May 15, Times-Colonist book sale

Always a most pleasant time, attending the Times-Colonist book sale. I've learned now to take a pocketful of cash rather than rely on credit or debit, but it's been a few years since I've been tempted to spend all of it, in part because I now attend early on the second day. No first-day crush, but also no post-breakfast or post-church johnny-come-latelys, so it's pretty calm for the first 90 minutes or so.

So with the occasional hint from one blurb or another, and excluding books for my daughter, here's the day's haul:
  • Poul Anderson, Twilight World ("The time is shortly after the Great Nuclear Spasm")
  • Poul Anderson, The Winter of the World ("First came the ice, and a magnificent civilization collapsed beneath the glaciers")
  • BC Motorist (14 issues between 1963 and 1970, the magazine of the BC Automobile Association)
  • British Columbia Digest, a 1965 issue (now BC Outdoors)
  • Arthur C. Clarke, The Deep Range ("...a future when submarine patrols harvest the water's wealth to feed the world")
  • Capt. J.Y. Cousteau with Frederic Dumas, The Silent World (Cousteau's first book)
  • Garth Coward, Tree Book: Learning to Recognize Trees of British Columbia (great little pocket guide that I'm hoping will let me practice enough to distinguish between the assorted firs and spruces that continue to plague my best environmentalist intentions)
  • Richard Ellis, Tuna: Love, Death, and Mercury ("at once an astounding ode to one of nature's greatest marvels and a serious examination of a creature and world at risk")
  • Finnish Forest and Park Service, Forestry Environment Guide ("This booklet has been printed on the high-quality Finnish paper necessary to do full justice to the fine paintings and photographs used to illustrate it")
  • Erna Gunther, Northwest Coast Indian Art (awesomely, the catalogue for the Fine Arts Pavilion at the Seattle Word's Fair of 1962)
  • Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah
  • Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
  • Frank Herbert, The Green Brain ("His masterpiece of ecological horror!")
  • Robert Hunter & Rex Weyler, To Save a Whale: The Voyages of Greenpeace (tales and photos from leaders of the mid-70s anti-whaling adventures)
  • Joseph Wood Krutch, The Voice of the Desert: A Naturalist's Interpretation
  • Aldo Leopold, Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold, ed. Luna Leopold
  • Lisa McGonigle, Snowdrift (documenting a few years spent snowboarding etc in the Kootenays, after this young Irishwoman "abandoned her scholarship at Oxford")
  • T.C. McLuhan, The Way of the Earth: Encounters with Nature in Ancient and Contemporary Thought
  • Jonathan Raban, Old Glory (boating solo down the Mississippi, in a 16-foot skiff)
  • David V. Reddick, Ma-Kee: The Life and Death of a Muskellunge (um, yeah, actually an imagined biography of an individual fish, which might be the clincher in assessing whether my nerdishness is in fact redeemable: it's not unlike Fred Bodsworth's wonderful Last of the Curlews, if that helps)
  • Andy Russell, Trails of a Wilderness Wanderer: Memoirs of a Modern Frontiersman
  • Theodora Stanwell-Fletcher, Driftwood Valley: The Northern Frontier ("Together, a trapper and a naturalist set out for the wilderness to the North"-published in 1946)
  • Gene Stratton-Porter, Freckles (one of the Limberlost novels, but about a logging company: thanks to Nancy Holmes for telling me about it!)
  • John & Mildred Teal, Life and Death of the Salt Marsh
  • Susan Vreeland, The Forest Lover ("A lavish historical novel about a pioneering woman artist and the untamed country she loved"-meaning Emily Carr)
  • Fred Wah, Diamond Grill (a recent recollection of Nelson in 1951, organized around the city's newest Chinese cafe, owned by Wah's father)
  • Sheila Watson, Deep Hollow Creek (the Cariboo of the 1930s, written at that time)
  • Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals

Comments

theresa k said…
Oh yikes, I just lost my comment which was: Some terrific finds! I wonder if the Krutch is the Sightlines editon? They are doing some wonderful books. And Deep Hollow Creek is one of my favourite novels. An interesting coda to it would be Hilary Place's A Place in the Cariboo, the history of his family at Dog Creek where DHC is set and where Sheila Watson was briefly his teacher.
richard said…
Thanks for reading the whole list, Theresa! I think you're the only person who does.

The Krutch is actually a 1975 paperback from Morrow.

I've been meaning for years to get to Deep Hollow Creek, since reading DHC in class about 20 years ago. I had a really great student from Dog Creek a few years ago writing about Chilcotin literature, but even so I didn't manage to get there. Sigh. I'll follow up the Hilary Place reference, too.
theresa said…
I guess I love to know what other people are reading and also I wish I'd been able to go to a booksale which had such great possible choices.
tk
richard said…
Tell you what, Theresa: let me know which three titles to send you, and they'll be in the mail next week. It's a great sale, and I'm happy to share.

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