Babbitt's Books

Gifts that live.

2011-04-23T14:26:00.000-07:00

It's a steady Saturday here at the bookstore and since I can't stray too far from the register, I'm using the down-time to whittle away at the pile of books waiting to go online. (In case you're not familiar with our system, most books at an eight-dollar price-point or above are cataloged so that they can be sold online as well as in the store.) In one of the piles I unearthed quite an interesting catalog from 1941.

The product is "sold under the fairest plan and easiest terms ever offered." There is a "30 Days Trial" and the buyer has "4 Months to Pay."

Can you guess what it is?

. . .

Employee Ben couldn't, either.

The product--sold via mail-in orders only--is singing canaries. The world's finest.

The canaries are sold* by Roderick Bird House of South Bend, IN and come in such varieties as Yankee warblers, American singers, gypsy serenaders and Manhattan serenaders. There are Seifert Roller canaries, Glucke canaries, white canaries. An English Norwich canary is "half the size of an ordinary canary" and "can be furnished in yellow or mottled," while the English Yorkshire "stands very erect" but does not sing as frequently as other canaries. The Dutch frill is a "large bird with a fairly good song" with a plumage that "consists of curls and frills."

There's even a handy name guide for your new canary. Roderick Bird House suggests such gems as Andy, Beauty, Buttercup, Dizzy-Dean, Dempsy, Dillinger, Lindy, Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Playmate, Dandy-Jim, Jumpin'-Joe, Kayou, Whiz-Bang, Franklin D., Pretzel, King-Ben, Moon-Mullins, Tarzan, Vander-Meer, Little-Boy-Blue and Torpedo. They caution, however, that these are "merely suggestions" and "maybe you can think of a better name."

The two-page, step-by-step canary breeding section is particularly amusing because of two, solitary sentences--in all caps--in the body of the text. (Evidently the most important instructions to heed when mating your pets.) DON'T LET PEOPLE STAND OVER THE CAGE AND WATCH THEM, one sentence says. DO NOT EXPECT YOUR MALE BIRD TO SING WHILE IN THE BREEDING CAGE, warns the other.

Canaries aren't the only bird offered, though. The catalog has a big boast to make about cousin cockatiel.

There's even a coupon inside titled FREE BIRDS FOR YOU! Each male canary ordered from page 4 or 5 of the catalog comes with a complimentary female companion of the same breed.

So what do you say? We can't give you a free canary, but we can sell you an incredible catalog for $8.

Title: "Gifts That Live" Birds [catalog for canaries, supplies and other birds]

Publisher: Roderick Bird House

Year: 1941

Condition: G+ [front cover is somewhat foxed and rear cover has small edge-tears]

Price: $8

*well, were sold. I imagine this business is long defunct.

A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.

2011-04-07T21:49:00.000-07:00

Babbitt's Books is excited to announce the first-ever event in our "new" location, an April 15th reading to mark the release of David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel and last major work, The Pale King. (We say "new" because we're coming up on our four-year anniversary in the Beaufort Street space.) Set in Peoria, IL, The Pale King explores the boring and tedious life of an I.R.S. worker, David Wallace. The book reads like a memoir and--well--may actually be part memoir, as Wallace claims in the preface that he once took a year off of college to work at the I.R.S. You can read more detailed reviews at The New York Times and Esquire.

David Foster Wallace taught English literature and creative writing at ISU from roughly 1992 to 2002, and has countless ties to Central Illinois. He finished his magnum opus Infinite Jest while living in Normal. Actually, Babbitt's Books used to host regular readings, and David Foster Wallace was a presence at many of them.

At this reading, we will remember him as a patron, a person and most of all as a friend. Fans and friends of Wallace will read selections from The Pale King and his previous works. The reading begins at 7:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public. Copies of The Pale King and Infinite Jest will be available for purchase. Babbitt's Books will provide complimentary beverages and refreshments.

For more details, please check us out on the web at https://www.facebook.com/babbittsbooks (Go to 'Events' on the left-hand side of the page) If you are interested in reading you can e-mail us at sales@babbittsbooks dot com. Selections are your choice and should be 10 to 15 minutes in length.

We hope to see you there.

And Spring herself when she woke at dawn / Would scarcely know that we were gone

2011-03-15T11:15:00.000-07:00

To date on this blog, we've discussed reading for pleasure and buying for collectibility. We haven't yet talked about writing as a means of bringing about social change, though it is an accomplishment that many authors have achieved. Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin strengthened anti-slavery sentiment and probably helped bring about the Civil War, while Upton Sinclair's 1906 book The Jungle led lawmakers to pass the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. In the same vein, Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring is said to be the impetus for the environmental movement.

Originally serialized in The New Yorker, Silent Spring (1962) discusses the devastating effect of pesticides, particularly DDT, on the natural world. Unlike previous pesticides, which targeted only one or two insect species, DDT wiped out all of them. At first, the pesticide seemed like a miracle cure. In World War II, it was sprayed to kill typhus-carrying insects and the disease was almost eliminated in Europe as a result. DDT was also used to destroy pests like malaria-causing mosquitoes in the South Pacific.

But Carson noticed that DDT was not just killing off large numbers of insects--it was killing off bird populations, as well. When DDT enters the food chain, it builds up in the fatty tissues of animals and people, causing cancer and other genetic defects. Scientists later discovered that DDT makes the eggshells of birds thinner, which means that eggs cannot withstand the weight of brooding adults--and frequently break before they have a chance to hatch. DDT also causes sterility in adult birds and was one of the main reasons that bald eagles nearly went extinct in the 1950s. Once the chemical was banned in 1972, the bald-eagle population rallied.

Although John F. Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee validated Carson's claims, critics dismissed her findings. Some even suggested that the accredited biologist was nothing more than a hysterical woman. Although she did not live to see the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, her groundbreaking book was pivotal in its creation.

Here at Babbitt's Boosk, we have two excellent vintage hardcovers by Carson. One is the first printing of the first UK edition of Silent Spring, published by London's Hamish Hamilton in 1963. The book's brown-tweed exterior is in almost pristine condition and the interior is clean. It comes with its original dust jacket. At only $20, it's quite the steal.

The second is The Edge of the Sea, which is the third book in Carson's so-called "sea trilogy." (The first is Under the Sea Wind and the second is The Sea Around Us.) All three books are about marine biology and the ecosystem, and classics in the canon of nature writing. The dust jacket blurb reads:

"The variety of shore life is rich and complex; its patterns go back half a billion years, when the ancestors of our sponges and jellyfish, snails and crabs flourished in the Cambrian seas. The same great forces are still at work: the tides in their eternal rhythms, the waves, the ocean currents. In this book we see how these forces shape the living creatures that depend on them. And so a mysterious universe becomes intelligible, though the essential mystery remains."

Our copy is a first printing of the first edition, published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1955. The book is in clean, readable condition and comes with the original dust jacket. Priced at only $8, it's also a steal.

Title: Silent Spring

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton

Year: 1963

Features: First edition, first pristing

Condition: Very Good/ Good+

Price: $20

Title: The Edge of the Sea

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company

Year: 1955

Features: First edition, first pristing

Condition: Very Good/ Very Good-

Price: $8

"I would rather excel in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and possessions."

2011-02-26T12:03:00.000-08:00

-Plutarch

A misconception that we encounter on a weekly basis here at the bookstore is this one: if a book is old, it must be expensive. Or rare. Or both.

Week after week, we have to tell customers that that isn't the case. Books have been printed en masse since the 1450s, which makes for 560 years of publishing and millions upon millions of titles. More than 107,000 books were published in the United States alone between 1910–1919. Only a small fraction of those countless books will retain any value after the decades and centuries have gone by. And a book that is old in people terms may not be old in book terms, as Brian is fond of saying.

