Biblioscore!

Had a good haul at the local thrift store yesterday. I stopped by on my way out of town, and noticed two shopping carts full of books, a quarter apiece. How can you resist that? So I commenced to rummaging, and came up with some good finds, chief among them this stated first edition, first printing of Thomas McGuane's first novel, The Sporting Club.

In mint condition this one would be in the $800-950 range, but in book collecting,condition is everything, and while this copy is in good shape, the dust jacket has some issues and I doubt I could get $200 for it. Which is a moot point, of course. I collect books, I don't sell them, so for me this is a major find of a favored author for my meager first and rare-edition shelf.

I also found a number of really nice ex-library books, including what is stated as a first-edition Sterling North Rascal, although the dust jacket doesn't seem to match other first-editions, and an early Book Club edition of Jim Kjelgaard's classic Big Red.

In addition, I picked up an excellent condition first-edition Judy Blume Blubber, a very early Dr. Suess Bartholomew and the Oobleck, a first American edition Bedknob and Broomstick (yep, the book the later Disney classic movie was based on) and an early American edition of Felix Salten's classic (or infamous, depending on how you feel about deer hunting. For my views see two blogs below...) Bambi.

Believe it or not, there is a pretty thriving market in collectable children's and young adult books, and some of the classic titles can command big bucks. I found that out last year when I stumbled across (in the same thrift store) what I thought at the time was a first edition of Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach. I just bought it for the kids because it was beautifully illustrated, but, being a bibliophile, I got curious about what it might be worth. A shitload, as it turns out. Unfortunately, some further snooping revealed that my Dahl book wasn't in fact a true first-edition, but ever since then I have kept my eyes peeled for classic children's books.

I just wanted to point that out in case any of you were wondering "Why the hell did he buy a copy of Judy Blume's Blubber? Isn't he a little old for that? Isn't that a little creepy?" In fact, it's worth about $75 bucks...

Other pretty cool titles I found include early editions of The Great Buffalo Hunt by Wayne Gard, I Fought With Custer, by Frazier and Robert Hunt, and a regrettably dustjacket-less 1960 (but not first edition) To Kill A Mockingbird, which is one-third of my personal Holy Trinity of modern first-editions.

What I'd give to find a true first-edition, jacketed Mockingbird, along with, of course Catcher in the Rye and Vonnegut's Player Piano. Although I'd also throw in Abbey's Desert Solitaire as the fourth tine. Hell, in reality I'd kill for any of Vonnegut's or Abbey's first editions. I've got first editions of The Monkey Wrench Gang and Down the River, but Desert Solitaire is the Abbey Grail for me.

Which does bring up an interesting point: if I found a pristine copy of either Mockingbird or Rye, would I sell it? Tough one, there. As a rule I don't sell books, period. But with prices of either of those titles in the $20,000 to $30,000 range, I might be tempted. That would buy an awfully nice shotgun...

At any, rate, for a sum total of five bucks, I may not have hit the book-collecting lottery yesterday, but I damn sure didn't do too shabby, either. It was enough to make me go buy a real lottery ticket. I am, after all a big believer in signs...

Mallard's Infinite Playlist: Mayan 2012 Christmas Doom Edition.

Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas! Think I've posted this before, but it's worth repeating. In fact, move over, Rudolph, because this is the best Christmas song ever. Especially this year. And remember, open 'yer presents before the 21st...

Baby Bear Buck...

Not too big. Not too small. Just right for someone who these days isn't much interested in holding out for something larger. Life and bird seasons are far too short to freeze (or sweat) your ass off for some 16 days waiting and hoping for something that may or may not make an appearance*. Besides, a nice buck is a nice buck regardless of some arbitrary "score."* Sitting in the opening morning darkness I spied a shooting star and asked for nothing more than a decent buck honorably taken. And some damn rain. Wish partially granted.

Taken with my "lucky" CZ 550 in the venerable, classic, and oh-so-cool 6.5x55. A gun and caliber that, for whatever reason, just seems to produce for me. I'm superstitious about such things, and have been wise enough to not trade this one off like I foolishly have so many others. It also helps, I suppose, that it's also the most accurate gun I own. Next year it's getting a stock refinish to bring out the figure currently hidden by the gawdawful finish CZ puts on their stocks, as well as a new Leupold 6x42 fixed-power scope to replace that inelegant variable.

Incidentally, in the four mornings I spent hunting down on the wife's family's home place, I had to endure dozens and dozens of flights of ducks winging their way overhead, with none of them, not a one, pitching into what is normally my A#1 duck hunting spot. Because they would bounce off the hardpan that used to be a slough. Because I have No. Effing. Water. Biggest fall flight on record, and I have yet to shoot a duck, because I have no private water on which to shoot them, and what little public water I have is closed due to deer gun season (as is my quail hunting). The drought grinds on.

