Book Hauls!

Went to the local vegan restaurant yesterday, and got a copy of Gateways (collection of stories and essays in honor of Fred Pohl) from their shelf of books to be traded. Gave them a dollar in their donation box.

Now I call that (all of it) civilized. (As Joy Davidman Lewis might have put it.)
 
View attachment 25024 View attachment 25025 Any blake And Mortimer fans ?
Gaston Gaffe?
Blake & Mortimer is great. Lovely art. Best read in French though: the couple I have read in English had laughable, high-school translations. Makes one realise the sophistication of the translation in Tintin and Asterix.

Family holidays in France always include a trip to a decent bookshop with the kids, to emerge with an armful of classic bandes-desinees. Same in Belgium. Brussels is particularly good for comic shops.

Not actually living on the continent, I find the French Amazon site is a good place to shop for these things:

http://www.amazon.fr/s/ref=sr_nr_n_...+dessinées&ie=UTF8&qid=1443280670&rnid=301130
 
Bargain of the Month.
Have just got from Amazon Marketplace the 2002 edition of Hutchinson's Encyclopedia.
1000+ pages of large format loveliness, loads of colour pictures plus built-in Atlas, in very good nick!
All for the princely sum of 1p plus £2.80 postage.
Wow!!!!!!!!!
It weighs a ton so I would imagine the post cost more then that!
So it's a bit on the old side as encyclopedias go, but I would think that nearly all of it's info is still valid.
You can't argue with that for just 1p!!!
 
Recent purchases:

Killer of Men by Christian Cameron
Tribune of Rome by Robert Fabbri
Prophet of Bones by Ted Kosmatka
The Whale Road by Robert Low
Relentless by Jack Campbell
The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart
Alexander: God of War by Christian Cameron
The King Must Die by Mary Renault
The Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan
 
A copy of the Penguin Classics edition of Balzac's The Black Sheep, which has been recommended to me by someone on Chrons as a good first Blazac to read.
 
I may have just bought all of Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet/Beyond the Frontier/Lost Stars books - barring the two I already owned - for 99p each on Kindle in Amazon UK's Autumn Sale. That was 12 books for £11.88 :ninja:
 
A new book on Tolkien's drawings for The Lord of the Rings has arrived. I've glanced through it and look forward to reading the commentary by Scull and Hammond, who did such a good job on Tolkien's artwork for The Hobbit. The new book has no works to compare with the pictures that Tolkien intended for publication with The Hobbit, and the most finished ones, such as a somewhat anemic picture of Lothlorien or a grim scene of part of the Dark Tower, have been reproduced before in Ballantine's Tolkien calendars and Scull and Hammond's earlier book on Tolkien as artist. What's new is numerous sketches, some of them very simple, that seem to have been used by Tolkien as references, e.g. to the contours of mountains. I predict that some review will grouse about the book as having relatively few attractive pictures, etc. The more discerning reviews will discuss how the sketches and designs related to Tolkien's compositional process, etc. In that way this book should enhance enjoyment of the "trilogy." If one wants a "pretty" book of art by Tolkien, the Tolkien-Artist book by Scull and Hammond is the one to get, or the Hobbit one.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0544636341/?tag=brite-21
 
Good haul from the local Oxfam bookshop this afternoon. I could have bought much more, but there would have been problems explaining it when I got home. Will have to go in small installments.
SF: New Worlds 10. 1976 Some really interesting stuff in there by some of the modern greats:Moorcock, Keith Roberts, Thomas Disch, M John Harrison, Barrington Bayley.
NewWorlds-10.jpg


Seagalology A study of the ass-kicking films of Steven Seagal by Vern. Looks very amusing.

And, most precious, 2 volumes from the New Naturalist series:
12 The Sea Shore CM Yonge, and 15 Life in Lakes and Rivers Macan & Worthington. This is a beautifully published series, still going since 1945. Written by experts in the field as detailed, definitive, academically respectable works accessible to a lay reader. Worth getting for the covers alone.

$_35.JPG
51teFDmnc4L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
 
So which books have you recently spent your hard earned cash or pocket money on :)

What little gems couldnt you resist and ended up on your bookshelf:D

I have to be careful with my pennies these days so the only books that get onto my bookshelves (yep got more than one) now are my favourite authors works.

There was a special offer on (last week) at the book club I am a member of and I've sent for -

Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen by Garth Nix
Grass for his Pillow and Brilliance of the Moon by Lian Hearn

Havent' got them yet but eagerly awaiting them :D
Have not bought any new ones lately. My latest searches have concentrated on first editions from the greats of SF.
 
Should mention I picked up Short Stories Of De Maupassant a few weeks back, put out by The Book League Of America, no editor listed. What's notable about this 1941 hardback is that with 96 stories packed into 502 pages, not one of them is either his monumentally famous "The Horla" or the truly bizarre "Who Knows?" But for two bucks it seemed a good deal.
 
SF9 was 50¢

Let me know how that goes - that's the one "classic" annual series I'm completely unfamiliar with.

Should mention I picked up Short Stories Of De Maupassant a few weeks back, put out by The Book League Of America, no editor listed. What's notable about this 1941 hardback is that with 96 stories packed into 502 pages, not one of them is either his monumentally famous "The Horla" or the truly bizarre "Who Knows?" But for two bucks it seemed a good deal.

They must have printed a million copies of that. :) It's weird for a 1941 hardcover: I've had the exact same book twice (picked up one from somewhere and then inherited another). Maybe it was that and not WWII that caused the paper shortages. :D
 
Talking of strange omissions I've got a very large coffee table type book about WW2 weaponry.
It covers everything you could think of, aircraft, ships, tanks down small fire arms and hand grenades.
However one huge and strange omission is there is no mention of the Messerschmitt Bf 109?
This is very odd as it was the back bone of the German fighter command.
It's like writing a book about the Battle of Britain and not mentioning the Spitfire???
 
Good haul from the local Oxfam bookshop this afternoon. I could have bought much more, but there would have been problems explaining it when I got home. Will have to go in small installments.

Oh god! I have that problem too. Sheds are good for hiding stuff in as a half-way house. Today I bought a 280 page book by Moebius my favourite French comic book artist (by which I mean, he is my favourite comic book artist - and he's French). 280 pages for 9 euros including postage to the UK. Wooo-hooo! The book in Italian right enough and I don't speak Italian but what the hell - I didn't understand Le Garage Hermétique when it was translated into English!
 
For research purposes
By Christine Henry, 1 Euro each: Black Wings, Black Night, Black Howl. (charity shop, new condition)
Downfall (Free! outside Charity shop). Thriller
By HP Lovecraft: 10 Euro (€9.99) "The Best Of H.P. Lovecraft. (Bookshop, reduced from £18.99)
 
They must have printed a million copies of that. :) It's weird for a 1941 hardcover: I've had the exact same book twice (picked up one from somewhere and then inherited another). Maybe it was that and not WWII that caused the paper shortages. :D
The Book League Of America sounds suspiciously like some secret society of librarians trying to work their wicked ways into the lives of everyday Americans and won't let some ridiculous paper shortage stand in their way.:sneaky:
 
View attachment 25024 View attachment 25025 Any blake And Mortimer fans ?
Gaston Gaffe?

I only have one Blake and Mortimer in my small but rapidly expanding 'Teach Myself French by Reading Comic Books' pile: Le Piege Diabolique. It's probably the most talky comic I've ever read. On one page (36) a character delivers great slabs of monologue that take up most of the page. More words over 6 panels than the average modern Marvel comic delivers in twenty pages. Are they all like that?
 

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