More often than not, two factors called scarcity and demand affect a book's value more than its age. For example, most people back in the 1800s had schoolbooks--Latin, geography, arithmetic, etc. Many people also saved them, so the used-book market is saturated with them. The demand for them is negligible, since the information is outdated or just simply dated. We've got a small collection of old schoolbooks at Babbitt's, but the resale value of each book is only around eight or ten dollars. (Which is fine by us, but don't expect $200 for them if you're selling some!)

Which brings me to a couple of new arrivals that I like to call Plutarch's Lives.

These leather-bound books, priced individually as a result of two missing volumes, date from 1822 and contain the lives of famous Greek and Roman citizens, as written by the philosopher and historian Plutarch. Between these particular volumes, you'll find bios on Pericles, Theseus, Romulus, Alexander, Julius Caesar and Cicero. The complete set was comprised of eight books, and each volume here contains two of them. Volume I contains books I and II, while volume III contains books V and VI. (If you want a matching set, volumes II and IV will probably have to be ordered specially through the Internet.)

Marbled endpapers.

After being in existence for 189 years, both volumes are slightly banged up as you can see from the photos. Volume I has a large signature crack in the middle and several loose pages around the crack, though all pages are present. The previous owners' bookplate is on both pastedowns. Still, these old books are a handsome addition to any bookshelf.

And fortunately for their buyer (is it you?), these books are also affordable. The two factors we discussed above, scarcity and demand, are aligned against poor Plutarch and his Lives. Plutarch was quite popular up until the 19th and 20th centuries and copies of Lives were heavily printed, which means they're not scarce. As for demand, it has dropped dramatically for Plutarch and other Greek greats within the past century. These factors combined make for an $8 copy of an 1822 book, your choice of volume I or volume III.

If you like the look of leather spines lining a shelf and want to start a collection of your own, remember . . . buying old, attractive books doesn't have to be expensive.

Title: Plutarch's Lives, Translated from The Original Greek; with Notes Critical and Historical and a Life of Plutarch by John Langhorne, D.D. and William Langhorne, A.M.

~~Publisher: Samuel Campbell & Son~~

~~Year: 1822~~

~~Features: Volume I (books I and II), Volume III (books V and VI)~~

~~Condition: Fair / Good~~

~~Price: $8 apiece~~

A madness most discreet.

2011-02-03T19:07:00.000-08:00

Less than two weeks until Valentine's Day! If your beloved is the sort of person who doesn't care for flowers and chocolates one way or another, or likes something supplementary, you should visit Babbitt's Books before the 14th and pick out a gift or two. Here are just a few suggestions:

1. We have several classic poetry books from the late 1800s in stock right now. The cloth bindings come in all colors and are handsomely gilt-stamped, which makes the books an attractive accompaniment to, say, one dozen red roses or a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. Authors range from Thomas Moore to Tennyson to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Perhaps the best thing about these books, next to the fact that they're old and pretty and filled with romantic poems, is their inexpensiveness. For example, we have an 1872 copy of Lord Byron's poems for only $16. You'll find the rest of the books on our counter shelves for $4 to $40.

Not that we're inducing you to marry, but a few years ago a young man came in and bought one of the aforesaid poetry books so he could cut a hollow into the pages and put a ring inside for his girlfriend and (we hope) soon-to-be fiancée.

2. Do you remember that we have totes and tees? The totes come in two designs and each design comes in green on white or white on black. The tees come in two designs as well and are printed on Jerzees heavyweight blend, which gives them a soft feel. (They're nothing like those awful, stiff-feeling, heavyweight Hanes tees.) Tees are men's unisex and range in size from S to XL. The totes are $9 and the tees are $15.

3. We still have plenty of vintage Valentines, too, for those of you who are considering an alternative to store-bought cards.

$1 (1950s-era)

$1 (1940s-era)

$2 (1920s-era)

$7 (mechanical, 1940s-era)

$8 (die-cut, 3D, circa 1890-1910)

$15 (die-cut, 3D, circa 1890-1910)

4. The following items aren't as Valentines-related, but I couldn't resist showcasing them. Brian has been slowly but surely putting out some of the prints we've accumulated over the years. Some are wood engravings, some are steel engravings, and still others are chromolithographs. Prints are a great way to get some new artwork into your home without spending an arm and a leg. The ones you're about to see are 7" by 10", but many that we have are larger.

$10 ("Mammals of Earth, Air, and Water" lithograph, 1902)

$12 (wood engraving by E.H. Dewey, circa 1880. It's a Costwold ram, but I like to think of it as Fat Sheep.)

~~$15 ("Academic Gowns--British Usage", 1902)~~

~~$18 (this is my ultimate favorite--"Octopods and Decapods", 1902)~~

As always, Kathleen and Brian and I (Sarah) will be more than happy to point you in the direction of these featured items when you come in. We also reserve books for 48 hours, so don't be shy about e-mailing us if you want to stake a claim to any of these Valentine's delicacies. Hope to see you soon!

Pulp fiction.

2011-01-13T00:45:00.000-08:00

As you may have gleaned from a visit to the store--maybe a visit to this blog, even--Babbitt's Books has a vast and varied stock which is not limited to antiquarian books. As long as an item is made of paper and is collectible or otherwise in-demand, we're happy to sell it.

Which brings me to our collection of pulp paperbacks.

Named for the cheap, wood-pulp paper they were printed on, pulp paperbacks were printed from the 1940s to the late 1970s, and reached the peak of their popularity in the 1950s. They were cheap and conveniently sized, much like today's mass-market paperbacks, and were the favored medium for mystery, science fiction, and fantasy. Today, they're known as much for their kitschy covers as they are for their content. Strong-jawed detectives, orgiastic young women, space aliens . . . all standard fare for pulp paperbacks. Here are some of our most recent acquisitions in that field:

1.

Because you can't help judging a book by a cover as wonderful as this.

If only!

Claudia is definitely the sort of wife I would put up for sale.

Some lovely artwork on a pocket-sized volume of Edgar Allan Poe.

Here's something you didn't know existed: a mystery by the author of Winnie-the-Pooh.

A truly fantastic cover is the selling point on this copy of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot.

If you're apt to forget that you're a man, the devil in dungarees has a cure. Apparently.

And last but not least, ~~Reformatory Girls~~. 'nuff said.

If you like what you see, we've got hundreds more books like these, the majority of them searchable on our website. All are priced between $2 and $150. (Yes, these cheaply bound novels can get quite collectible.)

Saint Valentine's Day

2011-01-09T21:42:00.000-08:00

Christmas is done, spring seems far-off and the frigid Illinois landscape has grown steadily drearier. Over at Babbitt's, we're preparing a month or two of mid-winter cleaning. Soon we'll be purging our storage site of old and obsolete books and replacing them with slow-selling, in-store titles in order to make room for our wealth of summer and autumn acquisitions. In the bustle of this rearrangement, I stumbled across some vintage treasures. And wouldn't you know it? They dispelled a little bit of the winter gloominess.

Can't make out what you're looking at?

They're die-cut, chromolithograph Valentines, from the late Victorian to early Edwardian era. The ones that we have on display behind our counter are three-dimensional and, as you can see above, quite intricate. Although they're rife with typical Victorian sentimentality--saccharine children, scads of flowers and doves galore--there's still something attractive about them.

They fall under the category of what we booksellers refer to as "ephemera." Ephemera is a broad category that includes any paper object that was meant to be thrown away. Letters, stamps, ticket stubs, magazines, menus, sheet music, posters, postcards, pamphlets, playbills, pin-ups . . . all of these count as ephemera. A fraction of our ephemera collection is for sale in the store, but most of it is online and stored off-site. Type in ephemera into our website's search page and you'll come up with a massive 12,287+ hits.

You won't find any of these Valentines listed online, but you're welcome to come see them in person. If you're forward-thinking, you might even buy one! Most have a small gift inscription on them, but if you'd like to re-gift one, a small paper label or some white-out will do the trick. Prices range from $15 for smaller Valentines and $25 for larger ones. If you think these are out of your price range, we have dozens more vintage Valentines from the 1920s through the 1950s at $1, $2, and $3 apiece.

