Books: A summer trip to Anderson-Butler Rare Books

If you live in the greater Puget Sound area, and you can read, and you prefer to read good books instead of popular trash, then you owe it to yourself to visit Anderson-Butler Rare Books in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle.

With the demise of Wessel and Lieberman last summer, Anderson's remains my favorite bookshop in the Seattle.  A good book excursion into town would have you stop at Anderson's first, then John Michael Lang's good shop downstairs, Twice Sold Tales across the street, and finishing up with the indispensable and very high-turnover (churn is good) Magus Books in the University District.

If you ding your book budget elsewhere, you'll feel like a real mook when you show up at Anderson's with only $20 left on your open-to-buy.  Don't do that.  Go there first.

I walked down to Ballard on Saturday; here's what I got.

Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: A history of popular religious and social movements 
in Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, London: Secker & Warburg, 1957, 1st ed.

This is a modern classic of social history, sort of an applied Ernst Troeltsch, which we dig in these parts.  If this blog evolves into a full-on chiliastic movement, we'll certainly crib notes from this.

William Shakespeare, Complete Works, London: Oxford, 1969

This is a good bare-bones edition of the bard, handy, portable, no-frills.  Don't expect to borrow mine after TSHTF and you need to check some allusion to King Lear.  You can pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Rabelais, Works, London: Bodley Head, 1927 2 vols, numbered copies

Gorgeous books here!  I'm so enjoying finishing up Fritz Leiber's various adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser that I think it's time I finally got around to the Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel.  This is one of those classics, like Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, which I'm deeply ashamed for never having read.  Book people know that a Gutenberg Project text file just won't do -- you simply must have a beautiful analog edition.  And now I do.

Seattle has some very good book shops.  Drop in and make tour of them all.

Public libraries are great -- for commies.  Time's running out -- start stackin'.

It's time for a book thread

Schizoid market, but it looks now like we may get that new high after all, after which the waves will tell us if it is the ultimate one.  We will pray this can end quickly with a sharp spike instead of weeks trapped in some tedious ending-diagonal pattern.  Let's give Bryan Franco credit for now for his historical model that demands one more all-time high for the chart gods to be satisfied.

So what's new on the bookshelf?

Well, I found this 1956 Mencken collection at the Ballard Goodwill.

H.L. Mencken, A Carnival of Buncombe, Johns Hopkins 1956

And A. N. Wilson's book on the decline of Britain, at Value Village.

A.N. Wilson, After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain
in the World, FSG 2005

I've been picking up solid book club science fiction published by Nelson Doubleday, like these.

Harry Harrison, The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat, et al,
Nelson Doubleday, early 1980s

Anthony Boucher, ed., A Treasury of Great Science Fiction,
Nelson Doubleday, 1959

I'll buy Nelson Doubleday sci-fi books all day long.

Mark Anderson's shop in Ballard is now my favorite bookshop in Seattle.  If you're in the area, stop in on a Saturday and spend some time in his stacks.  Here's what I have got from him lately.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Rings trilogy, Houghton-Mifflin, 1965 revised ed

I upgraded my old boxed set of Tolkien to one with dust jackets -- for $45.  Such a deal on the set!

Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds In Collision, Macmillan, 1950 1st ed

Velikovsky is crackpot science, but it holds a special place in my heart due to the 1978 release of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", one of my favorite cult films.

I also picked this up from Anderson's, Naipaul's account of his first visit to India.

V.S. Naipal, An Area of Darkness, Reprint Society London, 1966

This will go well with this other Naipaul I found at the Value Village over on Lake City Way in Seattle:

V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now (signed), Viking 1990

This one is signed, from 1991, and worth at least $50.  Who gives a signed book away?

Here's another signed book, James Howard Kunstler's latest from the World Made By Hand series.  I've been a real putz not to get to this just yet.  Soon, very soon.  The story may go well with Kondratieff winter.

