Sept 3 - dept sale

It's the first day of classes, and we were welcomed back with another heartbreaking book sale, this one completely filling the department library's tables and floor. Longtime and favoured prof Margot Louis passed away a little while ago now, and there was a sale in the department's main office of all the books from her office that the library didn't want, and that her friends didn't want as mementoes. This was a sad thing, made more so because some books remained there for months, unwanted even for the cost of donation.

Well, Margot's home office has now had the same treatment, so the rest of her book-owning life is spread out, spine-up, across six tables and a few hundred square feet of floor. I can't imagine anyone would ever want simply to take on my own library, and I understand I've got individual and somewhat peculiar tastes, but it's difficult to see a dissolution in progress.

Not difficult enough, mind you, to prevent me from adding to my own library of things no one but me would want:

• George Bowering, Burning Water (historical but somewhat pomo novel of the founding of Vancouver)
  
• Christopher Dewdney, The Natural History (an epic poem of natural history, among other things, including a four-page "Bibliography of Creatures Mentioned": the Red Backed Salamander, the Wood Frog, the Green Darner Dragonfly, line storms, rhubarb, catalpa, spruce (blue), Niagara Escarpment, Rondeau...)
  
• ed. Robert Finch and John Elder, The Norton Book of Nature Writing (908 big pages, from Gilbert White to Terry Tempest Williams)
  
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman (ed. Larry Ceplair), Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Nonfiction Reader
  
• Tomson Highway, Kiss of the Fur Queen (a Cree novel about residential school survivors who become artists, under the eye of "the wily, shape-shifting Fur Queen")
  
• Roy Kiyooka, Pear Tree Pomes (yes, he did spell it that way, and I'm very excited to find this book!)
  
• ed. Peter Nabokov, Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992 (a compilation of oral history, more or less, that I'll need to research before I know what to think of it)
  
• comp. and ed. Jim Pojar and Andy MacKinnon, Plants of Coastal British Columbia, including Washington, Oregon & Alaska
  
• Sharon Pollock, The Komagata Maru Incident (a play about an important and gob-smacking BC historical event)
  
• Dale Zieroth, Mid-river (poems by a writer I've so far wanted to like a bit more than I have...)