Books Purchased Today

[ritter]

Hat tip to Florestan 

In the wonderful Librería Antonio Azorín in El Escorial I located (and bought on Saturday last) an affordable copy in mint condition of the 1947 edition by (now defunct) publishers Biblioteca Nueva of selected works by Leopoldo Alas "Clarín", including his novel La Regenta, widely considered the greatest 19th century Spanish novel.

Tooled leather covers with gold lettering and ornamentation, 1309 pages on India paper.



.
An object of beauty, and a great opportunity to revisit literature that I thoroughly enjoyed in my youth. 

[Florestan]

That looks awesome, Rafael.

I'll return the compliment by boosting your thread with a cross-post from the reading thread.

Just bought: Thomas Mann - Complete Short Stories & Novellas, Romanian translation in two volumes.



Covers read: Nobel Prize for Literature - Death in Venice, Mario and the Wizard - Short Stories

[j winter]

Purchased earlier this week... found a very cheap copy at my local used bookstore 

[SimonNZ]

At two different secondhand bookshops this week I found two books I'd been wanting for some time:

Carl Sandburg's biography of Lincoln. Not the full multi-volume, but the one-volume abridgement he made himself.

Frances Fitzgerald's Fire In The Lake. 1972 work that was the first to examine the Vietnam war from the Vietnamese side.

Both Pulitzer winners, I think.

[SimonNZ]

Found yesterday:

[MN Dave]

I will not purchase another book until I finish reading 25 off my shelves.  I am currently on numbers 5 and 6.

[j winter]

The Complete Aztec Ace, 15 issues of wild independent comic goodness from the 80's.  Seriously, how can you resist this cover blurb:

"An action-packed, intellectual, time-travel adventure, Aztec Ace stars Caza (AKA Ace) as he travels between the Aztec Empire and his home in the 23rd century. Ace, along with his pupil Bridget Chronopolis and his navigator named Head (the floating disembodied head of Sigmund Freud), struggles to save his own dimension from time paradoxes created by his enemy, the mysterious Nine-Crocodile...."

[ritter]

Just ordered:



This is an anthology of articles of musical criticism published by Adolfo Salazar in the newspaper El Sol between 1918 and 1936. Salazar is considered the most influential critic and musicologist in Spain in those years. El Sol was a very prestigious newspaper (among its  collaborators was Ortega y Gasset, who first published The Revolt of the Masses in sterilised for in its pages).

This should provide interesting insights to musical life in Madrid in those years.

[vers la flamme]

A really weird one:



Supposedly, it's a testament to the author's infamously copious use of tobacco, alcohol and especially caffeine.

[ritter]

A bookstore a couple of blocks away from my home here in Madrid had this on display in their window, and I couldn't resist:



This is a 1987 facsimile reprint of the 20 numbers of the magazine Residencia, issued between 1926 and 1934. It's a very impractical tome (ca. 2000 pages), but an object of beauty.

The magazine was published (irregularly) by the Residencia de Estuduantes, which was one of the main the centres of intellectual life in Madrid (and all of Spain) between 1910 and the Civil War. It still functions, and the complex of buildings and gardens in a central location of the city are well worth a visit (it is now included in the "European Heritage" list).





It functioned as a dormitory (famously, García Lorca, Buñuel, and Dalí were simultaneous residents —but also many others) and hosted —and still does— conferences, exhibitions, and concerts. Today, it provides accommodation to foreign and Spanish researchers working in Madrid. It is run by the Superior Council of Scientific Research (the institution that published the facsimile reprint).

The list  of contributors to the magazine is impressive. Just a cursory look at the index reveals the names of e.g. Howard Carter, Chesterton, Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel, Lorca, Milhaud, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Gregorio Marañón, etc., etc., showing a breadth of subjects that is amazing (in quality and quantity).



Even the advertising is great to look at (Isotta cars —the advert was drawn by Dalí— feature in the back covers of many numbers, Heno de Pravia soap —a leading brand in Spain to this day— in the inner pages).



A wonderful window to intellectual life in Spain in the "Silver Age", which I am increasingly fascinated with (its music, its literature...).

[JBS]

A bit more on the beaten track


The Melville was stimulated by the realization that I haven't read Billy Budd since I was in school, and of The Piazza Tales I've only read Bartleby.

[San Antone]

This is a four volume set, which I purchased from Amazon.  Three of the volumes arrived yesterday, and the fourth is scheduled for delivery  tomorrow:

The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads



Bertrand Bronson's Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads begins where Francis James Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads leaves off. In four large volumes published by Princeton University Press between 1959 and 1972, Bronson brought together all available tunes for each of Child's ballads together with their texts, annotated and organized them, with notes describing the history and development of each tune and tune family. The collection was immediately accepted as an indispensable text for ballad scholars, performers, and students of the ballad tradition - nearly 2,200 pages of tunes and texts with notation for 4,120 tunes - a milestone in ballad scholarship that has never been surpassed. (more)