Vacation Reading Supplemental

When I was at the Book Country warehouse, I couldn't help myself. I thought, "Surely to Gawd, there must be something in this big ol' place I will want, just to have for myself." I know that that was not the mission. I was there to buy remainders for the bookstore, not to shop for my library. But you must understand, there were huge bins, the size of movers' pallets, full of books. In each bin, and downstairs on the floor, there were stacks of books a yard high, sorted by publisher and title, and the place is huge.

Most of what was there was paperback. I don't really do paperbacks, unless I have no option otherwise. None of what I was sorting through was unfamiliar, or rather, what was was not the sort of thing I would feel much need of in my library. This was a good thing. I could concentrate on picking the books I thought would sell. That was the job. Even as I started sorting through bin after bin of Oxford University Press, I was not much tempted on a personal level. I was looking for reference books: foreign language dictionaries, scientific reference, a nice atlas (though someone shopping for another company snatched up all of the nicest of these. These people were there for a big company, shopping for other college bookstores, and they had a whole team deployed out on the floor the same days I was there. One tried not to get in the way of others. It did however make for a somewhat more competitive environment, specially after I'd had to call my boss to check on something like the atlas and, by the time I got back from my break, found the best books already gathered into my competitors' mountainous haul. Lesson learned.)

But then I did find, in an Oxford bin, just a couple of titles that proved to be irresistible. One of them heads this entry. In the bottom of one dusty stack, there were two hardcover volumes, still in their shrinkwrap, with the intriguing title: New Writings of William Hazlitt, edited by Duncan Wu. I was more than a little excited. Duncan Wu wrote a massive biography of Hazlitt not all that long ago, and while the book was far too weighted with academic seriousness and footnotes for my taste, and more interested in Hazlitt's politics than his style or his friends, it was a good book, and definitive in its way. Now I had before me, these too big volumes with the curious title. I set both sets in the bin aside.

And then, from the very same bin, up came another treasure! A volume of The Oxford University Press' Complete Henry Fielding, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, 'Shamela," and Occasional Writings, also in a fat, handsome hardcover, shrinkwraped and unmarked!

Happiness!

I'd taken three old paperback mystery novels, and a new copy of Agatha Christie's Curtain, the last case of Hercule Poirot, with me to read or reread. But I knew these would not last long. The television at my hotel was hardly adequate for a man much spoiled at home by the most expensive cable package, and so I knew I could not count on TV keeping me much company, even before I went north to stay with the elderly parents. Besides, one needs options, as a reader, no? One trip to the only used bookstore near that first hotel convinced me that I was not going to find much to supplement my traveling library in the area, and I knew there was nothing for miles around my hometown but one remainder shop in the outlet mall.

So imagine my delight in finding two old friends, in beautiful clean hardcovers, in one dirty bin in that big warehouse!

When I was done working the first day, I asked my helper if she would ask what might be the procedure for taking these two titles out of the shipment so that I might carry them off with me. The next day it became clear that this was not an issue that had previously come up at the wholesalers before. They had no problem with me having the books for myself, they simply had never had a buyer ask before. I figured I'd pay the bookstore for the books when I got back to Seattle. I'm sure I've made some kind of paperwork nightmare for somebody, if only myself, by doing this, but I still think it was well worth doing.

In the days since, I've read through all my little mystery novels, got a bit misty again rereading Christie's last Poirot, -- just as I did the first time years ago -- and have all but finished the book of ghost stories I found in the remainder shop in the mall. To whom then have I turned?

Well, the professor's two volumes of "New" Hazlitt have turned out to be masses of uncollected, and often unattributed reviews and occasional journalism, each with an introduction meant to justify their addition to the official Hazlitt canon. Sometimes, the introductions are longer that the essays they introduce. Doesn't much matter. The fascination has been in reading the things that the great essayist wrote, admittedly as he wrote nearly every word in his life, to earn his bread. Many of these pieces were recycled into the more famous essays and lectures by which the critic is already known; his reviews of plays and players like Mrs. Kemble, for instance or some of his thoughts on Shakespeare that later formed his famous lectures on the subject. An equal or even greater number are just light bits and pieces used to fill newspaper inches. I've been dipping then for a week. I can't say that I would have felt myself deprived of anything had I not found these books, but I am glad I did, so belated congratulations to Professor Wu for what must have been a Herculean effort in finding, collecting, and justifying such a weight of undiscovered or disputed Hazlitt. Bless 'im for it.

The Fielding I've only just begun rummaging through and already I've read a pamphlet on a once notorious case of a cross dressing lady who married multiple times. This sensational squib Fielding wrote to cash in on a scandalous trial of the day. In the introductory note, reference was made to my beloved Terry Castle, who evidently wrote about the case, Fielding's little toss off of it, and other such in her book, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Ideologies of Desire), which I really hadn't thought to read, but now think I must -- as soon as I can get back to civilization and find it.

Who'd have thought I'd find Fielding & Hazlitt, and in books unknown to me and now part of my "permanent" collection -- for who can flatter themselves that such things last? -- in a dirty bin in a warehouse in McKeesport, Pennsylvania?

One finds old friends, it seems, everywhere.