Enough.

William M. Klimon wrote:

John, you're back.

OK, I suppose I am. For now, at least.

You can see you haven't missed much.

As I recall it, Scott Kamins asked what happened to this newsgroup, and
things just went downhill from there!

What's the latest brag or brawl from Tokyo?

I've spent the last couple of months ripping out the staircase of our house
and replacing it. It's an old house in Japanese terms (40 years old) and
people were quite a bit smaller then, so the treads on the stairs were very
narrow, plus they negotiated a nasty curve, making them quite dangerous. I
took a tumble down them one night in January and decided, "That's it! I've
had enough!! and rebuilt the staircase. Had to redesign the downstairs area,
too, to accommodate the new design. Still not finished, but it's looking
good.

I guess that's not the kind of brag you were looking for, though...

On the book front, the books I buy in Japan are pretty much things I buy for
resale, so they're not really collector's brags. Unless you think of them as
*some other* collector's brags, of course, in which case I guess they merit
a mention. Two of my recent favourites are a set of Japanese translations of
Doc Savage:

http://rarebooksinjapan.com/images/DOCSAVAGE1.JPG
http://rarebooksinjapan.com/images/DOCSAVAGE2.JPG
http://rarebooksinjapan.com/images/DOCSAVAGE3.JPG
http://rarebooksinjapan.com/images/DOCSAVAGE4.JPG
http://rarebooksinjapan.com/images/DOCSAVAGE5.JPG

and a Meiji period (1906) Japanese-language edition of Darwin's Origin of
Species:

http://rarebooksinjapan.com/images/darwincover.JPG
http://rarebooksinjapan.com/images/darwintitle.JPG
http://rarebooksinjapan.com/images/darwinfrontis.JPG
http://rarebooksinjapan.com/images/darwincolophon.JPG
http://rarebooksinjapan.com/images/darwincontents.JPG

The Doc Savage stuff was fun for peanuts; the price I got for it for it
didn't even begin to compensate for the time it took to chase up a set for
the person who asked for it and another set for his friend. But it was fun,
as was a bunch of books on Japanese airships that someone had me running
around for round about Christmas time.

The Darwin was a very handsome book, and a good example of Meiji-period
scholarship; it was preceded by another Japanese edition, a decade earlier,
whereas the first complete Chinese edition didn't come out until nearly
twenty years later.

My *real* brags are those in my own collections. I have done nothing on the
Victorian women front, but there's a lot of stuff to update on the martyrs
web pages (http://rarebooksinjapan.com/religious/index.html), with some
veritable treasures that I shall post there in due course. Other than that,
I just paid an excellent price for the scarce first edition of Arthur
Collins' Letters and Memorials of State (2 volumes, 1746). This is the first
published edition of the letters of Henry Sidney, Philip Sydney, Robert
Sydney, et al. - a fascinating insight into the political wheeling and
dealing of the Stuart and Jacobean periods. There's a lot of stuff on
Ireland under Elizabeth, which I'm looking forward to studying in earnest.
And - I can't resist mentioning, though it's not a book at all - a lovely
Muromachi (14th-16th century) period Buddhist statue
(http://rarebooksinjapan.com/Kotouhin/muromachi.JPG).

How about yourself?

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com

Bud Webster wrote:

Christ, I should have kept my mouth shut.

Hi, Bud! We've hijacked your thread to have a civilised discussion. Don't
feel shy about butting back in, but could we keep religion out of it? ;-)

Basta, amigo...

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com

"Bud Webster" noted:

Christ, I should have kept my mouth shut.

Don't worry Bud, I put Spamamoto on my kill file so I won't be reading any more
of his hypocritical ravings.
--
Bob Finnan
http://bobfinnan.com

"John Yamamoto-Wilson" wrote in
message ...

How about yourself?



I've had a good run since last you were here. We had a blast at the
California International Antiquarian Book Fair in San Francisco this year.
I had good chats with Michael Zinman, Bill Reese, Rick Gekoski, Peter
Howard, Joe McCann, and Ricky Jay, among others, as well as my old friends
Christopher Edwards, Dave Szewczyk and Cynthy Buffington, and Kevin Johnson.

My book from the Fair this year was the very last thing I looked at at the
very last booth I visited, Maggs Bros. I picked up a convert trifecta:
Evelyn Waugh's life of Ronald Knox inscribed by Waugh to Alec Guinness
(converts all). It was far from a steal but I did get a nice discount off
their catalog price (the book just hadn't sold for some reason).

I've since gotten a few more nice things from Maggs and Chr. Edwards, but
I'll save the details for later.

Oh, alright, one mo I got quite an interesting piece of 17/c
anti-Catholic literature, which I don't usually delve into, unless it
attacks someone's conversion directly. Well, this is the mother of all
anti-convert pieces: the *Legenda Lignea* (1653). As Maggs described it:
"It begins with a list (printed in red) of 53 English Catholic converts ["A
Legend of Revolters to Rome"], nine of whom, including Sir Toby Mathew,
Walter Montagu, Hugh 'Serenus' Cressy, and Richard Crashaw, are single out
for detailed attack: hence the title Legenda Lignea, a "wooden legend" in
ironic imitation of the saints' lives in the medieval Golden Legend."
Apparently, this is one of the earliest biographical pieces on Richard
Crashaw, so I've got that going for me . . . which is nice.


William M. Klimon
http://www.catholicbookcollector.com

William M. Klimon wrote:

I got quite an interesting piece of 17/c anti-Catholic
literature, which I don't usually delve into, unless it
attacks someone's conversion directly. Well, this is the
mother of all anti-convert pieces: the *Legenda Lignea*
(1653).

Now there's a brag!

Enviously,

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com