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

. . . 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 . . .

. . . 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 . . .

. . . 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 . . .

. . . 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