Bookaholic

I’m going to restart an old project of mine—and you can help, by voting. Here’s how it works. The Deadword Dictionary is dedicated to spotlighting words we might well abolish. These are orphan words, words used in perhaps only one expression and without which the English language could do just fine. I don’t hate deadwords, I find them fascinating. Anyone learning and using English may find deadwords actually very useful.

Your part is to vote your comment on whether the word should live or die. Have you ever used the word, or do you expect ever to use it in the future? Here’s the first one:

“Cahoots” is used in the expression “in cahoots with” someone. One never finds it in the singular; its meaning is to share a secret plan or plot, usually with a person or persons not otherwise commonly associated with the individual under discussion. “Joseph Kennedy was reputed to be in cahoots with Chicago mobsters to help swing the election to his son Jack Kennedy.”

Books sold in August: Don’t Panic: Procrastinator’s Guide to Writing an Effective Term Paper (more copies available); John Fante Letters (signed); Christopher DeNoon, Posters of the WPA (a terrific resource). Also sent out Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Bandanna Books modernized version with Orson Welles drawings, to an artist who might be interested in helping create a similar illustrated edition

On an unrelated issue, I was chosen to be Beta tester for Blue Mars, a fancy-shmancy 3D world, but I was unable to open the client in my virtual Windows program 8=( And I haven’t made much progress with the Trial of Socrates in Second Life — any volunteers for acting or coding? I’m hoping to get an avatar to play the Socrates role, perhaps another for Crito — so the show can go on indefinitely without wearing people out. More on that later.

Here are the new arrivals, a number of science and math textbooks. I hope they’re still of use.

• Steven S. Zumdahl. Chemical Principles.
• Hugh D. Young and Roger A. Freedman. University Physics, Volume One, and Volume Two.
• Gilbert M. Masters. Introduction to Environmental Engineering and Science.
• Jerrold E. Marsden, Anthony J. Tromba, Alan Weinstein. Basic Multivariable Calculus.
• Roland E. Larson, Robert P. Hostetler, Bruce H. Edwards. Calculus with Analytic Geometry.
• Frank P. Incropera and David P. DeWitt. Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer.
• Deborah Hughes-Hallett, Andrew M. Gleason et al. Calculus
  and the companion volume Student Solutions Manual to Accompany Calculus.
• Yunus A. Cengel and Michael A. Boles. Thermodynamics. An Engineering Approach. Third Edition.
• Curtis F. Gerald and Patrick O. Wheatley. Applied Numerical Analysis.

Also some self-help, a horse book, and a couple of mystery novels by women authors at the top of the list at sbbookauction.com.
I’m up to 640 titles now, and trying two other sites to see what works in terms of selling. I can’t remember anyone in my family that was in the “selling racket,” so I’m feeling my way. And, of course, the Internet has its own unwritten rules.

From time to time I will post the “new” titles I’m putting online on my masterlist. Here’s recent additions: 10,001 Food Facts, James Beattie and Oliver Goldsmith. The Poetical Works of James Beattie and the Poems and Plays of Oliver Goldsmith (for the 19th-century buff), Sarah Bradford: Elizabeth. A Biography of Britain’s Queen, C.D.B. Bryan. The National Air and Space Museum, Sandra Brown, Bill Clinton. Giving, Art and Literature. Topics of the Time. A Series of Representative Essays on Questions of the Day. 1883, Edna Ferber. Giant (a first edition, basis of the James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson movie), Sheldon H. Cherry. Planning Ahead for Pregnancy, Howard Cosell, Patricia Cornwell, Robert Crais. Plus four issues of LIFE Magazine from 1944 and 1945, in case you feel nostalgic for wartime. Masterlist url: http://www.bandannabooks/auction. And if you are willing to swap me with a better book, just ask.

So it starts. Catching up, I’m still a publisher, though I haven’t published anything new in several years. Life, as someone once said, is what happens while you were busy doing other things.
Or, as an entrepreneur in the Stanford series said, his biggest hits seemed to occur in odd little side projects that were not scheduled to be a success.
Well, I never set out to be a “success,” and in that I have succeeded! (side bar, I can’t help looking at words. To succeed really means to follow, as in Who is your successor? By some twist of history, it has come to mean reaping great rewards, even though the literal meaning is reaping whatever follows. End sidebar).
My “in the meantime” currently is to sell books, starting with the collection that just seems to grow on my shelves. But once I made that decision, I’m buying way more than I’m selling, though at about 50 cents a book for hardcover with dust jacket, sometimes first editions or even signed copies. Somehow it satisfies me at this point in my life just to handle the books, not even to read them. Which is astonishing, given that I’ve been an avid reader (is one an avid anything else but reader?) since childhood. I claim the right to title this blog Bookaholic on that basis. Books were my earliest and deepest friends.
Thus endeth the first blog.