See? Just a dollar.

As always, we're open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. on Sunday. This is the slowest time of year for us and we'd love to see you. And really, is there anything cosier than browsing in a warm bookstore on a cold winter's day? Don't forget that we also have a four-month-old kitten who is always in need of playmates!

On the 5th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-21T17:30:00.000-08:00

. . . an early copy (1870) of The Professor, authored by Currer Bell.

Currer who, you say?

Up until recently (say the last century or so), published women were scarce. When women did manage to get published under their Christian names they were expected, according to Charlotte Brontë, to adopt a "mode of writing and thinking . . . called 'feminine' ." Deviating from the expected norm might cause "authoresses . . . to be looked on with prejudice." Brontë notes that she and her sisters Anne and Emily "had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise." Women who wanted to tackle heavier, riskier material, or women who just wanted to write honestly, were usually out of luck. To circumvent this problem, many Victorian women, like George Eliot and George Sand, or Michael Field (an aunt and niece combo!) resorted to writing under male pseudonyms.

So the name that you will find on the first edition of Wuthering Heights is not Emily Brontë, but Ellis Bell. Similarly, the name on the first edition of Jane Eyre will be Currer Bell, not Charlotte Brontë. Anne Brontë, the third sister, wrote her two bestselling novels under the nom de plume Acton Bell.

The Professor was written before Vilette and Jane Eyre, but not published until after Brontë's death in 1855. Villete is basically a reworking of The Professor, with a woman's point of view. Still, it would be something to give this book to an enthusiastic Brontë fan this Christmas, to watch the initial puzzlement, then the delight as you revealed the true nature of this treasure. Maybe pairing a $4 copy of Jane Eyre with The Professor would be a nice hint.

Title: The Professor. To Which Are [sic] Added the Poems of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

Publisher: Smith, Elder & Co.

Year: 1870

Features: Early Edition

Condition: Good+ (the leather spine and corners are rubbed, plus a hungry insect chewed a couple of the inside corners)

Price: $60

Title: Jane Eyre

~~Publisher: Nelson Doubleday, Inc.~~

~~Year: 1950~~

~~Features: Hardcover~~

~~Condition: Very Good~~

~~Price: $4~~

On the 6th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-21T12:07:00.000-08:00

. . . two nice James Merrill collections, one of poetry, one of novels and plays.

Merrill's poetry is split into two different bodies: the first, emotional lyric poetry; the second, occult-themed verse, as explored in The Changing Light at Sandover. The blurb on the dust jacket flap of Collected Poems calls him "one of the supreme love poets of the twentieth century."

"Orchards, we linger here because
Women we love stand propped in your green prisons,
Obedient to such justly bending laws
Each one longs to take root,
Lives to confess whatever seasons's
Pride of blossom or endeavor's fruit
May to her rustling boughs have risen."

--"Upon a Second Marriage"

Collection Poems spans his earliest poems to A Scattering of Salts, the last volume of poetry published before his death from complications of AIDS in 1995. Collected Novels and Plays is just what it says.

Both books will make for a handsome addition to your friend's or loved one's poetry library. Collected Poems is bound in black cloth, with lilac endpapers and a silk, lilac bookmark ribbon. Collected Novels and Plays is bound in plum-colored cloth, with yellow endpapers and a yellow bookmark ribbon. Both come with dust jackets.

If you're running out of Christmas ideas, many of the featured books on this blog are still available. (If you scroll back through previous entries, ones that are sold have been crossed out.) Many of the featured books on this blog are inexpensive. And all, of course, are fabulous. You can contact us at sales@babbittsbooks.com if you're interested in a specific title, or drop by the store from 10 to 6 p.m. up until Friday, Christmas Eve, when we're open until 3 o'clock only. Kathleen and Sarah (me) are armed with suggestions for gifts, so you have nothing to lose. Come on by!

Title: Collected Poems

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Year: 2001

Features: First Edition

Condition: Very Good+ / Very Good dust jacket

Price: $16

Title: Collected Novels and Plays

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Year: 2002

Features: First Edition

Condition: Very Good+ / Very Good dust jacket

Price: $6

On the 7th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-18T18:51:00.000-08:00

. . . a nice collection of Matisse books, which is the closest we can come to giving you an actual Matisse painting.

We thought the art fans out there might be feeling under-appreciated, and since we have such good (affordable!) Matisse books, he's the perfect springboard to talk about the spectacular art section at Babbitt's Books.

The drawback of buying art books new--especially ones that are coffee-table books--is that they get expensive fast. It's hard to find a new one for under $50, maybe $35 if you're lucky. At Babbitt's, though, big art books range in price from $6 to $15 (unless they're scarce or collectible, of course, but then we price 'em on the low end of used copies available through Amazon to ensure that you're always getting the best possible bargain).

So it goes with the first book on this post. This 167-page book, filled to brimming with dozens of tipped-in plates, is only $8. What's a tipped-in plate, you ask?

A tipped-in plate is an illustration that is loosely glued to the page along only one edge, so that it can be easily removed if one wants to frame it.

The book is authored by Gaston Diehl and was published by Editions Pierre Tisne in 1954. The text is in French, but even if you're not a Francophile, the beautifully reproduced illustrations alone make this book a worthy purchase.

If you'd like a good biography of Matisse, we have both volumes of Hilary Spurling's A Life of Henri Matisse (2005), each in very good condition with dust jackets, each for $8. The first volume is called The Unknown Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908, the second Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954.

If you'd rather delve into Matisse's artistic philosophy, Jack D. Flam's Matisse on Art is perfect. Chapters include "Notes of a Painter, 1908", "Interview with Jacques Guenne, 1925", and "On Modernism and Tradition, 1935". Good stuff.

Hurry, though, because there's only a week left before Christmas!

Title: Matisse

~~Publisher: Editions Pierre Tisne~~

~~Year: 1954~~

~~Features: Tipped-in plates~~

~~Condition: Very Good-~~

~~Price: $8~~

Title: The Unknown Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Year: 2005

Condition: Very Good+ / Very Good+ dust jacket

Price: $8

Title: Matisse The Master: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Year: 2005

Condition: Very Good+ / Very Good+ dust jacket

Price: $8

Title: Matisse on Art

Publisher: E.P. Dutton

Year: 1978

Condition: Very Good-

Price: $4

On the 8th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-18T16:58:00.000-08:00

. . . the complete works of William Shakespeare. Also, the complete works of William Shakespeare. Not to be outdone by the complete works of William Shakespeare.

"Knowing that I loved my books, he furnished me,
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom."

-William Shakespeare, The Tempest.

Babbitt's Books can furnish you and yours with at least four different sets of William Shakespeare's complete works.

Here we have a $25 set in its original slipcase. The books are all in very good condition, and the only defect seems to be the previous owner's tiny, tiny ink stamp on the title pages of each book. This set would be a handsome addition to anyone's library. Case in point? We have it behind the counter with all of the fine bindings.

Next up is a 1958 set from The Heritage Press. There are three lovely, thick volumes with illustrations from Edward Ardizzone. Each volume is priced at $6 apiece, but we'll let you have the entire set for $15. You must act fast, though!

If you think your Shakespeare fan would prefer a set that takes up less space, this jacketed, '50s-era set will do nicely. It's just $8, too, which is roughly what you'll pay for a measly paperback of one Shakespeare play at one of the big-box bookstores.

My personal favorite is The Norton Shakespeare. I have a copy of my own at home, which I used for Shakespeare courses at the University of Illinois. I like The Norton Shakespeare for its superior annotations. The right-hand margins are filled with synonyms for the archaic words, while more detailed information is confined to footnotes. The margin arrangement is good because you're not constantly glancing off the page when you read, as you'll do with an edition where the notes are on the opposite page. Each play or group of sonnets is prefaced by a six- or seven-page introduction to the text, which presents major themes and historical backgrounds.

