Noel Perrin (1927-2004) was a great essayist, and his First Person Rural series contain some of the best gentleman farmer anecdotes ever.  But he also wrote a series of book reviews of lesser known books, and his essays are so good you want to run right out and read all the books he reviews!  Trouble is, most are out of print.  So I set a goal to find them and offer them for sale, along with Noel Perrin's own books, of course.  I don't have them all, either.  But here's a good start.  Oh, and if you want more of Perrin's essays, you'll have to buy A Reader's Delight. That, and his other books, are listed for sale at the end of this list.
 

FICTION CATALOGS How to order This is a self-made website by little old me, and while it might be big, it is not sophisticated.  The little  icon takes you to a generic order form where you can type in the author, title, price, and indicate whether you would like to send me a check or PayPal payment.  I will confirm availability via e-mail, and once I've received payment, I'll ship the book.  It's that easy.  If you have questions,  please don't hesitate to ask  via email. Condition Grades There's a standard bookseller vocabulary, with terms like Fine, Very Good, Good and Poor to assess condition (to see these terms defined, click on the link above).  Most of my books are in Very Good or better condition, and I tend to overemphasize their flaws so that any surprise is a pleasant one.  Feel free to ask questions, and if the book isn't in the condition described, you may return it for a full refund.  Wants Lists If I don't have the book you seek in stock, I will retain your book search in my wants files and email you when I do have a copy for sale. If you don't hear back from me immediately, that probably means I don't have a copy right now.  But fear not,  I keep extensive files and never stop looking....  so send me your request;  you've got nothing to lose! Not listed? Not everything is listed on-line. Let me know what you're looking for. Book Search Form In Print Books If it's in print, I can get it for you. Just ask me.

Adams, Henry.  Democracy. 1880. So begins the best political novel yet written in America, Henry Adams's Democracy.  The author had extraordinary qualifications for writing it.  His own family had been casting shadows for three generations.  His great-grandfather, while serving as president of the United States, was the one who supervised the transfer of the government to Washington in 1800.  His grandfather had been both president and a congressman.  His father had been both ambassador to England and a congressman.  (Well, actually minister to England--in those days we were a more modest nation.) Henry Adams himself was a writer, not a politican, but he knew politics inside out.  One of his boyhood memories was the exciting nomination of his father for vice-president on the Free Soil ticket.  As a young man he had the opportunity to study government on both sides of the Atlantic -- first as a congressional aide in Washington for a winter, then for seven years as an American diplomat in London. And perhaps Adams's despair of American politics was not total, after all.  Five years after the book came out, he made over the copyright to the National Civil Service Reform League, and for almost half a century, until long after his death, the royalties -- and they were substantial -- went into the effort to make democracy work.  Casting a shadow, that's called. --Noel Perrin, "Gulliver Goes to Washington" in A Reader's Delight. Adams, Henry. DEMOCRACY. Farrar, Straus & Young, Hardcover.   VG.  <SOLD> Ade, George.  Fables in Slang. 1899. It is irresistible to quote George Ade.  If there were more room, I would probably quote the entire fable of the Stuffer family, prosperous farm folk who move to town and attempt to continue eating in the heroic style to which they had been accustomed--and since it is one of Ade's longest fables as well as his funniest, I would wind up seriously unbalancing this book.  Instead I'll merely urge you to find out what happened to the New York Person who had them trembling in Fostoria, Ohio.  It's not what a complacent easterner might suppose.  There is a Turnabout of the most satisfying sort.  Ade was good at that. --Noel Perrin, "The Fables of George Ade" in A Reader's Delight. Ade, George. MORE FABLES. (More Fables in Slang). Illustrated by Clyde J. Newman. Herbert S. Stone And Company, 1900. