New, Not Blue

The funk of the weekend has paled. A few eeeks back my friend Ed was heading out west for a holiday, he asked if there were any books I wanted him to look for while in the Bay Area. I scribbled a short list and all was good. He didn't find any of the titles noted and such was life.

Last Wednesday my friend Travis and I were browsing the Broadway Goodwill and after the initial shock of a Stefan Zweig novel in German and a Napolean bio in French, I did encounter a pristine copy of Simone De Beauvoir's The Mandarins. Two day's later Roger made his selction for samizdat and I ordered that and added novels by Patrick Hamilton and Victor Serge to the order so as to, you know, eliminate that cumbersome shipping charge.