Another Day, Another Book Sale

My primary goal in attending this week’s big book sale was to round out my Virginia Woolf collection in anticipation of the reading project that I mentioned the other day. I did rather well on that count, picking up four of the novels and one of the essay collections that I didn’t yet own. But of course I didn’t stop there. I found a raft of books to feed my current obsession with the novel as a literary form. Then I came across a few bargain editions of books I’ve read multiple times but inexplicably didn’t have copies of in my collection. Plus a selection of memoirs, essays, and letters that I’ve been after for a while. Plus a few short story collections by authors whose work I’ve become increasingly interested in of late thanks to discussions at A Curious Singularity. And finally, a couple of fiction titles that I’ve been meaning to buy for ages. You can see why I didn’t restrain myself.

Here’s the grand list:

Miriam Allott, Novelists on the Novel;
The Personal Papers of Anton Chekhov: his notebook diary
     and letters on writing (translated by S.S. Koteliansky,
     Leonard Woolf, and Constance Garnett);
Robertson Davies, World of Wonders;
Robert Murray Davis, ed., The Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism;
John Halperin, ed., The Theory of the Novel: New Essays;
John Lent, So It Won’t Go Away;
Katherine Mansfield, Bliss;
Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood;
Mary McCarthy, The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays;
Lorrie Moore, Birds of America;
Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop;
Cynthia Ozick, Metaphor & Memory;
Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the last minute;
Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins
     (John Hall Wheelock, ed.);
Robert Scholes, ed., Approaches to the Novel: Materials for a Poetics;
Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the
     Imagination;
Philip Stevick, ed., The Theory of the Novel;
Guy Vanderhaeghe, Man Descending;
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel;
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room;
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out;
Virginia Woolf, The Waves;
Virginia Woolf, The Years; and,
Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader.

There’s yet another such book sale next week. At the rate I’m going, perhaps I ought to sit that one out…