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Previous owner's bookplate on inside of front cover. Previous owner's inscription on front loose endpaper. Previous owner's attempts at drawing (in pencil) on rear endpapers. Small format.   G+.  $28.00  Ade, George. FABLES IN SLANG. Illustrated by Clyde J. Newman. Herbert S. Stone And Company, 1899. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Top section of front free endpaper removed (looks like a gift inscription was removed) . Staining to covers. Small format.   G.  $25.00  Ade, George. FABLES IN SLANG & MORE FABLES IN SLANG. Illustrated by Clyde J. Newman. Dover, 1960. Softcover. Sunning to spine. Lamination peeling from cover. Trade size pb.   G+.  $15.00  Ade, George. PINK MARSH. Illustrated by John T. McCutcheon. Herbert S. Stone And Company, 1897. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Water damage to bottom of book and back cover. Sold as is. Previous price stamp on front free endpaper. Please note: novel is a period piece and uses offensive terms and concepts. African American caricatures abound.   P.  $10.00  Ade, George. DOC' HORNE. Illustrated by John T. McCutcheon. Herbert S. Stone And Company, 1899. Hardcover. Sold as is. Water damage to bottom of books and bubbling to endpapers. Previous owner's inscription on inside front cover. Another period piece from Ade; uses outmoded conceits and language; potentially offensive.   P.  $10.00  Athill, Diana.  Instead of a Letter. 1962. Only a few totally honest accounts of a human life exist.  That's not because people are lacking who would like to tell the truth.  (They probably -are- a minority.)  It's because you can't tell it unless you know it.  Biographers, not being mind readers, never know it all. People who write their own lives are only slightly better off.  To see the truth of your own life you must first have gotten beyond all illusions about yourself, and probably about the world as well.  Few of us do.  Diana Athill is one of the few.  She is also a gifted writer, and, if one may judge by this book, an enchanting woman. --Noel Perrin, "Over Forty and Just Beginning An Englishwoman's Brilliantly Recorded Life" in A Reader's Delight Barbellion, W.N.P.  The Journal of a Disappointed Man. 1919. Bruce picked the wrong family to be born in.  What -he- wants is first education--lots and lots of it, at the best schools--and then fame.  He'd like to be a great biologist, preferably the greatest of his generation. He knows he has the temperament.  By the time he's fifteen, he is reading Darwin, dissecting leeches, teaching himself chemistry.  At sixteen, when he catches measles, he can look at his own body with a calm scientific eye and note, 'I have somewhere near 10,000 spots on me.'  He can look at his mind (he loves to do this--he is self-intoxicated) and suspect himself of genius.  And all the time he is pouring thoughts into his journal.  What he doesn't know yet is that he is an extraordinarily good writer. This journal is one of the great affirmations in our literature. If I had a friend who found life tedious, who was maybe even suicidal, and I had the power to make him or her read one book, it would be the soul-stirring diary of Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion, alias plain Bruce Cummings. --Noel Perrin, "A Book That Could Cure Suicide" in A Reader's Delight. Beagle, Peter S.  A Find and Private Place. 1960. A reader who's not moved by that scene is (a) blind to good writing, and (b) stonyhearted.  In fact, that's true for the whole novel. You don't even have to accept the possibility of ghosts to be moved, because of course what Peter Beagle is really talking about is the temporariness of everything and the apartness that is present in even the closest human touching. --Noel Perrin, "Love, Longing, and Death" in  A Reader's Delight Beagle, Peter. A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE. Viking, 1960. Hardcover. Previous owner's pencil marks and wite-out on front pasted endpaper. Number written in pen on front pasted endpaper. Some bumping to side of text block.   VG.  $25.00  Bramah, Ernest.  Kai Lung's Golden Hours.  1922. ...he [Ernest Bramah] spent most of his life writing what can only be described as the Chinese equivalent of the Arabian Nights. It came about like this.  In early manhood Bramah encountered the highly ritualized and super-polite mode of speech employed by well-bred Chinese before the revolution.  