Hooray for Abe

To balance some of the negative comments about Abe round here recently, I'd
like to speak in praise of their want list feature. A few days ago a US
bookseller listed a book which I have been in search of for years, Frank
Harris's little-known novel "Love in Youth". Within a few minutes I had the
email notification from Abe and had ordered the book, which arrived today.
Sweet, as they say, as a nut.

--
Alfred Armstrong
Unusual books unmasked at http://www.oddbooks.com/
"The eye has been described by scientists as a small-sized volcano"
- Webster Edgerly

On 20 Feb 2004 10:46:06 GMT, Alfred Armstrong
declared:

To balance some of the negative comments about Abe round here recently, I'd
like to speak in praise of their want list feature. A few days ago a US
bookseller listed a book which I have been in search of for years, Frank
Harris's little-known novel "Love in Youth". Within a few minutes I had the
email notification from Abe and had ordered the book, which arrived today.
Sweet, as they say, as a nut.

that is a handy feature, i've had a few good matches that way :-)

Robert

The sound of gunfire, off in the distance, I'm getting used to it now
Lived in a brownstone, lived in the ghetto, I've lived all over this town
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around

MindElec wrote in
:

On 20 Feb 2004 10:46:06 GMT, Alfred Armstrong
declared:

To balance some of the negative comments about Abe round here
recently, I'd like to speak in praise of their want list feature. A
few days ago a US bookseller listed a book which I have been in search
of for years, Frank Harris's little-known novel "Love in Youth".
Within a few minutes I had the email notification from Abe and had
ordered the book, which arrived today. Sweet, as they say, as a nut.

that is a handy feature, i've had a few good matches that way :-)


It's my first, despite registering a bunch a few years ago. All of them
very difficult to find, presumably, but that's where a service like this
really scores.

--
Alfred Armstrong
Unusual books unmasked at http://www.oddbooks.com/
"Our nose does not only serve the purpose of respiration,
but the purpose of smelling also." - Frank Nimrod

"Alfred Armstrong" wrote in message
...

that is a handy feature, i've had a few good matches that way :-)


It's my first, despite registering a bunch a few years ago. All of them
very difficult to find, presumably, but that's where a service like this
really scores.



I've had a bunch in the last 2-3 years:

(1) Daniel Barber, *Catholic Worship and Piety* (Washington City [one of my
favorite imprints], 1821)--a book I expected never to own--for $30 from a
little dealer in Maine.

(2) Two cheaply priced copies of Charles A. Frazee, *Catholics and Sultans:
The Church and the Ottoman Empire 1453-1923* (1983). I quickly sold the
second copy for the price of the two.

(3) Just recently I was alerted to a bibliography that I have been looking
for for a while: Anne Klejment, *Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: a
Bibliography and Index* (1986). This is particularly good timing because I
am attending a history conference in April which Prof. Klejment is also
attending--I hope she, among a number of other scholars, will sign.

(4) Which reminds me of perhaps best of all, a signed first edition of
Dorothy Day's convert memoir *From Union Square to Rome* (1938). For anyone
interested, there is an online text available he

http://www.catholicworker.org/doroth...t.cfm?TextID=2

I got my copy for a very reasonable price from the good guys at Bolerium
Books:

http://www.bolerium.com

(Dorothy Day and other radical Catholic converts are about the only point
where my interests overlap with their specialties--but I respect them as
good bookmen.)

Getting this signed copy almost--ALMOST--made up for my biggest anti-brag.
About 5 years ago, in my earliest days on eBay, I missed a rather tatttered
copy of Dorothy Day's *The Eleventh Virgin* (1924) that went for about $50.
That seemed to rich for me at the time--surely another, better copy would
come around. Unfortunately, I didn't know at the time how rare the book is:
It was Day's first book, an autobiographical novel that she quickly came to
regret publishing. It is documented (she confessed) that she gathered up
and destroyed as many copies as she could find, so it is a true rarity. The
last copy I saw for sale had a price tag in the low 5 figures!


William M. Klimon
http://www.gateofbliss.com

William M. Klimon wrote:

I've had a bunch in the last 2-3 years:

I had one a while back - Murakami's Pinball 1972 (which led to a saga that I
posted details of here) - then one (Nobuki's Dwarf Trees) that I badly
wanted but made the mistake of e-mailing the seller instead of buying
immediately from the ABE site; by the time the seller read my e-mail she'd
already sold it to someone else over the phone. And yesterday I got a third,
a copy of a work by the all-but-forgotten Victorian writer Grace Webster
(the one whose letters were found in a chimney in Edinburgh a couple of
years ago and which I bought). It's a duplicate copy of a work of hers I
already have, but at least now I'm getting a second copy I can pass it
around to others to see if they like it as much as I did.

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com