NOTES OF A USED AND OUT-OF-PRINT BOOK DEALER

An email newsletter issued bi-weekly. No. 1. Thursday March 15, 2001 NYC.

Contents

1. 10% discount on our novels for our Newsletter readers
2. Book trade: A prediction
3. Parlor game. The hidden book, the hidden identity
4. Book trade. A spicy tip.
5. Twayne Authors Series. 24 titles available.
6. Links. Two academics, difficult to read but nice to know they're there.

This newsletter is issued by Continental Books for book people. Our intention is to entertain and inform and to encourage readers to visit and shop our web site list of some 5,000 titles. We add more titles almost daily. (http://www.continentalbooks.com/continental.cgi)

CELEBRATORY DISCOUNT. Novels

In celebration of this new project we're offering a 10% discount off our list prices for novels (http://www.continentalbooks.com/novels) if purchases are made through our web site order form and are paid by credit card (Visa, Master Card, Discover). Tag LTR#1 somewhere on the order.

OUT ON A LIMB, Predicting a bull market for one book.

Remaindered copies of the 1993 edition of David Bellos GEORGES PEREC, A Life in Words are a good buy at $9.95 even though there is a 1995 corrected edition that followed. I think it's a sleeper whose value will go back up toward its original $42.00 list when the remainder trove has been dispersed.

Perec, who died on March 3, 1982 just before his 46th birthday, wrote in a variety of styles and forms and is best know for his novel, LIFE A User's Manual which Bellos calls "one of the most exhilarating works of fiction ever to have been written."

The biography is encyclopedic in size, at xxx & 802 pages and over 3 pounds, and in content, following Perec in and through modern France: its schools and paratroops, the literary life and circles of friends, a post-surrealist literary movement called OuLiPo where the creative energy is tempered with mathematical forms. And, deep breath, more: German radio programs, a writer's day job, cultured pearls, travel, housing, cinema, vagaries of romance, an astonishing etymology of the name Perec. And so on.

A quick line on Perec's talent through two of his short pieces on the Internet:

1. One entitled "Experimental demonstration of the Tomatopic organization in the Soprano" (Cantaterix Sopranica L), is a comic imitation of trivial scientific writing. (http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/tomato/tomato.html)
2. Two "The Winter Voyage", is written in the style of Jorge Luis Borges. (http://www.towson.edu/users/baker/perec.html)

The 8th Street Bookstore near NYU in Manhattan sold out their remainder table copies several weeks back. But some remainder dealers may still have copies at $9.95. After these few copies are gone, the bull market.

Reviews:

• http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~4ss42/Oulipo/gp-lwbr.html
• http://dannyreviews.com/h/Georges_Perec.html
• http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/perecg/bellos.htm

Biography

http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/perec.html

PARLOR GAMES AND BOOKS. The Mysterious Connection

Parlor game. A small gathering of people in someone's home. A turning away from milling and private cocktail party murmuring. A focusing of attention toward the same object, the game. A sharing of rules, social form, ideas and understanding. Ritual-like. Pleasure. No agonistics. No striving. No exclusion. All in. A game.

The book. A physical object. Capable of being hidden in plain sight amidst the several hundred books scattered around this house, this apartment, this tent, this igloo, this space station. Each participant, including the hosts, secretly selects a book as his/her own and writes the title on a slip of paper. Ah, the game's afoot: The group must now identify for each individual in turn his/her secret book identity.

Questions to be answered with a yes, no or don't know, but each question costs a point. Identifying the wrong book as "it" is worth two negative points. A correct identification -- three points up. The group can't find the book within ten minutes -- the it-player upon showing a valid slip gets three points.

End of game: All books found or revealed, tally each player's score. Two winners: highest number and lowest number.

Give everyone a milkshake, roll up the rug, turn on the music and dance.

Solid, compact discussions of life and times of famous authors by gung-ho academics: We have Simenon, Proust, Floyd Dell, Dylan Thomas, Mary McCarthy, Celine, Blake, Malamud, Henry Miller among others. (http://continentalbooks.com/twayne)

THE BOOK TRADE. Spicy Tips

Heard in the coffee bar section of a bookstore on Crosby Street below Houston in NYC. "Trouble with book dealer newsletters is that they never give inside tips. So everything is bland."

"Yah. But really, you never know the source of your next spicy tip."

LINKS. Academic e-books that appear to be otherwise unpublished

• Ran into Win Van Binsbergen. BOARD-GAMES AND DIVINATION IN GLOBAL CULTURAL HISTORY while looking for games. It is not easy reading, but even a quick scan will introduce you to the Mankala board which while not Monopoly is a serious game in its own right. The author's method harkens back to an historical anthropology very popular over a century ago. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Atrium/2327/gen3/mankala/mankala1.html
• Ed Stephan. THE DIVISION OF TERRITORY IN SOCIETY is an original work by a professional sociologist. Ed claims that the math he uses should be accessible to most of us. That's arguable. But there is a certain elegance in his pulling out a category from Durkheim's DIVISION OF LABOR from, again, a century ago (Kinship, Territory, Division of Labor) and riffing on it. http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/Book/contents.html

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copyright. Alvin Katz 2001