Saturday 9 September 2006

I arrived at the Chancellor’s Committee Bookfest at around 8:10 a.m. this morning. It was raining, as it would continue through the morning. I was the fourth person in line.

Half an hour or so later a chap drove up in his car and told us that the entrance would be around the back this year. So we all trooped over to the clock tower, where we could stand sheltered from the rain. We chatted amiably — I didn’t have the opportunity or inclination to read the magazines I’d brought for company.

When the doors finally opened at 10:00 there was a rush, but it was quite orderly. Wet floors made a dangerous setting for our excursions along the tables laden with books. I made it to the check-out by 10:30.

I found 24 books, which cost me $44.50, and which I think is a pretty good bargain all round. They take my LibraryThing total up to 897 books.

The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer (1968)
The Moor’s Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie (1995)
The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe (1979)
Night and Day, Virginia Woolf (1919)
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford (1915)
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote (1958)
Cat & Mouse, Gunther Grass (1963)
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1926)
Academia Nuts, Michael Wilding (2002)
The Game, A. S. Byatt (1967)
The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro (1995)
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981 - 1991, Salman Rushdie (1991)
Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust (1922)
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera (1980)
Tent of Miracles, Jorge Amado (1971)
Criticism in Society: Interviews, Imre Salusinszky (1987)
Arrow of God, Chinua Achebe (1964)
Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, Geraldine Brooks (1995)
Somebody Save Me: War, Peace, Nudity and the End of the Twentieth Century, David Leser (2002)
An Anthology of Australian Verse, edited by Bertram Stevens (1906)
Selected Poems, A. D. Hope (1973)
English Verse Volume I: The Early Lyrics to Shakespeare, chosen and arranged by W. Peacock (Oxford Univ. Press, 1928)
Selected Poems, John Tranter (1982)
John Betjeman’s Collected Poems (1958)

1 comment:

Ampersand Duck said...

What is this marvellous sale? Whose books are being sold off? And why so cheap?