I did, however, hear the beautiful sound of quail calling every morning I hunted the old homestead. They're in a precarious state these days, but a few of the precious little buggers are still hanging on, god knows how. I hope to take one bird over each dog out of the home covey, and then leave them be.

**I have to admit that I did catch a glimpse of a truly big buck on the third day of the season, got a little excited, and hunted for him exclusively until Thanksgiving morning, when this buck walked by and I came to my senses. What can I say? Hypocrisy is a perfectly normal component of the human condition...

Mallard's Infinite Playlist: Son of Election Day Version

The Sex Pistols, confirming what we already knew...

Mallard's Infinite Playlist: Election Day Version

An election day civics lesson from the only band that mattered...

Virtue is nothing more than insufficient temptation...

 I have a hard and fast rule that I don't hunt local deer. In the five years we've lived here I've had some pretty nice bucks skulking around the place about this time of year, and I haven't drawn a bow on any of them.

It's not that it's illegal or anything. I could set up a stand or a blind in my back yard and proceed to happily and completely legally arrow as many deer as the law will allow. I don't feed them, even though it's perfectly legal to hunt over a feeder. I don't try to tame them or make them pets. These deer are completely wild and free-ranging. The bucks are, anyway. They only show up in the fall, and are gone as soon as they spot you.  The does, however, are lazy-ass loafers whom I practically have to kick out of the yard. Bitches.

The point is, there's really nothing ethically or legally wrong with hunting close (OK, very close, like back yard close) to home. Lots of people do it. Hell, my dad once shot a buck while sitting in his dining room (so maybe that's a little extreme but there were extenuating circumstances: He had just had back surgery, couldn't walk, and he needed the meat. My father is nothing if not practical. Once he healed up, however, it was right back to the woods for him and he hasn't shot a home-based buck since.).

I'm the same way. I just feel like a deer should be earned with some effort and shoe leather, something a bit more involved, a bit more rigorous, than opening the patio door, walking a hundred or so yards and sitting down.

But holy shit, this guy is tempting me. He showed up a couple days ago, following a doe. He's nice. Very nice...

I've never seen him before, and so far, I've only seen him the one time during the last weekend of black powder season. He hasn't been back to tempt me since. For all I know he's hanging in someone's garage right now and the point is moot.

And even though I told myself I wasn't going to bow hunt this year, that I was going to concentrate on the dogs and spend every spare moment bird hunting, I've been flinging a few arrows at the target the past couple days, you know, just to keep in practice. No reason, no reason at all, just a Kyudo thing, really, a meditative device, like yoga or tai chi. Honest...

With apologies to the ghost of George Bernard Shaw for butchering his quote...

Behold Headstonehenge!

I meant to post this yesterday on Halloween because, well, it's a little creepy, but I got busy and never got around to it.

Yes, that is a firepit (still under construction) with old headstones as the benches. Am I the only person in the world with a backyard firepit comprised of cemetery totems? Perhaps. But don't worry, the owners don't mind. Ba dum ba!

Actually, no, I didn't steal them. These graveyard monoliths were acquired by completely honest means. For the story you'll have to read this 2008 F&S blog. Or I'll just cut-and-paste a graf or two...

From my ancient Field & Stream blog post...

I recently came into possession of a number of polished granite headstones. Now before you jump to any grave-robbing conclusions, I picked them up from an old building that used to be a monument company but is very soon going to be a pile of rubble. My plumber bought the property and told me I could scrounge anything I wanted. Imagine my surprise to find all these beautiful slabs of granite just lying around.

So I brought them home, much to my wife's chagrin. She flatly refused to allow me to scatter them through her flowerbeds. I thought it would be quirky and off-beat, but for some reason she considered it morbid and disturbing.

Since my reputation in the neighborhood is already a bit dodgy, I reluctantly agreed, but then hit on a great idea: I would find timeless quotes, inscribe them on the granite and place them strategically around our property! Even my wife agreed it was a pretty cool idea.

For example, this one is, which I found on Steve Bodio's excellent blog is going in front of my dog kennels: "Hee cannot be a gentleman whych loveth not a dogge" which comes from a 1555 book entitled "The Institucion of a Gentleman."

"Litera Scripta Manet" or "the written word endures" will be going on a slab placed outside my office window, while the Ben Johnson quote that hangs above the Shakespeare & Co. book store in Paris  "Thou art alive still while thy book doth live and we have wits to read and praise to give" will be going in my front yard.