The Norton Shakespeare also includes highlighted segments of text which represent material that was excised from certain editions / performances of Shakespeare's plays, either due to edits by Shakespeare himself (though bear in mind that his plays only came into print after he died) or due to corrupted transcription. If you find that last sentence confusing, you can read about the phenomenon of the bad quarto here. Like the Nelson Doubleday set, this book is only $8. It comes with a CD, which (apparently) contains a reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream and two sonnets.

And hey--if you can bear to hold these books back until tickets for the 2011 Illinois Shakespeare Fest tickets go on sale, your gift will pack twice the punch!

Title: The London Shakespeare (edited by John Munro)

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Year: 1957

Features: Slipcase

Condition: Very Good

Price: $25

Title: The Heritage Shakespeare: ~~The Comedies~~ / The Tragedies / The Histories (edited by Peter Alexander)

Publisher: The Heritage Press

Year: 1958

Condition: Very Good

Price: $6 apiece

~~Title: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (edited by W.G. Clark and W. Aldis Wright)~~

~~Publisher: Nelson Doubleday, Inc.~~

~~Year: circa 1950s~~

~~Features: Book club edition~~

~~Condition: Very Good / Very Good dust jacket~~

~~Price: $8~~

~~Title: The Norton Shakespeare based on the Oxford Edition (edited by Stephen Greenblatt)~~

~~Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company~~

~~Year: 1997~~

~~Features: First printing~~

~~Condition: Very Good / Very Good dust jacket~~

~~Price: $8~~

On the 9th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-18T13:35:00.000-08:00

. . . a signed, first edition of David Herbert Donald's famous biography of Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln.

Donald was an eminent Lincoln scholar, and taught at several universities throughout his long career, including Oxford, Harvard and Princeton. He was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize twice, so it will not surprise you to learn that Eric Foner (president of the American Historical Association!) called Lincoln the best biography of Abraham Lincoln in existence.

Our particular copy is signed on the title page by Donald. Both book and dust jacket are in as-new condition.

Other Lincoln books in our possession that will make good Christmas gifts are Mark E. Neely, Jr.'s The Insanity File: The Case of Mary Todd Lincoln (1993) and Allen C. Guelzo's Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2004). Some scholars speculate that Mary Todd Lincoln, who was in and out of sanitariums her entire life, suffered from bipolar disorder. Three of her four sons died during her lifetime, which may have contributed to her depression and erratic behavior.

These three books, though, are only a small sample of our Lincoln collection. We have dozens of books in stock right now that discuss the 16th President's life and various aspects of his administration.

Come on by! Time is running out. (At least for Christmas shopping.)

Title: Lincoln

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Year: 1995

Features: Signed, first edition

Condition: Very Good+ / Very Good dust jacket

Price: $40

Title: The Insanity File: The Case of Mary Todd Lincoln

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press

Year: 1993

Condition: Very Good / Very Good- dust jacket

Price: $4

Title: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Year: 2004

Features: Signed, second printing

Condition: Very Good+ / Very Good+ dust jacket

Price: $18

On the 10th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-16T12:13:00.000-08:00

. . . Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by humorist David Sedaris.

This blog entry would have come to you a day earlier, but when I took the books home for the night, I ended up reading 152 pages of Me Talk Pretty One Day in a single sitting instead of blogging! That's how good this book is. It's one of the quickest, smoothest, funniest reads out there.

All of the essays describe real events in Sedaris's life. The author begins the book with an essay about the semester he was forced to take a speech-therapy class with other lisping young boys. At the end of a class, Sedaris is no closer to pronouncing his s's correctly, and has decided that "a more appropriate marker [for the class's door] would have read FUTURE HOMOSEXUALS OF AMERICA." From this essay, he moves onto his short-lived guitar lessons with a real-life midget ("Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities"), an embarrassing foray into the coexistent world of art and crystal meth-amphetamine ("Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist") and his sister Amy's fondness for dress-up, imitation, and a special fat suit ("A Shiner Like a Diamond").

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Sedaris's follow-up book, is just as good, and contains essays in the same vein. This time we get to hear about Sedaris's triumph during a childhood game of strip poker ("Full House"), the birth of his vulgar younger brother's first child ("Baby Einstein"), and the peculiar manner in which the Danish people celebrate Christmas ("Six to Eight Black Men").

Sedaris has visited Bloomington-Normal and Champaign-Urbana several times (I met him in 2007!) and makes regular appearances in the area. He will be in Waukegan, Illinois on April 6th, 2010 at the Genesee Theatre, and whoever you decide to give these books to can get them signed if they attend.

Title: Me Talk Pretty One Day

~~Publisher: Little, Brown & Company~~

~~Year: 2001~~

~~Features: First edition, fifth printing~~

~~Condition: Very Good+ / Very Good+ dust jacket~~

~~Price: $5~~

Title: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

Year: 2004

Condition: Very Good+ / Very Good+ dust jacket

Price: $5

On the 11th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-14T13:51:00.000-08:00

. . . Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs.

This semi-autobiographical novel is divided into chapters which, according to Burroughs himself, are only loosely related and therefore can be read in any order. Burroughs is the epitome of the Beat Generation, so you will encounter a lot of drug use (heroin, morphine, other opiates), sexual excess, and so-called obscene language within the book's pages. The book was banned in Boston in 1962 after some people complained that it violated obscenity statutes. It has been somewhat vindicated, though, as Time magazine rated it one of the "100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005".

Interesting facts about William Burroughs:

1. He was openly gay, but had a common-law wife named Joan Vollmer, whom he accidentally shot to death during a drunken game of William Tell in 1951. He was deeply affected by her death, and cited it as the reason he became a writer.

2. He was good friends with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

3. He used his $3,000 advance from Naked Lunch to buy drugs.

4. He dabbled in Scientology and chaos magic, among other religions.

These facts only scratch the surface of the man, the character, the caricature who was William Burroughs.

Burroughs is most popular, at least in our experience, with young men. It's easy to jump to conclusions about this marked preference, but more likely than not, they just want a vicarious taste of the fast-paced, mixed-up life that Burroughs led. Burroughs is also popular with folks who like Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, so if your young man (or woman) likes these authors, there's a good chance he (she) will enjoy Naked Lunch. Don't be scared off by this book's popularity with the 18-25 crowd, either, because it also has an audience with the baby-boomer generation. All your gift recipient really needs is an open mind and an appreciation for good literature.

Title: Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

~~Publisher: Grove Press~~

~~Year: 2001~~

~~Features: First edition, first printing (of this edition)~~

~~Condition: Very Good+ / Very Good+ dust jacket~~

~~Price: $15~~

Title: Naked Lunch

Publisher: Grove Press, Inc.

Year: 1959

Features: First edition, fourth printing

Condition: Very Good- / Very Good- dust jacket

Price: $25

You might also like these related books by Burroughs:

Title: The Soft Machine

Publisher: Grove Press, Inc.

Year: 1967

Features: First paperback printing

Condition: Very Good-

Price: $8

Title: Junkie

Publisher: Ace Books, Inc.

Year: 1953

Features: Paperback

Condition: Very Good-

Price: $20

On the 12th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-12T19:40:00.000-08:00

. . . a $15 first edition and $25 signed first edition of Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project. Both books are in near-fine condition, with dust jackets in similar shape.

Guest-blogger Alex Smith tells us more below.

Eye-catching composition not intentional.

In 2000 I got a fantastic Christmas present from my longtime friend and onetime Babbitt's employee, Lynn Bulgrin. The Question of Bruno introduced me to the Chicago-by-way-of-Sarajevo author, Aleksandar Hemon. He has that sly and world-weary style that you find in many Slavic writers. His works are semi-autobiographical and they fictionalize his early years in America and especially Chicago. Those of you who are familiar with the city will find his stories vividly illuminated with familiar Chicago landmarks and neighborhoods. Hemon sees his adoptive city with the fresh eyes of a stranger. Oh, and his books are laugh-out-loud funny. Beware reading him in a public place!

Anyone who is reading this blog has likely spoken English longer than Hemon. Like Nabokov and Conrad he learned (and demonstrably mastered) English as an adult. He published his first story on English in 1995.

