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

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

. . . 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 . . .

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

. . . 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 . . .

. . . 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