The Haul (breathe, breathe)

I have a bloated feeling from the Lifeline Book Fair, and I only spent a few hours there. It's because I went on Saturday and bought what for me is a moderate amount of books, and then I went back on Sunday for the last half hour when they charge $10 for all you can fit into a green bag, and I gorged myself, mostly on poetry books that no-one else seemed to want except me.

Blimey, if I thought I had no room for my books before, now the situation is utterly ridiculous. But I can justify each purchase, truly! Well, I can justify it to myself, anyway. But now the piles of books teetering around my home office are even higher...

Here's the list.

Fiction
-- Angela Carter (ed), Wayward Girls & Wicked Women, (replacing a copy I once lent and never got back)
-- Angela Carter, Fireworks: nine stories in various disguises
-- Dymphna Cusack, The Half-Burnt Tree
-- Dymphna Cusack, Black Lightning (no, Bernice, I didn't have it. But I do now)
-- Dymphna Cusack, Say No to Death (I already have a copy of this, but this one has a pristine dustjacket)
-- Harold Bell Wright, That Printer of Udell's (1903, seems to be a novel about a letterpress-printing family in the American mid-west)
-- William Morris, A Dream of John Ball
-- The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (1 volume, always wanted one of these, and it's a nice old one with glossaries of characters, etc. Happy Birthday, Bill)
-- Roger McDonald, 1915
-- David Whish-Wilson, The Summons
-- James Bailey, Man, Interrupted
-- Emma Tennant, The Bad Sister
-- Charmian Clift/George Johnson, Strong-man from Pireaus and other stories (hardback)
-- Lionel Shriver, The Female of the Species
-- Zoe Fairbairns, Benefits (dystopian feminist novel, highly recommended, and I've got a copy, but this one has a better cover)
-- Peter Draffin, Pop: A Novelty, with illustrations (everywhere!) by Martin Sharp
-- Kerryn Goldsworthy (ed), Australian Short Stories (not only a good selection, but a killer photo on the back :) )

Non-fiction
-- Style Manual for authors, editor & printers, 3rd Edition. (I seem to have a collection of editions now)
-- J.G. Cone, Cone's Book of Handicrafts (1961, with sone fabulous low-tech fun, including how to make the panoramic drawing frame featured in last week's Collectors)
-- Esther Hautzig, Let's Make Presents: 100 Inexpensive Gifts (1964, packed with good blogposts)
-- J. Hagan, Printers and Politics: A History of the Australian Printing Unions 1850-1950)
-- Charmian Clift, Images in Aspic (1st edition paperback)
-- Laurence Whistler, Rex Whistler, his life and drawings (This book is a definite blogpost in itself)

Poetry
-- Denise Levertov, The Freeing of the Dust
-- Catherine Reilly (ed), Scars Upon My Heart (a collection of WWI poetry & verse by women. Really happy about this one.)
-- Penguin Modern Poets 8: Edwin Brock, Geoffrey Hill, Stevie Smith (LOVE Stevie Smith)
-- Vivian Smith, Selected Poems
-- Jon Foulcher, Convertible
-- Jon Foulcher, New and Selected poems
-- David Holbrook (ed), Iron Honey Gold, 4 vols of anthology.
-- Lily Brett, In her Strapless Dresses
-- Lily Brett, Mud in my Tears
-- Stephen Spender, Poems
-- Martin Johnston, Selected Poems and Prose
-- ANU Staff Centre Poet's Luncheon Menu, 29 November 1977, with poems by Rosemary Dobson, David Campbell, Geoff Page, Roger McDonald, RF Brissinden, and AD Hope, SIGNED BY ALL and was only 50c in the pamphlet section. Bonus!
-- Les Murray, New Selected Poems
-- Derek Walcott, The Bounty
-- e.e. cummings, selected poems 1923-1958 (lost my other copy)
-- Deborah Westbury, Flying Blind
-- Robert Graves, Love Respelt (I actually bought this as one of my design 'warning' books, as it is a dreadful one-section, machine-stitched binding, which ruins the careful layout of the text. Such a shame.)

Comics
-- Larry Pickering, A decade of Pickering (now I can let my individual copies for each year lie fallow)
-- Stan Lee, The Amazing Spiderman (1979 anthology)
-- The Completely MAD Don Martin (one of the only things I like in MAD comics)
-- Northbourne and Glory Bound (a Canberra comic anthology from 2000. This is an ex-library copy that I can read and keep my other copy nice)

Reference
-- Roget's Thesaurus (a copy for the Book Stud, because I'm always wishing I had one)
-- Collin's Australian Pocket English Dictionary (ditto)
-- Collin's Authors' and Printers' Dictionary (I think this is my 3rd copy now, but this one has a FABULOUS bookplate, so I'll cast off one of my other copies. Anyone want one?

As far as the weirdest one I saw, I think this takes the cake:



When I saw it, my first thought was a polemic about drier types of white wine (it's a nice bit of typesetting), or maybe even alcoholism, or maybe growing a cactus garden. But no, it's "a commonsense approach to the problem of Urinary Incontinence". Heh.

No, I didn't buy it. I don't need THAT many books.