So that's the background. In truth, I never got around to having inscriptions cut into the headstones because I changed my mind about the whole project. I scrapped the quotes idea and decided I would use the stones to build a miniature Stonehenge firepit in the back yard. That way, as I told the wife, on the summer and winter Solstices we could sacrifice a goat, then beat drums as we danced nekkid and fornicated around the fire. Or maybe beat drums, sacrifice the goat, then dance nekkid, then fornicate. Or maybe fornicate, then one of us dance nekkid while the other beat drums, and we just spare the goat.... hell, I don't know, we'd make it work somehow...

Anyway, the wife - needless to say - quickly informed me that, were I to actually build my miniature Stonehenge, I'd most certainly be dancing nekkid, beating drums and fornicating with myself. Or the goat.

Undaunted, I quickly got to work. Just as quickly, I realized that despite hauling three pick-up loads of headstones past our worried-looking neighbors, I wasn't going to have nearly enough stone to build even a half-ass Stonehenge replica. Dejected, I scaled back the project to a more attainable (and normal) goal. I chose a few stones, cut some firewood rounds for bases, and made headstone benches.

No Stonehenge replica, no nekkid fornicatin', no drum-beating and (in hindsight, probably a good thing) no freaked-out neighbors. Just an ordinary backyard firepit that just happens to have a tastefully understated touch of ghoulish weirdness to it.

It's not finished, of course. I still need to put down flagstone within the circle, and I still have a lot of unused headstones I haven't figured out how, exactly, to incorporate into the design. But it serves its purpose well enough. The dogs like it, anyway.

And even though it's not technically correct, I still like to call it Headstonehenge. It's a good conversation starter. Or ender, depending on how you're wired. I've used it as both...

Halloween Redux in the October Country

 Well, it's almost Halloween, and since I'm once again facing the terrifying prospect of taking my children trick-or-treating tomorrow night, I thought it appropriate (and appropriately lazy)  to re-post my Halloween Screed from last year. Because it still irritates me.

However, even though it was titled "Assholes and Autumn People" that post wasn't entirely about stupid people. It was also about October, which (along with November and May) is one of my favorite months, and Halloween, my favorite holiday, and Ray Bradbury, one of my favorite authors. Also, at the suggestion of Steve Bodio in last year's comment section, I'm adding the intro to Bradbury's classic short-story collection "The October Country" (photo above).

Anyway, enjoy. Or not. I don't really care.

A few random observations - both impolite and wistful -  on Halloween and the month of October...

First, a bit of a post-Halloween screed...

Since when did trick-or-treating with your children become a strictly vehicle-based activity? One in which the parents - who apparently can’t be bothered with the tiresome act of removing their lardasses from their vehicles and physically walking down the street with their children and, you know, engaging with them – instead kick said children out of the vehicle and slowly cruise along the street ignoring their kids and other pedestrians, updating their Facebook status on their phone and creating huge traffic and safety hazards.

Thanks for that.

What the hell, people? Is this what we’ve come to? Can we not, for one night a year, just one friggin’ night out of 365, park our cars – just this once – and take a walk instead of willfully disassociating ourselves from the opportunity to have a real, tangible, organic experience with our children?

You horrible, self-indulgent, fat, lazy, no-good, stupid-ass mo-fos; you squawking, shit-for-brained, lemming-like creatures whose asses are apparently connected - Avatar-like - with the heated, air-conditioned Corinthian leather seats in your steel cocoons, here’s a hint: Not only do you ruin the experience for the rest of us who still use our lower extremities for something other than operating a gas pedal, you ruin it for your own children, too.

How? By teaching them to grow up to be just like you. And if there’s one thing the world doesn’t need right now, it’s another generation of self-absorbed dickheads.

And this is just my opinion, but I’m pretty sure that, deep down, most eight-year-old girls don’t really want to be tarted-up pixie streetwalkers for Halloween. That’s your fantasy, and if you've secretly always harbored some Penthouse Forum daydream about rockin’ the stripper pole, hey, that’s cool, but maybe you shouldn’t be living that dream vicariously through your child. Just sayin’…

Just had to vent a little. I'm good now...

Last night, after we got home from trick-or-treating and got the kids out of their costumes and into bed, I grabbed a wee nip and curled up in the reading chair with some Ray Bradbury.
 
October is a restless month. It has always made me - even as a child - wistful and pensive, with a touch of fear at the transition it represents, not just of season, but of mood, being and mind. It’s the one month in which even this hoary, jaded old adult still feels some residual tug of an ancient, pagan magic we all once believed in as children, but which gradually lost its grip as we grew into adulthood.

