1+1=3
…We recently acquired a lot containing Pocket Guide to Vietnam and Viet-Anh: Vietnamese-English Pronouncing Dictionary. As you can probably tell from the picture, these two paperbacks aren’t in particularly great shape and as you can probably guess, neither is worth all that much on the open market. In fact, when I first came across them during our initial triage process I may have raised an interested eyebrow (born in 1968, the Vietnam War was a big topic of conversation in my family when I was growing up), but I had enough experience to know that they weren’t going to be worth enough to bother selling…
Not-So-Merry Mount
Found this oddity in amongst a box of otherwise unremarkable paperbacks (think stuff like outdated self help ripoffs and Rosamund Pilcher). I’ve spent years devouring everything “weird horror” and Lovecraftian (and as a kid in the eighties devouring the prodigious output of every half assed publisher trying to get in on the horror boom) but had never come across Fred Chappell…
Vintage Bafflement
I am quite fond of marital advice books from the past so I pick them up whenever I see them. This particular gem, “Spousery”, from the heart of the Leave It To Beaver era, is less a book than a marketing gimmick. “Spousery” can be begun starting with either cover, see. It’s two books in one, see. It’s got a gender neutral title because it’s for Him and Her, see…
Mencken: Jester/Skeptic
It would be (at best) churlish of me to reprimand anyone for a having had a happy childhood among loving people. At the same time, it’s a fact that most of us…