I had been thinking the previous week that I did have quite a stack of books piling up at my father's house. While the gap between shipping books to the US and to Canada is sometimes shrinking, it is growing for other bookseller sites. The most annoying was this deal where a Canadian bookseller would ship to the US for free but charged a pretty penny to ship elsewhere in Canada! More often I sent books his way when the (US-based) sellers flat out refused to ship to Canada. At any rate, I knew there was a lot of stuff* and that I should try to pick up, but I was assuming it would be late spring or more likely summer that I made it back down.
When I saw the actual stack, my heart sank a bit, though I would pretty sure I could get it in my duffel bag, though of course I had considerably less space after buying some new clothes and shoes! Very oddly, the hotel maid threw away my toiletries (including razor and toothbrush!), apparently thinking that since I had taken my duffel bag with me for the day, I was skipping town a day early. Very annoying, and it's not like that even opened up that much space in the bag.
In any event, as I looked through the pile, I realized that there was a Mark Twain volume from Library of America that I didn't remember ordering. This combined A Tramp Abroad and Following the Equation (which I was not familiar with). I searched my memory, but I simply couldn't remember ordering this book. Later I checked my email (and Amazon account), and I hadn't ordered it at all. It seems my dad had ordered a James Thurber collection from Library of America and most likely bundled this together. Now either he had meant this as a present for me, or it just ended up in the wrong pile, but I decided to gracefully accept the book.**
My stepmom pushed us to take other books, simply to help her get them out of the house. I really had very little room left, but I did take the Thurber LOA volume (given that it was on his nightstand it was one of the last things he had been reading, and so will be a keepsake for me, even though I have other Thurber collections). I decided there was a small chance my daughter would want a learning to play guitar book, so I took that. As I was almost ready to leave, I saw Howard Becker's Art Worlds, and I thought that would also be an appropriate link to my dad through our sociology connection and love of art. I actually just missed out on meeting and perhaps being taught by Prof. Becker, as he had retired from Northwestern only a few years before I got there. He was still a bit of a legend in the department and several professors talked about his tenure there and his impact on them. I decided to pass on a massive Sherlock Holmes collection, as that probably really would have split the bag open.
So now I'll just have to get it home tomorrow, but it should be fine. Famous last words...
* Right now everything takes on a bit of a morbid cast. One of the books is a posthumous John Berryman collection, and several of the books are signed by dead authors (Timothy Findley and Robert Kroetsch), where I won't be able to track them down at a reading in Toronto. I also bought a couple of books signed by Salman Rushdie (fortunately still among the living), since I couldn't get tickets to his reading in Toronto and I just frankly didn't have the time (or patience) to stand in line when I heard him reading in Chicago. I wouldn't mind getting an autographed copy of his latest novel, The Golden House, but I'm not quite sure how much I am willing to pay. Probably not that much.
** The real question now is when (rather than if) having two of the LOA Twain volumes (I already had The Gilded Age and Later Novels) will induce me to get the two-volume set of Twain's shorter writings. As I scoured the interwebs, I saw there were some absolute steals for each individual volume, though the set itself was fairly pricey. While of course there is roughly a $5 difference (per book) to ship to Canada, this time around I'll just swallow it.
No comments:
Post a Comment