And I don’t think there’s ever been a writer that captures the essence of, and speaks so eloquently to, my (for lack of a better term) ‘Octoberism” than Ray Bradbury. Reading “Something Wicked This Way Comes”   (or any Bradbury story) as an adult reminds me, just a bit, of what it was like to be a child who still possessed the capacity for wonder.
 
That and a stiff glass of scotch also makes a perfect balm for having to deal with assholes all evening...

"Huntsman, What Quarry?" A Literary Criticism...

 Last weekend I took the boys (and Ozzy the pup) to spend a few days in my hometown of Norman, Oklahoma, visiting family and doing a little yard work for my grandmother. While there I was delighted to discover that the Norman Public Library, one of my favorite places in the whole world and a building in which a very sizable chunk of my childhood was spent in escapist bliss, was having its annual book sale.

So of course I hustled on down to see what could be had. I found a few good titles. A leather-bound limited first-edition "Bishop's Wildfowl" was a cool score for me, as was a copy of "Duck Shooting Along the Atlantic Tidewater." I also found an excellent condition ex-library 1958 hardcover (w/excellent dustjacket) "Martian Chronicles" as well as an old paperback copy of Richard Brautigan's "Trout Fishing in America", a UT Press copy of J. Frank Dobie's "Rattlesnakes" and a few others here and there. Nothing really terribly valuable or collectable, but nice books that I'll enjoy having on my shelf.

One of the books I picked up was a regrettably dustjacketless first-edition (1939) copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Huntsman, What Quarry?" with an inscription that read "For Lucille, Damn the Torpedoes! Doris, 1944."

I love finding old books with cryptic inscriptions like that. Stokes the imagination. Most of them seem to have something to do with love, either its confounding mystery and vexation or its abiding power .

I don't know what inside joke Doris and Lucille had in mind back in '44, but it was a nice gift, from a time when the act of giving a book perhaps meant a little more than it does now. At any rate, I've been reading through the collection a bit, specifically the title poem, "Huntsman, What Quarry?" which reads thusly, and I'd like to offer my thoughts below...


"Huntsman, what quarry
On the dry hill
Do your hounds harry?

When the red oak is bare
And the white oak still
Rattles its leaves
In the cold air:
What fox runs there?"

"Girl, gathering acorns
In the cold autumn,
I hunt the hot pads
That ever run before,
I hunt the pointed mask
That makes no reply,
I hunt the red brush
Of remembered joy."

"To tame or to destroy?"

"To destroy."

"Huntsman, hard by
In a wood of grey beeches
Whose leaves are on the ground,
Is a house with a fire;
You can see the smoke from here.
There's supper and soft bed
And not a soul around.
Come with me there;
Bide there with me;
And let the fox run free."

The horse that he rode on
Reached down its neck,
Blew upon the acorns,
nuzzled them aside;
The sun was near setting;
He thought, "Shall I heed her?"
He thought, "Shall I take her
For a one-night's bride?"

He smelled the sweet smoke,
He looked the lady over;
Her hand was on his knee;
But like a flame from cover
The red fox broke-
And "Hoick! Hoick!" cried he.

Dude, you're an idiot...

Even Superman Says "Screw It"...

When even Superman throws up his hands and says "to hell with journalism", you know we're in trouble...

From Salon

In issue No. 13 of the current Superman comic book series, out tomorrow, Clark Kent will dramatically quit his day job as a reporter at the Daily Planet in front of the entire staff. The change in Kent’s character reflects writer Scott Lobdell’s goal of making Superman more relevant in the 21st century (part of a grander push from DC’s “New 52″ relaunch of several comics). A DC representative said, “This is not the first time in DC Comics history that Clark Kent has left the Planet, and this time the resignation reflects present-day issues – the balance of journalism vs. entertainment, the role of new media, the rise of the citizen journalist, etc.”

Lobdell told USA Today, “Rather than Clark be this clownish suit that Superman puts on, we’re going to really see Clark come into his own in the next few years as far as being a guy who takes to the Internet and to the airwaves and starts speaking an unvarnished truth.”
So what will Clark, a frustrated 27-year-old guy who “is arguably the most powerful person on the planet” do? Lobdell said, “I don’t think he’s going to be filling out an application anywhere … He is more likely to start the next Huffington Post or the next Drudge Report than he is to go find someone else to get assignments or draw a paycheck from.”

Maybe he'll pen a blog, or write an e-book, or start a wildly popular Twitter feed that leads to a book deal (Shit Superman Says, maybe?). No more chasing a beat for the Man of Steel...