The Lazarus Project is a few shades darker than some of his previous books, dealing as it does with holocaust and institutionalized anti-Semitism. It has some tense and thrilling moments too, showing another side to an author who previously was happy to ramble, albeit in the most entertaining way.

Illustrated with photographs taken by a friend of the author, this signed (signed!) copy is a steal at $25. You'd better buy it quick before I change my mind and buy it for myself!

Title: The Lazarus Project
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Year: 2008
Features: Signed, First edition
Condition: Very Good+
Price: $25

Title: The Lazarus Project
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Year: 2008
Features: First edition
Condition: Very Good+
Price: $15

On the 13th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-11T13:21:00.000-08:00

. . . four of Jane Austen's minor works, published in London in 1984 by the Athlone Press.

If you have an Austen enthusiast on your list, chances are that he or she has already blazed through her big six: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. It may seem like there's nothing Austen left to read after all of those novels, but luckily that's not the case. Your Austen enthusiast might be interested in learning how Austen came to create such an impressive body of work. In the case, Volume the First is an ideal choice. It contains fourteen vignettes of Austen's ("literary skits and family jokes", according to the dust jacket flap) written between 1787 and 1793, when Austen was eleven to seventeen, respectively. This collection of juvenilia will not disappoint.

Pardon the stock picture; I forgot my camera today!

If your Austen fan wants to know how the author pieced together her great works, we also have The Manuscript Chapters of Persuasion, which are comprised of chapters 10 and 11 of the second volume as Austen first laid them out, as well as a facsimile of the chapters and Dr. R.W. Chapman's notes on them.

"No, no, no! This is all wrong!"

However, if you'd prefer to buy something more sustained, Lady Susan might be the better choice. This short, epistolary novel was probably written around 1794, a good fifteen years before Austen's first novel, Sense and Sensibility, was published. It was published posthumously in 1871 by Austen's nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh. Lady Susan could be read as an early feminist tract, since the title character is a beautiful, intelligent, clever widow who courts suitors significantly younger than herself while simultaneously carrying on an affair with a married man! Interestingly, Lady Susan does not get her comeuppance in the end for her bad behavior, an unusual deviation from literary norms at the time . . . and perhaps the reason that Austen never submitted the novella for publication during her lifetime.

The Watsons, an unfinished novel, is another option. Austen completed only five chapters of this book before abandoning it in 1804 or 1805. Mr. Watson, the patriarch in the novel, is gravely ill at the beginning of the novel, and Austen confided to her sister Cassandra that he would die before its conclusion. Austen's own father died in January of 1805, which is the reason, scholars speculate, that she left off writing the book. Our particular copy of The Watsons contains the original text, as well as notes on the manuscript.

Other alternatives for your Austen fan include The Jane Austen Book Club (2004) by Karen Joy Fowler, which we have in a hardcover, and Pemberley: Or Pride and Prejudice Continued (1993) by Emma Tennant. Since Jane Austen's works have been in the public domain for decades now, anyone with drive enough to compose a novel can write a Jane Austen spin-off. This specific spin-off, though, has a New York Times Book Review quote on the front cover that says "The text virtually breathes Jane Austen," which lends it a bit more credibility than the other imitations.

Not an audio book--just a stock photo that shows the cover that our copy has.

Make your visit soon, though, because Jane Austen's immense popularity guarantees that these treasures will not be around for very long!

~~Title:~~ ~~Volume the First~~

~~Publisher: The Athlone Press~~

~~Year: 1984~~

~~Condition: Very Good-~~

~~Price: $12~~

~~Title:~~ ~~The Manuscript Chapters of~~ ~~Persuasion~~

~~Publisher: The Athlone Press~~

~~Year: 1985~~

~~Condition: Very Good-~~

~~Price: $12~~

Title: Lady Susan

~~Publisher: The Athlone Press~~

~~Year: 1984~~

~~Condition: Very Good-~~

~~Price: $12~~

Title: The Watsons: A Fragment

~~Publisher: The Athlone Press~~

~~Year: 1984~~

~~Condition: Very Good-~~

~~Price: $12~~

Title: The Jane Austen Book Club

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Year: 2004

Features: Dust jacket

Condition: Very Good

Price: $4

~~Title: Pemberley: Or Pride and Prejudice Continued~~

~~Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin~~

~~Year: 2006~~

~~Features: Softcover~~

~~Condition: Very Good~~

~~Price: $4~~

All of The Athlone Press books are complete with very-good condition dust jackets. Each book has the previous owner's bookplate on the front pastedowns (i.e. the inside front cover), but when the dust jackets are on you can't see them. The Watsons has minor ink underlining to a few pages.

On the 14th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-09T19:19:00.000-08:00

. . . three Eleanor-Roosevelt-centric books in honor of Human Rights Day (December 10th) and four Emily Dickinson books in honor of Emily Dickinson's birthday (December 10th).

Human Rights Day honors the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which may be read here) by the UN General Assembly in 1948. Though not a treaty, the declaration has since been adopted into most of the world's nations' constitutions. Eleanor Roosevelt figures into the equation because she served as the first chairwoman of the Commission for Human Rights (CHR), helped draft the declaration, and ardently supported it.

First up in our small Eleanor Roosevelt library is The Extraordinary Mrs. R: A Friend Remembers Eleanor Roosevelt (1999) by William Turner Levy. Levy talks about international and political events that involve Roosevelt, but as her personal friend, also writes about never-before-read anecdotes.

Second up is volume II of Blanche Wiesen Cook's 1999 biography, Eleanor Roosevelt: 1933-1938. The first volume of this biography caused a ruckus when it was first released because of Cook's claim that Roosevelt had a romantic affair with reporter Lorena Hickok. Though we have volume II only, both volumes were published separately and can be read separately.

Last up is Eleanor Roosevelt's own take on her life, simply titled This is My Story (1937). This is an older, '50s-era edition and also an ex-library discard, but that shouldn't discourage you from checking it out, no pun intended. The pages are still nice and clean, and the content is just as good as ever.

All of these books are superb candidates if you want to learn about the smart, dynamic figure that was Eleanor Roosevelt.

If you'd prefer to celebrate Dickinson's birthday instead on December 10th, that's okay with us, too. We have at least four books of her poetry, all in very good condition. Three are her collected poems and one is Final Harvest, edited by Thomas H. Johnson. They range in price from $3 to $5. Famed recluse Dickinson was almost the opposite of the outgoing, politically active Roosevelt, but you'll find her quiet observations and social commentary no less wise than Roosevelt's.

Title: The Extraordinary Mrs. R: A Friend Remembers Eleanor Roosevelt

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Year: 1999

Condition: Very Good

Price: $4

Title: Eleanor Roosevelt: 1933-1938

Publisher: Viking

Year: 1999

Condition: Very Good

Price: $5

Title: This Is My Story

Publisher: Harper & Brothers, Publishers

Year: 1937

Condition: G+ (Ex-library, no dust jacket)

Price: $8

Title: The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson

Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics

Year: 2003

Condition: Very Good

Price: $3

Title: Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson

Publisher: The Modern Library

Year: circa 1960s

Condition: Very Good-

Price: $4

Title: Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson

Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

Year: circa 1990s

Condition: Very Good-

Price: $4

Title: Collected Poems

Publisher: Courage Books

Year: 1991

Condition: Very Good

Price: $5

On the 15th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-09T09:30:00.000-08:00

. . . a signed first edition of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster.

This book is Krakauer's most famous next to Into The Wild, and tells the story of his perilous ascent up Mount Everest. Krakauer, an amateur mountaineer, was originally assigned by Outside magazine to climb only to base camp, where he would report on the commercialization of Mount Everest. However, the assignment reawakened his interest in mountain-climbing, and he asked for an additional year to train so that he could follow the expedition all the way to the top.

