Less of a wow shopping for books in the US these days given the existence of Amazon & other sources but there were still one or two things that caught the eye ...





... a modest haul, all things considered, and in any case there were suitcases to think about.





Picked up this new Ashbery volume in Politics & Prose in Washington. A lovely edition with a question mark motif running from the front to end papers. The page layout & typeface make Ashbery's poems read rather differently. Strange.





I had read about this book via someone's blog a few years ago (Kate Greenstreet? Jess Mynes?). Anyway, it was tucked up under a shelf in a secondhand bookstore on or near Bleecker Street (NY). I like the cover's playfulness with the letter 'A' & the inside's good, too. Enough grit to set it apart from the usual dishwater How To type of book. Not too much about dancing, either, which is probably a good thing given my two left feet.





Bought this Robert Walser collection in the world famous Strand Bookshop on Saturday morning with the equally world famous Geof Huth. Highly desirable, with fascinating reproductions of manuscripts & other scraps. For instance:





Good, eh?

Oh, and back in Washington I happened upon this brick of a Robert Duncan Collected (or at least the first volume) in the Bethesda Barnes & Noble. It will join the Lisa J biography & the HD Book on the To Read shelf. (It groans a little more).





And finally, although deserving a separate post entirely, here's a first glimpse of a Geof Huth phylactery (I'm thinking of those little boxes containing the key texts) which he gave me as we sat munching on our tarragon chicken sandwiches down near St Mark's (what better locale?).




More on this to come ... plus the Kate Greenstreet & Erin Moure volumes which I collected from the post room this afternoon. Yum yum.