for the journey into a plagued and violent land. On the wall he finds "the usual blank map...a few towns along the coast, a few villages along the border."

A few pages later he describes his motivation for his journey as inspired by a particular shape he saw on that map."I thought for some reason even then of Africa, not a particular place, but a shape, a strangeness, a wanting to know. The unconscious mind is often sentimental; I have written 'a shape', and the shape, of course, is roughly that of the human heart."

Greene's journey without a map is only one of many books on the shelves of Destination Literature that speak to the importance of cartography to the way we imagine and perceive the world. Ken Jenning's recently released Maphead is a memoir told through its author's obsession with maps. Andrea Ponsi's delicately illustrated Florence: A Map of Perceptions, takes the reader on a visual tour of Florence's architecture. In the art section you can find Katharine Harmon's gorgeous Map as Art. But it isn't difficult to see how maps operate as art, as mediums through which to conceive of the world anew, inspiring us into new spaces. Simply go to the basement wall, close your eyes, and point.

Some quick cheese.

Try poems.


Dirty little bricks-
so many finger shakers
fertile pace makers.

Turn to the tip
of some forgotten truth-

a sour toothed balm.
Palm again the exhale in the

train's breaks
with line breaks

take another take.
Give someone a scream and a sigh.

unhinge the hamper,
filth up the quaint-

make it shine
a brake-less car on the highway
of your heart.

*


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In Of Mice and Men, one of the main characters, Lenny, famously has a fondness for "soft things." And whom among us isn't tactile, perhaps not to the intense degree of Lenny himself, but there is something about the feel of tiny, hoppy bunnies--or particularly well-made books--that makes them that much more satisfying to enjoy.

Maybe the most obvious texture that a lot of favorite books have is the deckled edge, the byproduct of an old way of papermaking that leaves the edges of a paper artfully rough (observe photo left). Nowadays, only artisans make paper this way, so when you get a book with these edges it's usually faked by a machine to make the book look real legit. But it does have a certain fancy feel to it, even if it makes it difficult to flip through the pages. Sometimes a book is given a fancy texture in another way. Varnishes, like metallic foil or spot gloss are pressed onto a cover to give the color of the jacket more POP and the result is also a tactile delight. The embossing on some covers, too, gives a subtle look to the jacket but also makes it really pleasant to hold, and also therefore more difficult to put down.

Recent books that employ this technique really well are the Penguin Threads series designed by magically amazing artist Jillian Tamaki. For three recent reprintings of Black Beauty, Emma and The Secret Garden, Tamaki HAND-EMBROIDERED jacket illustrations, and when the books were printed, the texture of the threads was embossed on the cover, making them stunning art objects that are compulsively touchable. Rachel Sumpter is designing the next three covers for Wind in the Willows, Wizard of Oz and Little Women. They are STUNNING.

Of course, sometimes texture and touch are employed in the design of a book in a way that is integral to the text. Firmin by Sam Savage (a recent acquisition in the UBC) is the story of a rat born in a 1960s Boston bookstore (not us!) who devours literature both literally and figuratively. The book is die cut with a huge bite-mark taken out of the right side, all the way through the book. It's a playful way of introducing a central element of the story into the design, and makes it a really fun book to pick up and inspect. It's sort of a grown-up version of classic touch-and-feel books like Pat the Bunny, where images, text and texture combine to help young toddlers in the tactile phase with language acquisition. This phenomenon is timeless, and since the publication of Pat the Bunny in 1940 there have been a plethora of additions to this category of books. A more recent one that I'm particularly fond of is Betsy Snyder's Have You Ever Tickled a Tiger which employs some really creative materials to imitate turtle skin and walrus whiskers in particular.

This completes my little blog-series on senses by-the-book. Thanks for reading! As always, come check us out in the Used Book Cellar! And remember we can even give you money for your already-felt books. Stay in the black this year and exchange your books for store credit, then take care of all your holiday shopping under our roof. We buy Wednesdays through Saturdays from 10 AM to 4PM.

Destination: Morocco

Today I received a letter from a friend who recently moved to Morocco. A native of Ireland, this friend has lived in more countries over the past few years than I have ever seen. When I turned a page in my address book to scribble down his newest residence, it was the seventh address entered beneath his name.

The move did not surprise me, but the destination? Why Morocco? I asked. He'd found a copy of Partir (translated Leaving Tangier) by Tahar Ben Jelloun while in London, my friend wrote back, and he had booked a ticket soon after he'd finished the novel.

I recognized the name. Last week a customer told me she was traveling to Morocco. We headed to the Destination Literature section, where we found Jelloun's This Blinding Absence of Light, in which prisoners tell each other stories to endure their internment in desert concentration camps. Next to Jelloun was Paul Bowles, whose fiction is full of Americans encountering the culture of North Africa. We also found For Bread Alone a memoir of Moroccan Mohamed Choukri, a friend of Bowles.

In solidarity with my friend's move, I picked up a copy of Leaving Tangier for myself. It's a desperate story of those who long to leave their country and take life-destroying measures to do so. The main character, Azel, sells himself to a rich Spanish lover in order to make the crossing, then writes heartbreaking anguished letters back to a country he loves and hates with an irreconcilable tension.

In reply to my friend's letter I am sending him a small Moroccan guidebook I found from the '60s. While the information is long out of date, the aesthetics of the book pleased me: a tiny 4x6 volume of dark navy with the country's name etched in gold across the cover. But it was the cartography that drew me. Several detailed, full-colored maps of various cities fold out from the thin pages.

In the back of the guidebook, I gingerly unfolded a full sized map the country. I stared at the northernmost tip, at Tangier, and at the strip of water that separates it from Europe. Something in the very topography of that place speaks of borders and boundaries, of the lines that define nations and races and individuals, of voices that speak across channels and oceans, of longing that reaches the viewer from the flat dimensions of a page.

While few of us can claim such versatile itineraries for our lives, books often play the same role as they did for my friend, that is, books function as maps, leading us into worlds we have never seen. It seems appropriate then, that we're bringing in a rich array of maps to supplement our travel section at Booksmith. Look for them downstairs, bordering the walls of our events' space. Books and maps illustrate the world for us in much the same way, connecting us across distances that once seemed impassable.