He eventually makes it to the summit, but not without suffering hypoxia and severe sleep-deprivation. The grueling climb quickly becomes the least of his problems as a sudden, violent storm sweeps across the mountain. When the clouds lift the following morning, five climbers in his party are dead.

"Krakauer examines what it is about Everest," reads the dust jacket blurb, "that has compelled so many people--including himself--to throw caution to the wind, ignore the concerns of loved ones, and willingly subject themselves to such risk, hardship, and expense."

If you'd just like to read the story, never mind the Krakauer autograph, we have two additional copies to suit your needs. One is a hardcover, jacketed first edition for $5 and the second is a paperback for $4. Both are in very good condition.

So if you have a rugged, outdoorsy friend or family member to buy for, keep this book in mind. Travel writing and outdoors writing doesn't get any better than Jon Krakauer.

Title: Into Thin Air

Publisher: Villard

Year: 1997

Features: Signed, First Edition

Condition: Near Fine / Very Good dust jacket

Price: $80

On the 16th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-07T17:38:00.000-08:00

. . . brand-new Babbitt's Books T-shirts and totes by nonaffiliated clothing. And a magnificent sale!

First up are T-shirts, which come in two designs. Design A features a (Brian-esque) bookseller scratching his head over a stack of books, and is red with grey-silver lettering.

Design B features a (Sarah-esque) bookseller in a stall offering a book to a customer, and is navy blue with grey-silver lettering.

Both T-shirts say babbittsbooks.com across the shoulders. The tees are printed on Jerzees heavyweight blend (50% cotton and 50% polyester) and have the soft feel of a well-loved T-shirt--not the stiff, coarse feel of a Hanes heavyweight tee. They are priced at $15 apiece and range in size from a men's small to a men's XL.

The totes are 12" by 12" and also come in two designs, which are in the style of old bookplates. You have your choice of several colors, as both the designs featured above come on black totes with white ink. The "Antiquarius" owl comes in green ink as well as maroon. Like the T-shirts, the totes read babbittsbooks.com across the backs. They're yours for $9 apiece.

That isn't all, though. If you participate in our online sale and purchase $75 of merchandise, you will automatically get a free tote of your choice. Bear in mind, though, that this offer is only while supplies last. As for the online sale, here are the details:

Use the code "Holiday 2010" and you receive 25% of all orders over $25. This offer is good for all books, especially rare and expensive ones. (Had your eye on a $1000 book? It's yours for $750 with this sale.) Better still, media-mail shipping is free. Just e-mail us at sales@babbittsbooks.com with your selections and mention the code. You can buy your T-shirts in person or through e-mail. We'll help you work out payment details.

This sale is only good until midnight on Sunday, December 12th, so be sure to get your orders in as soon as possible.

On the 17th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-06T16:02:00.000-08:00

. . . a 1927 Art Deco copy of Oscar Wilde's play, Salome.

Salome was originally written in 1893, three years after Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was published. Wilde was fluent in French and the play was originally released en français. His lover, Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie"), was given the honor of translating the play into English, but his French was so poor that Wilde ended up scrapping most of Bosie's translations and doing his own, which led to animosity between the two. The English translation was published in 1894, and included beautiful illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. Our copy, sadly, is not the Beardsley version, but does have lavish illustrations by John Vassos, which are none the less beautiful as you can see for yourself.

Salome is the one-act story of Salome, stepdaughter of Herod Antipas (the very same Herod that sent Jesus to his death in the Bible), who, in exchange for performing the exotic striptease Dance of the Seven Veils, asks for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. The play premiered in Paris in 1896, but its author was not there to see it.

In 1895, Wilde went on trial for sodomy and was imprisoned in mid-1895. The playwright's two-year stay in jail did considerable damage to his health and he never convalesced. When he was released he set about penning a long prose poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, inspired by events during his incarceration. Since Wilde's name was unpleasantly infamous following the charges of homosexuality, the poem was initially published under the pseudonym C.3.3., Wilde's cell-block number. The author died destitute on November 30th, 1900.

Babbitt's has at least one copy of this poem. The copy featured here is undated, but the Art Nouveau peacock design on the front board puts it around 1910. The exterior is slightly faded. However, the interior is as bright and crisp as the day it came off the press.

If you'd rather just read Salome before committing to a collectible copy, we also have a $3 copy published by Three Sirens Press. This copy is bound together with (a marked-up) Dorian Gray, but Salome is clean--and has the signature Aubrey Beardsley illustrations.

Wilde might have been too radical for the 19th century, but his continued popularity proves that the 21st century does not think him too avant-garde; here at Babbitt's Books, we can barely keep a copy of Dorian Gray in stock. This stanza from The Ballad of Reading Gaol, chiseled onto Wilde's tomb, confirms it.

And alien tears will fill for him,
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.

Title: Salome: A Tragedy in One Act

~~Publisher: E.P. Dutton & Company~~

~~Year: 1927~~

~~Features: Illustrated by John Vassos~~

~~Condition: Very Good-~~

~~Price: $18~~

Title: The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Publisher: John W. Luce & Company
Year: circa 1910
Condition: Good+
Price: $25

Title: The Picture of Dorian Gray / Salome
Publisher: Three Sirens Press
Year: 1931
Features: Illustrated by Lui Trugo and Aubrey Beardsley
Condition: Good+
Price: $3

On the 18th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-05T16:27:00.001-08:00

. . . a $50 signed first edition of Gregory Maguire's Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister.

Maguire is best known for his 1995 book Wicked, a revisionist telling of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Most of you probably know that it has also been made into a popular musical by the same title. Wicked is told, of course, not from Dorothy Gale's point of view, but from the view of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999) was Maguire's next novel and, in a similar vein, relates the Cinderella fairy tale not from Cinderella's point of view, but from the views of her two maligned stepsisters, plain-faced Iris and mentally handicapped Ruth. Très original!

Our particular copy of this book is in very good condition, with glossy, illustrated boards (not pictured) and a pristine interior. You might notice that is has been inscribed to a previous owner, as many used books often are. Babbitt's Books has devised a solution to this in the form of a bookplate, which we hope will go on sale soon. Written by Kathleen Kirk, the text of the bookplate is as follows:

Whose book this is, I think I know.
I don’t mind the inscription, though,
To someone else, for now it’s mine;
A book in the hand’s worth two in the snow.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

If you'd like to give someone the gift of Gregory Maguire this Christmas but don't think $50 is in your price range, we also have a first edition, hardcover copy of Son of a Witch (the follow-up to Wicked) for only $6 and a paperback copy of Confessions for $4.

Oh, what a world! What a world! That such good books are available so inexpensively.

Title: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

Publisher: ReganBooks

Year: 1990

Features: Signed, First Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good+

Price: $50

Title: Son of a Witch

Publisher: ReganBooks

Year: 2005

Features: First Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good+

Price: $6

On the 19th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-04T19:32:00.000-08:00

. . . a nice collection of books by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

First up is the restored edition of Ariel, Plath's most famous collection of poetry. The first edition of Ariel, published two years after Plath's suicide in 1965, was edited and arranged by her estranged husband Ted Hughes, who diverged quite a bit from her original manuscript, adding in more than a dozen new poems and excising a dozen others entirely. This edition, which has a foreword by the couple's only surviving child, Frieda Hughes (Nicholas Farrar Hughes committed suicide in early 2009), preserves Plath's own arrangement. It also includes a facsimile of her manuscript, with both hand-written and typewritten poems. Still, Plath and Hughes had the habit of reading each other's work, and some critics argue that Plath would have approved of Hughes's edits. Did Hughes do his wife a favor by accentuating her better, bolder poems and cutting the weaker ones? Frieda Hughes says it best in her foreword.

"When she died leaving Ariel as her last book, she was caught in the act of revenge, in a voice that had been honed and practiced for years, latterly with the help of my father. Though he became a victim of it, ultimately he did not shy away from its mastery.
This new, restored edition is my mother in that moment. It is the basis for the published Ariel, edited by my father. Each version has its own significance though the two histories are one."

