Deja-Vu, Surely Not!

This may seem like deja-vu, but really it is my attempt at righting a terrible wrong that I have committed. My girlfriend, Ionia Martin of Readfulthingsblog.com, pointed out to me, in her own inimitable fashion, that the original post yesterday was an extremely strong candidate for the most boring blog post ever award. Upon re-reading it I would actually go as far as to say that it would be a runaway winner of that particular award, were there one. I have to confess that I have no recollection of having written it at all. That being said, there is still no excuse for the pain that I must have inflicted on those of you that actually managed to reach the end, and for that I apologise.

The original idea of these posts regarding my book collection, was to attempt to instill in readers the profound joy that can be experienced collecting first editions, even on a limited budget. I guess that in order to do that, the post must not put those readers instantly to sleep. I will try again.

So without further babbling, onto this week’s book, ‘The Naked Lunch’ by William Burroughs. This beat generation novel was originally intended to be called ‘Naked Lunch’, a title that was later used prominently in the US, although ‘The Naked Lunch’ remained common in Europe. The copy that I have is a first UK edition and has a pretty cool cover, as you can see. Since I haven’t read it yet, and I will not be reading this copy, I have to say that I hope you can judge a book by its cover. If so it will be a great read.

The boring details of this book, that I kind of like to know are, in short, that it was published in 1964 by John Calder (publishers) Ltd. Both the book and the dust cover are in pretty good condition. It is not price clipped and was originally available for 42s (shillings), I only wish that it had cost me so little, when I found it at the Cambridge book fair last year.

This old, yellowed, newspaper clipping (above) slating William Burrough’s book ‘Nova Express’, from what looks to be the Guardian Newspaper was tucked away inside. I doubt it affects things in any material way, but is interesting.

So hopefully a few more of you actually survived until the end of this post and I do hope you will comment, even if only to say, ‘thank fuck it wasn’t as boring as last time’.

Cambridge Book Fair – Dare I go?

The Cambridge Book Fair is this Friday and Saturday, 22nd and 23rd February, at the Guild Hall in Cambridge. I have been agonising over whether to go along this year, after the amount of money that I ended up spending there last year. It was a really good fair last year with a lot of dealers, although space was tight. There was an excellent selection of old and rare books and I found a number of first editions that I had been looking for. My small collection grew considerably that day.I managed to get not only the Enid Blyton firsts I had been wanting, but also, by chance, a very nice first UK edition of ‘The Naked Lunch’ by William Burroughs.

I have been provided with complimentary tickets by Peakirk Books so I really have no reasonable excuses, except the travel into Cambridge from here (about 20miles), and is that a reasonable excuse.

Surely I should be able to exhibit sufficient self control to just go and look around without having to spend copious amounts of money. I should be, but I am not sure that I am.

Anyway, my question to you all is ‘Should I stay or should I go?’ Leave a comment.