A great new 'used' book store has opened in the old Ballard Library. It is called
Abraxas Books. May I say it has books of all kinds but not yet
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. I started at the A's and quite honestly was tired looking at the titles by the time I got to the D's. There in the C's was Conrad, and this old copy of his
Rescue.
Ah, I thought.
I don't think I've read this one. Opened the cover and saw a price tag of $6.50. Put it under my arm.
The Author's Note, indicates it, the note, was written for a release of his
first Collected Edition, and for a while I thought maybe this copy was from that edition. There is no reference to printing, only that it was Copyright 1920,21 and the Author's Note was from 1920... But then I noted it was published by Doubleday,
Doran and Company - and I have since learned that Doubleday was so known from 1927-46, so presumably the copy is from this era.
The other day I turned to page 340 and noted, curiously, that the next 2 pages were actually connected; i.e. they were the same piece of paper folded at the top.... so now the question is, how am I supposed to read pages 342-343? Of course it struck me that no one had gotten near to finishing 340 pages, else they would've sliced the pages to read ... Because it is actually something of a page turner, very cinematic, about pirates and swashbucklers... Who could want more?
Nevertheless, this discovery has left me with something of a quandary, as for some reason I'm not quite ready to take my knife and separate these
siamese/conjoined pages. In some way I feel the book is better off in this pristine state; it is like these pages themselves are lost, lost inside this lost book, found in
Abraxas Books; a charm, an offering, an
abraxas you might say, of lost books.