Next up is the first American edition of Hughes's Wolfwatching, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1991. It is one of the last books of poetry published before Hughes's death from cancer in 1998, and explores man's interaction with the natural world.

Third in line is a lovely-looking collection titled Selected Poems: 1957-1994. This anthology draws from four decades of Hughes's work, and is as close as you will get to a definitive collection of the former Poet Laureate's work, as it was personally compiled by him when it was originally published in 1995. This copy you see here is a clean, new-looking reprint from 2002.

Lastly, for those who want to read more about Plath's and Hughes's acrimonious marriage, we have a hardcover, jacketed copy of Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband: Hughes and Plath--A Marriage. You get to learn what annoyed Plath about Hughes (his "scratching, nose-picking, with unwashed, unkempt hair & dogmatic grumpiness--all unnecessary & unpleasant" [99] is apparently part of it) and vice versa (Plath's anxiety, sexual jealousy, sentimentality, etc.). Perhaps each of them had a point. Hughes ultimately left Plath for poet Assia Wevill, whom he also cheated on, but Plath's bipolar depression must have been hard to live with.

In addition to the four books pictured above, we also have a hardcover, jacketed copy of Hughes's Birthday Letters, a book of poems about his late wife that brought wide acclaim shortly after his death--just as, ironically, the posthumously-published Ariel brought Plath her biggest fame. Love them or hate them, these two late poets are forever destined to be linked.

Title: Ariel: The Restored Edition

Publisher: HarperCollins

Year: 2004

Features: First Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good+

Price: $20

Title: Wolfwatching

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Year: 1991

Features: First Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good

Price: $25

Title: Selected Poems: 1957-1994

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Year: 2002

Features: First FSG Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good+

Price: $10

Title: Her Husband: Hughes and Plath--A Marriage

Publisher: Viking

Year: 2003

Features: First Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good

Price: $4

On the 20th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-03T20:40:00.000-08:00

. . . Christmas books. Lots and lots of Christmas books.

At the moment, we have two large wooden bins in the store to fit all of your Christmas needs. There are picture books for the kids, old sheet music for decorating, antique cards, and small, vintage volumes of lesser-known holiday stories (like Washington Irving's Old Christmas). There are also two lonely copies of Happening Hanukkah, a children's book of crafts and games. (Alas! I wanted to do at least one Hanukkah entry, but this is all that we have in stock. Sorry to disappoint, Jewish readers.)

Among the items you can find in these festive bins are:

1. Two hardcover, jacketed first printings of Charles M. Schulz's A Charlie Brown Christmas.

2. A somewhat psychedelic-looking, Art Deco copy of Is There A Santa Claus? Some of you may not know the story behind this item, so here's a brief summary. In 1897, a little girl wrote an editorial to The Sun, a now-defunct New York newspaper, asking whether Santa Claus existed, as some of her friends had recently placed doubt in her mind. Editor Francis Pharcellus Church (a former Civil War war correspondent!) penned a touching and now famous response, assuring her that her "little friends" were wrong. Without faith in Santa Claus, he said, "[t]here would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence."

3. A hardcover, jacketed copy of A Visit from St. Nicholas (Twas The Night Before Christmas) by Clement M. Moore. Contains Moore's original text and accompanying annotations, a history of the poem, a reproduction of a copy hand-written by Moore, and a certificate of authenticity from the publisher.

4. Vintage Christmas cards, most from 1910-1930, all priced at $1 or $2. They're great re-purposed as new Christmas cards or used as accents for a scrapbook. Here are a couple (one with its original envelope).

Please keep in mind, too, that this is only a small sample of what we have right now. There are several copies of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, three $4 copies of A Christmas Carol, books of Christmas carols, and vintage Christmas postcards galore (located in a box beneath one of the wooden bins).

Come in and stock up for the season!

Title: A Charlie Brown Christmas (adapted from a Bill Melendez production)

Publisher: The World Publishing Company

Year: 1965

Features: First Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good-

Price: $25

Title: Is There A Santa Claus: A Great Editor's Answer to A Little Girl's Question

Publisher: Buckbee-Brehm Co.

Year: 1927

Features: Hardcover

Condition: Good+

Price: $15

Title: A Visit from St. Nicholas (Twas The Night Before Christmas)

Publisher: International Resourcing Services, Inc.

Year: 1997

Features: Hardcover, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good

Price: $4

On the 21st day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-01T21:37:00.000-08:00

. . . a signed, first edition of William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Whether they're buying from us or selling to us, a common mistake that people make is assuming that signed books are automatically valuable / expensive. As in, worth $200 or $300 . . . or more. Of course, as evidenced by yesterday's $35 signed Sandburg, that isn't always the case. A signed book's value is based on a number of factors, including supply, demand, condition, edition, and scarcity. If you want J.D. Salinger's signature, be prepared to shell out at least $7,500; he rarely signed anything, unless it was to a friend. By the same token, you can buy a book signed by Toni Morrison for under $25, as she signs liberally.

Tonight's book is a good buy all around. It's a first edition in the original dust jacket, which means that you get the book as it first appeared. A book doesn't get earlier or more authentic than a first edition. The condition is also agreeable. There's a smudge or two to the book itself, a couple small tears to the dust jacket, but no extremely compromising defects. Plus the book is signed on the blank front endpaper by William Styron. No flourishes, no frills. Just a plain signature and lots of empty space for you to add a gift inscription, if you're so inclined.

The book is a fictional account of the life of Nat Turner, and was controversial at the time of publication for its sexually explicit content, as well as the fact that it was written from a black man's perspective by a white author. Did I happen to mention that this book won a Pulitzer Prize? That it's William Styron's best-known book? That it's only $50?

If you're looking for something a little cheaper ($8), we also have a first edition of William Styron's Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, an account of the author's plunge into severe depression in the mid-1980s. "Our perhaps understandable modern need to dull the sawtooth edges of so many of the afflictions we are heir to," he writes, "has led us to banish the harsh old-fashioned words: madhouse, asylum, insanity, melancholia, lunatic, madness. But never let it be doubted that depression, in its extreme form, is madness" (46-47). The book certainly deals with difficult subject matter, but it is also comforting to have someone put precise words, gorgeous words, to this often stigmatized disorder.

Styron may not write the most happy-go-lucky books, but there's a reason he won a Pulitzer Prize: he's damn good. So if you're looking for a nice, modern signed first at an affordable price, look no further than Babbitt's Books.

Title: The Confessions of Nat Turner

Publisher: Random House

Year: 1967

Features: Signed, First Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good-

Price: $50

Title: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

Publisher: Random House

Year: 1990

Features: First Edition, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good

Price: $8

On the 22nd day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-12-01T00:07:00.000-08:00

. . . a $35 copy of Always The Young Strangers, signed by Carl Sandburg.

Those of you not familiar with Sandburg's oeuvre will know him vaguely as a Chicago poet, but his prolificacy extended beyond verse. He won one of his three Pulitizer Prizes for a multi-volume biography of fellow Illinois resident, Abraham Lincoln. The American fairy tales that he dreamed up for his three young daughters were collected in a 1922 anthology called Rootabaga Stories. Folk music fascinated him, and long before he ever published any poetry, he taught himself guitar and played popular folk songs to an eager audience.

Always The Young Strangers is the account of his life, from his childhood in Galesburg, Illinois to his enlistment in the 6th Illinois Infantry during the Spanish-American War. (He never saw combat, in case you are curious.) Sandburg has signed the book on the half-title page with a felt-tipped pen and dated the signature 1953. The name that appears above the date is the previous owner's. Her bookplate is on the verso of the front blank flyleaf, but it can probably be removed with care. There's even a tiny smudge near the 'g' in Sandburg's last name; perhaps a smudge from the great author himself?

The endpapers of the book are illustrated with photographs of a young Sandburg and his parents. Galesburg figures heavily in this book: Chapter 2. is titled "The House on Berrien Street", Chapter 7. "Along Berrien Street", and Chapter 14. "Prairie Town."

