More uncontrolled Book Acquisitions

Porter Square Books is very smart with the way they give out those coupons for every so much you spend (what is it? every $100? I do seem to get an awful lot of those coupons ...). I have a coupon, Lisa wants to take one of the dogs in to Porter Square (whenever we take them to Porter Square, they immediately drag us consecutively into Tags Hardware and Porter Square Books and B-line straight to the counter where they immediately SIT and stare at the startled clerk behind the counter, expecting a dog-treat from the stashes the stores keep there for just that reason — Pavlov — so it's kind of odd when you think about it that the clerks would be startled) and so of course I think I might as well use the coupon.

Do I ever come out of there with just the book I could pay for with one coupon?

What do you think?

This last time I really only went in there for the delightful edition of The War of the Worlds — illustrated by Edward Gorey, no less: here's a good look at the cover:


I actually discovered the book in an ad in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books (much ad-trolling from that issue that I haven't blogged yet). It turns out that Gorey drew these illustrations in 1960! And on re-reading (well, re-skimming) it, I find in fact that Gorey's illustrations - of the Tripods, definitely - are by far the most faithful renderings I have seen, while at the same time bearing his trademark whimsical style.

Of course I didn't stop there. For some reason, I just had to have the following books as well (taking advantage of my xsl skills to generate the table below from an Amazon web-services asinsearch request):

	Going Nucular: Language, Politics. and Culture in Confrontational Times Geoff Nunberg $10.40 (%20 off at Amazon)
	American Exceptionalism and Human Rights Michael Ignatieff $24.95 (No discount at Amazon)
	Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem--and What We Should Do About It Noah Feldman $16.50 (%34 off at Amazon)

Interestingly enough, Divided by God turned out to be previewed in the New York Times Magazine on the very same day I bought the book (though I hadn't seen the Magazine yet when I visited Porter Square Books). I'm not convinced by his proposed solution, but it's still a valuable contribution to the discourse. Going Nucular is by a Stanford Linguistics Professor who also writes a weekly language section for the New York Times Week in Review. I bought it anyway. And of course I've been quite interested in the concept of American Exceptionalism lately, particularly in light of the recent Orwellian re-writing of history that the Republicans have been engaging in of late (e.g., see here).

Of course, there's no point in asking whether I had first finished (or even begun?) reading the books from my last couple of sprees, blogged here and here.

I do feel the need to affirm that I have really been enjoying Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction, however. I'm reading it cover-to-cover. It's the best survey of the field I've seen in a long time.

Categories: books, bibliophilia, bibliomania, biblioholism, bookbuying, bookshopping, acquisitions, consuming, acquisitions, bookstores, portersquarebooks, language, linguistics, politics, historicallinguistics, indoeuropean, religion, churchandstate, foreignaffairs, byjjmg