That there book meme

[wordinista]

Ganked from various people on my f-list!

List 10 books you have on your bookshelf that you think nobody else on your friends list has on theirs.

*cracks knuckles*

1. The Complete Political & Dramatic Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edited by James Dykes Campbell. 1901. (Out of print.) This one has a great deal of sentimental value for me, because it's the first "rare" book I ever bought. I also love STC like a mad thing.

2. Horror Ficton in the Protestant Tradition, Victor Sage. 1988. (Out of print, as far as I can tell. I got this one for Christmas during grad school after handing my mother a wish-list of hard-to-find/out of print books.)

3. Baudelaire's Literary Criticism, by Rosemary Lloyd. (Also out of print, I think. I bought this one while I was researching my Master's thesis.)

4. The Age of Reason Begins, by Will and Ariel Durant. (Ditto out of printo. Also bought (or maybe given for Christmas?) while researching my thesis.)

5. Valperga, by Mary Shelley. (Going out on a limb with this one -- not one of her more famous novels.)

6. The 'Cane Mutiny: How the Miami Hurricanes Overturned the Football Establishment, by Bruce Feldman. Yes, I really read a whole book on the history of one football team. DON'T JUDGE ME.

7. The Devil in Love, by Jacques Cazotte. Numbered edition (219 of 365), copyright 1925. Out of print. (This book is a translation of the French novella that inspired Mathew Lewis' The Monk. My mother found it I DO NOT KNOW WHERE OR HOW OMG and gave it to me for Christmas several years back.)

8. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Illustrated edition. Copyright 1886. Waaay out of print. (Huge sentimental value here -- Mom gave me this as a gradution present when I got my earned my BA.)

9. H: The Story of Heathcliff's Journey Back to Wuthering Heights, by Lin Haire-Sargeant. (I'm kind of embarrassed to admit I have this one. I'm doubly embarrassed to admit liking it. I'm also pretty sure it's out of print.)

10. The Waverley Novels: Surgeon's Daughter and Castle Dangerous, by Sir Walter Scott. Copyright, 1879. (A professor in my first year of grad school gave us a syllabus that had NOTHING BUT OUT OF PRINT BOOKS ON IT. I found this one on Ebay. Fail, prof. Fail.)

EDIT: HOLY CRAP. Just looked up what some of those books are going for on Alibris. HOLY CRAP.

Comments

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

Man! I guess it doesn't count if I've read the Durant. My parents have the full set and I relied on it heavily during my high school History courses. :)

Hrm...maybe instead of The Dot and the Line I should've gone for my Caxton Edition of The Tour of the World in Eighty Days (1890). ;-)

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

Somehow, given the number of old and out of print books I have, a lot of this list felt like cheating. XD

And I love the Durant! I didn't really use much of it for my thesis after all, but I enjoed reading it all the same (and reading it inadvertently prepared me some for my comprehensive exam, so there you go).

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't use it for a reference, now. I'm far too neurotic about using secondary resources if there is any access whatsoever to primary ones, but at the time they were perfect for what I needed.

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

Well, that makes sense -- I was less neurotic, since I wasn't looking for anything really... in depth. I wanted to make a basic reference to the Age of Reason and use Kant at some point, but since I never actually WENT in that direction for my thesis, it was kind of a moot point. But an enjoyable read all the same. I also picked up Britons by Linda Colley, which I lurved.

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

Right...also, the difference between an English Major and a History Major.

I won't even go into the time we used fiction in my upper division History class and started trying to analyze things. It wasn't pretty...

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

Exactly. One of the hardest parts of my thesis was hunting down the ORIGINAL articles and essays that other articles and essays cited. Sometimes I could just swipe the bibliographical information in the secondary article/essay, but most of the time I really wanted to read that primary source. I still have every single photocopied article/essay I used for my thesis, because they were just that hard to hunt down.

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

I don't blame you, not one bit.

The class I'm in now, the assignment reads like she wants us to primarily look online for some of the information and my inner historian is having a conniption. "Can't...use...tertiary...sources. Must...find...primary..." *thud*

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

I honestly do not know how I managed NOT going crazy during that second year.

...Then again, ulcer.

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

Yeah...there's 'not going crazy' and then there's 'internalizing the stress so my body starts turing on itself'. I'm actually trying to avoid both of those, but I suspect my job is going to drive me over the edge.

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

I will never, ever forget the phone conversation I had with my mother:

"My stomach's been really upset lately..."

"Upset how?"

"Well, like... I feel nauseated a lot, and I have this weird... hungry/burny sensation in my stomach. Antacids don't even make a dent."

"...Honey."

"What?"

"Go see a doctor."

Luckily, I was able to take care of it with a change of diet. And I had to cut coffee out completely (I'm back to drinking it again, though nowhere NEAR as often as I used to), but I'm better now! But any kind of stress just goes straight to my stomach.

[megido]

My dad has like, the entire library of works by Durant. His entire bookshelf is taken up by them. It's almost mind-boggling.

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

Oooooooh~

I think if my library's got any claim to fame, it's got to be the number of literary criticism books with the word "Gothic" in the title. XD

[dqbunny.livejournal.com]

*poke* You so need to do. LibraryThing. *yanks meme and starts browsing through her collection*

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

I want to! But... I'm... ridiculously lazy.

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

It wouldn't help for your older, out of print volumes, but the cuecat is worth the $15 (or whatever you can find one for on eBay) to make additions to your library much easier. If you can put together a pile of books with the same tags, you can enter them all at once by reading the bar codes. V nice.

[dqbunny.livejournal.com]

:P :P

It's been fun going back through my book collection and fast once I got the USB kitty thing.