Says Sandburg in Chapter 14., "This small town of Galesburg, as I look back at it, was a piece of the American Republic. Breeds and blood strains [stains?] that figure in history were there for me, as a boy, to see and hear in their faces and their ways of talking and acting" (280).

This childhood home on Berrien Street has been turned into a museum, the Carl Sandburg Historic Site Association. The house is unimaginably tiny, a veritable doll's cottage. It is boggling to imagine Sandburg, his parents, and six siblings squeezed inside. Unfortunately, I visited in late 2008, when then-governor Rod Blagojevich had shut down Sandburg's childhood home and numerous other historic sites across Illinois, so I could only peer in the windows of the house and walk through the yard, where the ashes of Sandburg, his wife Lillian, and two of his daughters are buried. If you're a fan of Sandburg, a holiday jaunt up to Galesburg with your family and friends might be in order.

Sorry for the small cell-phone picture, but holy cow! I'm sitting on the doorstep of Carl Sandburg's childhood home!

The only other thing I'd like to say about this book is that I've just managed to sell myself on it, so you'd better grab it before I do.

~~Title:~~ ~~Always The Young Strangers~~

~~Author: Carl Sandburg~~

~~Publisher: Harcourt, Brace and Company~~

~~Year: 1953~~

~~Features: Signed, Presumed First Edition~~

~~Condition: Very Good-~~

~~Price: $35~~

On the 23rd day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-11-30T00:07:00.000-08:00

. . . a two-sided vellum manuscript leaf.

What exactly is a vellum manuscript leaf, you say?

Before the printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-1400s, books and manuscripts were produced by hand, mainly in monasteries. Each book had to be painstakingly hand-lettered. The material used was usually not paper, but thin parchment made from the limed skin of calves, sheep or goats. Often the books were decorated with colorful illustrations or ornate borders. Today, such books are called illuminated manuscripts.

A leaf from an illuminated manuscript.

After the invention of the printing press, book-making skyrocketed. Gradually the practice of lettering manuscripts by hand dropped off, then died altogether. It just didn't make sense, time-wise and money-wise.

However, there were still manuscripts that had to be hand-lettered by necessity. Musical manuscripts, for instance. Nobody had quite figured out a good way to reproduce staffs, bar-lines, clefs and notes with a printing press, so music was hand-lettered well into the 18th century.

. . . do you see where this is going now?

Our particular manuscript leaves--I should point out now that you have your choice of over two dozen--are from 1707, when music was still transcribed by hand. Like leaves from illuminated manuscripts, they are written on parchment and have decorated capital letters. The leaves were originally part of a book of Gregorian chants, and feature Latin words and square-note neumes. You can read more here if you'd like to brush up on your musical history. They're big, too. 13" by 20" big. At just $50 apiece, these 303-year-old beauties are a real bargain.

Sure, you can get your music-lover or music major the requisite Bach CD for the holidays. Maybe a Beatles sweatshirt or a lapel pin shaped like a treble clef. But those gifts don't begin to approach the uniqueness and the loveliness of these Gregorian manuscript leaves, which would look wonderful framed in your loved one's studio or study. (No offense to Johann Sebastian or John, Paul, George and Ringo.)

Please bear in mind before you buy that the leaves have endured the wrath of three centuries, and are not in pristine condition. Each one has varying degrees of water damage, which mainly presents as darkening, smudging and wrinkling. The damage is well over two hundred years old, though, so you shouldn't have to worry about mold or other dampness.

Ask to see these on your next visit to the bookshop; you won't be disappointed!

Title: Vellum Manuscript Leaf

Year: 1707

Features: Hand-Lettered

Condition: Good

Price: $50

On the 24th day of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-11-28T15:21:00.000-08:00

. . . a potpourri of books signed by ex-Presidents.

First up is My Life by Bill Clinton, an autobiography published in 2004 by Alfred Knopf. Everything that you could possibly hope to know about this two-term President is contained within the book's 957 pages.

Clinton spent over two years penning the book, even hand-writing all the drafts. (Say what you will about his time in office, but that's dedication!) Our copy is signed on the title page by Clinton in blue felt-marker.

Next up is Jimmy Carter's Turning Point, which is the tale of how Carter ran for state senate in Georgia during the turbulent year of 1962. Segregation was on its way out the door, protests at lunch counters and on campuses were peaking, and Carter's opponents did not care a bit for civil rights. This particular copy is a signed, limited first edition from the Easton Press, which is known for their collectible fine bindings of classic and popular books. Among its features are 22k gold accents, peach-colored silk endpapers and tooled red leather.

You can't find that at a Borders or Barnes & Noble! Neither can you find a signed copy of Jimmy Carter's Christmas in Plains. Of today's three books, this may be the most affordable and the most engaging, not to mention the most pertinent to the holiday season. It is a slim 155 pages next to Clinton's behemoth of a book. Engaging and unpretentious, Carter relates Christmas anecdotes from his own life, beginning with his childhood in Plains, GA and ending at the present day. He glosses over his four Christmases in office in favor of more meaningful events, like the time a truck accidentally spilled Christmastime grapefruits--an unexpected and delightful bounty--near the Carter home.

All of these books are hardcovers in very good condition with very good dust jackets, and perfect for the political junkie on your list.

Title: My Life

~~Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf~~

~~Year: 2004~~

~~Features: Signed, First Edition~~

~~Condition: Very Good~~

~~Price: $180~~

Title: Turning Point

Publisher: Easton Press

Year: 1992

Features: Signed, First Edition, Fine Binding

Condition: Very Good

Price: $180

~~Title:~~ ~~Christmas in Plains~~

~~Publisher: Simon & Schuster~~

~~Year: 2001~~

~~Features: Signed, First Printing~~

~~Condition: Very Good~~

~~Price: $20~~

You might also like these other presidential presents:

Title: Christmas in Plains

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Year: 2001

Features: Hardcover, Dust Jacket

Condition: Very Good

Price: $4

Title: Sharing Good Times

Author: Jimmy Carter

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Year: 2004

Features: Signed, First Edition

Condition: Very Good

Price: $25

We also have several trade paperbacks of Barack Obama's two books.

On the 26th and 25th days of Christmas, Babbitt's Books gave to me . . .

2010-11-27T16:30:00.000-08:00

. . . assorted hardback history titles in as-new condition.

One of the wonderful things about a used bookstore is that all manner of books find a temporary home here, from the falling-apart, underlined $1 copy of Crime and Punishment to the $3,000 first edition of Cat in the Hat. Virginia Woolf once described "secondhand books" as "wild books, homeless books . . . [which] have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of a library lack." Although we have a vast and variegated flock indeed, I'm sure that some passersby just keep on walking when they see us, thinking that we carry vintage and rare titles only.

If you are at all familiar with us, though, you know that we have hundreds upon hundreds of books that have come out within the past two or three years. Most are still in excellent condition. Better still, most are inexpensive--70% to 80% off of the cover price, to be exact. When you tally up the original cover price of the six books featured below, the total comes to $163.30. Babbitt's price for the same six books is $31.

Babette thinks that's a great bargain.

If you want your Christmas dollar to go far, these books--these prices!--cannot be beaten. You can find these books and hundreds of others on our new arrivals shelf and in the history aisle. The ones below are all hardcovers with dust jackets, but we have plenty of three- and four-dollar trade paperbacks to fit your needs, too.

David McCullough's 1776.

Cover price: $32
Our price: $4

~~Joshua Kendall's~~ ~~The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of~~ ~~Roget's Thesaurus~~
~~Cover price: $25.95~~
~~Our price: $5~~

~~Howard Blum's~~ ~~American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, The Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century~~
~~Cover price: $24.95~~
~~Our price: $6~~

Caroline Alexander's The Bounty: The True Story of Mutiny on the Bounty
Cover price: $27.95
Our price: $5

Benjamin Wallace's The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine
Cover price: $24.95
~~Our price: $5~~

Eric Burns's Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism
Cover price: $27.50
Our price: $6