Books for Sale

Twice a year, the newspaper where my wife works as an editor holds an in-house book sale to dispose of the accumulated review and promotional copies that no one has reviewed or promoted. In the two years we’ve been here, I’ve scored some very inexpensive prizes – Jonathan Bate’s John Clare, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and, among others, The Supplicating Voice, a collection of Samuel Johnson’s spiritual writings. These are books I probably would not have purchased at full price, especially the hard covers, but each has become a treasure.

On her first sweep, my wife picked up a stack of dirt-cheap books and CDs for the kids and Christmas cards for us. That was Wednesday. On Thursday, she staged another surgical strike and called me on the cell phone for backup. I rejected several finds, reminding myself not to get greedy, but leaped at a hard cover of Jean-Yves Tadie’s Marcel Proust: A Life, which I read soon after the English translation was published six years ago. A few months later I read a just-published biography with the identical title written by William Carter, an American Proust scholar. In retrospect, I’m unable to separate the books sufficiently to recommend one volume over the other. If you love Proust, you’ll read them both because you can’t get enough.

That was the entrée. The sides consist of three Penguins of the latest generation,with black covers (I can see Penguins on my shelves in six colors): excerpts from Plutarch titled On Sparta; Tolstoy’s Master and Man and Other Stories; and Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Other Stories. The first is great: I own no Plutarch. The Tolstoy is also good because I count six of his books on the shelf, but they’re a hodge-podge, no uniformity, much overlap, but no “Master and Man,” a story the late novelist and editor William Maxwell adored. The poet Edward Hirsch quoted Maxwell as saying: “I once said to Joe Mitchell that the only part about dying that I minded was that when you are dead you can’t read Tolstoy.” That seems to me an immensely wise thing to say. The Tolstoy also felt right because my oldest son is reading War and Peace for the first time, having knocked off Anna Karenina earlier this year. He loves it. Who wouldn’t?

The Babel feels like a bait-and-switch swindle. It’s identical to the volume Penguin put out in 1994 titled Collected Stories (pale blue-green cover) – same translator, same stories. At least the new one has a better cover – a black-and-red montage of Russian pictures from the British Library. The old one had an unflattering close-up of Babel’s smiling face in which he looks like a sideshow attraction. I’ll accept the duplication philosophically – you can’t have enough Babel, the price was right, and I’ll pass it along to the appropriate reader.