Another gala day of book buying… Gulp. After leaving work this afternoon, I sauntered down to the Co-op Bookshop and picked up a text book and a sale book:

The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft, Robert S. Boynton (2005)
The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, Tariq Ali (2002)

Then I loafed over to Gleebooks and bought the latest issue of The New York Review of Books because I had discovered at Matilda that it contains a review of Peter Carey’s Theft: A Love Story (a very good review, by the way, showing me aspects of the book that I’d neglected to see). I also picked up, on the sale tables upstairs at No. 49 Glebe Point Road:

30 Days in Sydney: A wildly distorted account, Peter Carey (2001)
The English Yeoman, Mildred Campbell (1942)

It was raining. I swished along Parramatta Road, turned up Crystal Street and into New Canterbury Road, then popped into the bottle shop for my Friday beers. Four bottles of Amsterdam Mariner, a packet of chips, and four mini salamis later, I received a telephone call on my mobile phone from the furniture-maker, who regretted to say that the carpenter couldn’t do more than 26 centimetres between shelves. My new bookshelf was delivered last weekend but only had six shelves, so I had them make a new one. I’d ordered seven shelves, after all. So now they’re making a new unit — to my specifications. It seems they’d got the height wrong. Sigh! The good bookshelf, that they’d successfully made for me and delivered about five months ago, has 30 centimetres between shelves. I don’t want the shelves too close together, since if they are I’ll not be able to fit hardbacks on the shelves. They won’t deliver before next weekend, anyway. I hope they get it right this time!