rikita and i had breakfast here at garden street and then went to the semi-annual harvard bookstore frequent buyer sale: shame it should fall so near the end of the month but then it probably saved me from going all out and breaking the bank and my back all over again. i stayed only in the used book section and i put back a great many books and in the end i came away with:

• a peter rabbit treasury with lovely coloured illustrations
  
• a shabby old copy of the water babies, which i got because i've never been able to buy one before, all the puffin editions in recent print having a frog on the cover, so i can't actually hold them. this one was from the 70s.
  
• a copy of sylvia waugh's the mennyms, to give to rikita. (she, in turn, got me the fledglings by jane langton)
  
• the selected non fictions of borges edited by weinberger.
  
• sebald's ring of saturns, which i've never managed to keep for more than a month because everytime i buy myself a copy i find someone who hasn't read it and foist mine on them.
  
• another copy of the following story. *defensive* this time it was in an edition i've not before met.
  
• a glossary of language and mind editted by jean aitchison. a kind of beginner's psycholinguistic dictionary.
  
• an ars amatoria translated by rolf rolfe humphries simply because i liked his metamorphoses.
  
• the second volume of the britannica "great books of the western world" edition of aristotle, including the biological treatises, de poetica and de rhetorica. i really like these books which were printed in the 50s, of which harvard bookstore has a large number. they give me a great deal of aesthetic pleasure and are nothing like their modern day counterparts of the same series. if i were to buy a modern edition of any classics of western thought i would go for sensible paperback with proper annotations and certainly not a book out of a self-professed great books series honestly i don't want improving books it's as bad as taking out readers' digest to learn english which is what people always seem to want to hawk to me when i'm feeling belligerent and in one of my "i'm a foreigner i no speak much english" frame of mind.)
  
• the marriage of cadmus and harmony, to replace the copy i gave away to evans
  
• flying to nowhere. i always buy it up when i see one.
  
• ende's neverending story, for isn't it high time i owned one if i mean to write on it?
  
• castle barebane and only because i wanted a frivolous joan aiken novel. can i pass up one which subtitle reads "a novel of suspense" and has a blurb that begins "val montgomery, young, warm hearted and confident- but no lady, according to the grandes dames of new york in th 1880s, abandons a promising job on a newspaper and a claustrophobic engagement with a society lawyer and sails to england to help her spendthrift half-brother, nils, whose scottish heiress wife, kirstie, has fallen ill." ooh! trashy implausible and convoluted 19th century soap! full of murders and dark deeds and romance and newspaper editors and heiresses and tramps and people with titles doing unspeakable things to each other! american innocent in europe! doesn't that sound like perfect bathroom reading?