James Howard Kunstler, A History of the Future (signed),
Atlantic Monthly Press 2014

A book from my local Value Village.  All you need to know about the French existentialists is that Sartre was a salon commie piece of shit, and that Camus was the real deal, and a very good guy.

Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life, Knopf 1997

A clean, crisp edition of a Northwest mountaineering bible:

Manning ed, Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills,
Mountaineers Press, 1967 2nd ed

I wanted my daughter to read "To Build A Fire", so I picked up this fine edition of Jack London from AbeBooks.com last week.  I wish more books were published with such care as this.

Jack London, The Bodley Head Jack London, Bodley Head, 1968

When she's a little older, I'll get her into Fritz Leiber.  Stacks of paperbacks will help.

Fritz Leiber assorted paperbacks, hells yeah!

And here are a few books from Robert D. Kaplan.  I really like his work, and have just about all of his books.

Robert D. Kaplan miscellany

Of course, this has all been leading up to something, a very special book I found, heavily discounted, from the closing sale at Wessel & Lieberman Books (R.I.P.) in Pioneer Square, Seattle.  I walked out with one of their gems, on the relative-cheap.

J.H. Speke, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile,
William Blackwood & Sons, 1864 2nd ed

Speke, Source of the Nile

A fine copy of a rare book, and one actually worth reading.  Now I just need to get more and better Sir Richard Burton to match.

Anderson's Books has even got a set of Captain Cook's journals, pretty badass, and waaaay too rich for this collector.

It looks like I'll have plenty to keep me busy when the fall rains arrive.

Charts 10-04: Return to Anderson's Books

I walked down to Ballard again today (Saturday), to visit Anderson's Books again, this time with my 7 year-old daughter in tow.  My poor kids are used to my book habit by now, and behave themselves very well in any shop.  They browse the kids' sections and know that I will buy any books for them that strike their fancy.

I'm in a corner of the stacks for a while, looking over the history books, when I realize it's very quiet.  Not sure she is there, I call for my daughter, and after a minute, she arrives.

She has a book with her and asks if she can have it.  She had been wrapped up reading it in the corner alone and in silence.

Oh shit!  It's a book of poems by Alan Ginsburg!  I'm instantly overwhelmed with his ominous warning -- "We will get you through your children!" --  and here I am, stunned that my own child has found this book and likes it.  A lot.

A quick scan through to make sure it's not obscene, and it comes along with us.  Here's what else I found.

I have most of Solzhenitsyn's writings now in hardcover, which makes a nice set and should make a nice sight together on a shelf.

Alex Solzhenitsyn, August 1914

I went back for the Dreiser.  I'm heavy into the realist American writers, from Frank Norris to Dreiser to Tom Wolfe.  The print in this one is very small, so it should make for a long read.

Ted Dreiser, The Genius

This next guy is a lot of fun.  Once I stumbled across an old, worn copy of Gangs of New York, many years before Scorsese made his movie with Daniel Day-Lewis.  Asbury was a minister, shocked and appalled by the crazy shit that was everyday New York City in the 19th Century.  Gangs covered the legends of the Bowery, the murderous gangs that looted and killed sailors down at Battery Park, the spooky Chinese tongs and their assassins, the insane draft riots of the Civil War, everything.  The book has a reformist tone, as Asbury, a man of God, is looking to document the horrors of NYC in an effort to improve the conditions there.

This one is billed "An unflinching account of the sink-hole of depravity and vice that once made San Francisco's underworld the most dangerous spot in America".  Sounds great to me!

Herb Asbury, The Barbary Coast

The problem about reading this, and returning to San Francisco to look for the locations, is that the slate was pretty much wiped clean by the earthquake of 1906.  So today while I can visit all of the cool scenes from the 1978 "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" movie with Donald Sutherland, I doubt I can find anything at all of this one.  But the stories should be good nonetheless.

And I picked up that spare copy of F. H. King's book Farmers of Forty Centuries, on organic agriculture in Southeast Asia a century ago.  I love to give books away, and this is a gift for a friend.

