Good Book Hunting, April 16, 2020: The Weekly ABC Books Shipment

So I’m a bit conflicted: I tend to order my books from ABC Books online on Saturday or Sunday, but that means I don’t get them the next week until Thursday. So I am thinking about ordering the day I get them, so I can get them earlier. However, this plan would probably prove more expensive.

I got:

  • As I said, I should read more Longfellow, so I got three books: A 1913 edition of The Courtship of Miles Standish and Elizabeth that was somebody’s fifth grade textbook in 1926; a children’s book binding edition of Evangeline from 1962; and a Library of America edition of Longfellow: Poems and Other Writings (which includes The Courtship of Miles Standish and Evangeline).
     
  • Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell. This is Woodrell’s big hit which was made into a movie that launched the career of Jennifer Lawrence. I read The Maid’s Version in 2014.
     
  • The Inner Game of Fencing by Nick Evangelista. About fencing, which I haven’t done per se in a while. I’ve done some sword sparring in my martial arts classes and ate up the sword-swingers with my rapier fencing techniques. But I just reconnected with the fellow I was fencing with on Maryland Avenue in the middle 1990s when we were threatened with arrest for doing so, so I picked up a book to read on it. Because, face it, I buy books on the thinnest of pretexts or sometimes for no reason at all.
     
  • An inscribed copy of Vespers by Ed McBain. For $16. Don’t kids these days remember Ed McBain? He signed it Ed McBain, though. Not Evan Hunter or Salvatore Lombino.

Well, that should hold me for a while. Although the “while” will be scattered over the coming decades.

And I’ll place another order this weekend for a set of random books.

As I mentioned I was looking forward to the re-opening of things so I can support the local authors and save on shipping, handling, and Alibris vig costs.

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