F. H. King, Farmers of Forty Centuries

Charts?   I still think we head a little lower to finish off the 4th wave of the ending-diagonal since SPX 1560.  I stared at the chart Thursday night and could not make much sense of it.  I think Friday helped.

SPX 10-04

Longer-term count with the proposed top @1751 November 4th.

SPX 10-04 6M

Books: some recent acquisitions

All of this waiting on events this week, enduring the wave 4 (on my count) doldrums, is tedious and tiring.  The good news is, I discovered an excellent bookshop in in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, and braved the heavy rain today so I could raid the place.

Anderson's Books of Seattle is located just off Market Street, around the corner from where my family likes to get good pho now and then.  It's a small shop, doing a lot of internet business, but the selection on hand was outstanding and very nicely priced.

First, I found a really slick Heritage Press edition of Brave New World, in an orange binding and with a slipcover:

Aldous Huxley, 1974 Heritage Press ed.

Anderson's has a ton of these Heritage Press editions of various books, bought from someone who collected them for a very long time and took good care of them.  Here's another, Suetonius The Lives of the Twelve Caesars:

Suetonius, 1965 Heritage Press ed.

I found a hardcover of Richmond Lattimore's translation of the Odyssey.  His Iliad was a staple of my youth.

Odyssey, Lattimore trans, 1979 printing

And, to finish up the classics, a nice clean copy of Bury:

J.M. Bury History of Greece, 3rd ed., 1959

An Oxford Press edition of Jeremy Bentham's Fragment on Government, to join my general library of English political philosophy.

Jeremy Bentham, Fragment on Government, Oxford, 1951 printing

A general history of Latin America, published by Knopf:

Herring, A History of Latin America

And, lastly, a clean copy of that very strange book Tom Wolfe wrote so many years ago.  I love Tom Wolfe.  Also, I love Tom Wolfe.  Lastly, I love Tom Wolfe.

Tom Wolfe, In Our Time, 1980

The literature and history section is especially strong, and I am eagerly planning another raid.  He has an old Rodale copy of Farmers of 40 Centuries, which I would have nabbed if I didn't already have one.  There's a bunch of Theodore Dreiser and some Solzhenitsyn I'm going to plunder, too, like a fiend.

If you live near Seattle and you appreciate good books, visit this bookshop soon, it's easily in my top three list in the city now.

I also had a good visit to Wessel & Lieberman in Pioneer Square recently.  Here's what I found.

I'm a big fan of John McPhee's nonfiction writing on the world.  Here is his book about the Swiss and the Swiss Army (the Swiss themselves).  I continue to accumulate his books when I can, as they are always good reads.

John McPhee, La Place de la Concorde Suisse

Then I found these gems, a couple of signed first-editions.  The late Jim Sanford was once president of the Mountaineers club of Seattle, and trail guide author Robert L. Wood signed them nicely for him.

The books detail two of the pioneering expeditions into the Olympic Mountains here in the 1890s.  In addition to his legendary trail guides, Robert L. Wood has also compiled the histories of these exploits.

Robert L. Wood, Men, Mules and Mountains, 1st ed.

I had already read his book on the Press Expedition, the story of which is funny as hell and very well-told here.  Setting out in the dead of winter, they get seriously off course in the Goldie drainage (a box canyon), and hilarity ensues.

Robert L. Wood, Across the Olympic Mountains:The Press Expedition, 1889-90, 1st ed.

Heck, even Goodwill has been good to me lately.  I found this spotless copy of the first three books about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in Lankhmar, Fritz Leiber goodness:

Fritz Leiber, The Three of Swords

Re the markets, we really could get banged up Monday, perhaps even dropping down to 1660 SPX, the mid-Bollinger on the weekly.  It won't stick, however, because they'll work out something, and trigger the final rally I've been expecting for forever now.

We need the blow-off top soon, to cap the rally since 2009 and welcome a fresh and friendly Bear market to the scene.