It involved careful avoidance of ego display (one said 'this person,' not 'I'), elaborate compliments to the person one was addressing, insincere insults to oneself, and as much circumlocution as possible.  All this enchanted Bramah, and he rapidly began to develop an English version, a sort of Anglo-Mandarin speech, which is both extremely comic ('gravity reducing' you'd say in Anglo-Mandarin) and as supple as a well-made glove.  It was then his inspiration to invent the quick-witted and endlessly resourceful story-teller Kai Lung and enlist him as narrator.  Kai Lung plays the role that Scheherazade does in the Arabian Nights. In the end, Bramah wrote five books of Kai Lung stories and published them at leisurely intervals between 1900 and 1940.  All are worth reading, providing one likes artifice.  But the one likeliest to be greeted with actual cries of delight is Kai Lung's Golden Hours, which first began to reduce gravity in 1922. --Noel Perrin, "A Thousand and One Chinese Nights" in A Reader's Delight. Bryher.  Roman Wall. 1954. Rome is barely mentioned in Roman Wall.  The great city in this book is a place called Aventicum, which most of us have never heard of. (It survives to this day as a Swiss village of a couple of thousand called Avenches, which most of us have never heard of either.) It is a historic fact that in 265 A.D. German tribes--the alemanni--crossed the Rhine and captured the Helvetian frontier city of Augusta Raurica.  Half a legion perished in one day.  Pausing only to loot and burn, the tribes moved on to besiege Aventicum, the provincial capital.  That also rapidly fell.  Its garrison died in the burning temple.  The city was never rebuilt, though the mere ruins remained enough to impress Byron fifteen centuries later. Around this minor incident in a minor Roman province (Gibbon never mentions it), Bryher has written a wonderful novel.  Reading it, it is hard to remember that she was actually  a woman of our own time, and not an eyewitnes to those far-off events. --Noel Perrin, "The Decline and Fall of Switzerland" in A Reader's Delight. Bryher. GATE TO THE SEA. Pantheon, 1958. Hardcover. Front dustjacket flap has been clipped.   VG /VG $25.00  Bryher. BEOWULF. A Novel. Pantheon, 1956. Hardcover. Ex-library copy with usual markings.   G /G+ $12.00  Cabell, James Branch.  The Silver Stallion.  1926. An extreme romantic, he is simultaneously an extreme sceptic.  A writer elegant and learned far beyond the American norm, he is also fond of smut.  A lover of courtly good manners, he nevertheless delights in truly breathtaking irreverence. The Silver Stallion is cast in the form of medieval chronicle. --Noel Perrin, "Irreverence in the Year 1239" in A Reader's Delight. Cabell, James Branch. THE SILVER STALLION. Robert M. McBride & Company, 1926. Hardcover. 3rd Printing. Part of previous owner's bookplate pasted to front pasted endpaper. Some yellowing of paper. Minor wear to head and foot of spine and to edges of book.   G.  $17.00  Cabell, James Branch. THE CREAM OF THE JEST. A Comedy of Evasions. Robert M. McBride & Company, 1920. 2nd Edition. Hardcover. Previous owner's inscription on front loose endpaper.   G+.  $7.00  Cabell, James Branch. THE SILVER STALLION. Robert M. McBride & Company, 1926. Hardcover. 3rd Printing. Previous owner's inscription on front loose endpaper. Some yellowing to paper.   G+.  $20.00  Cather, Willa. O PIONEERS!  Illustrated by Mark Weakley. Reader's Digest, 1990. Hardcover. Afterword by Noel Perrin.   VG.  <SOLD> Cockerell, Sydney Carlyle. The Best of Friends: Further Letters to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell. Ed. Viola Maynell.  1956. The Best of Friends contains some hundreds of the letters these people wrote Sydney Cockerell between 1900 and 1954 and a few of his replies.  I can hardly think of a nicer book for bedtime reading.  If "civilization" means anything at all, it means the kind of environment that fosters communication like this.  There is so much affection, intelligence, humor, and ripe wisdom in these letters as to make one actually homesick for the period.  There is also the fascination of reading comments by one distinguished person about another, here on a higher level than in your usual political memoir or book of namedropping. --Noel Perrin, "A Man of Many Letters" in A Reader's Delight. Corncob, Jonathan.  The Adventures of Jonathan Corncob: Loyal American Refugee.  1787. ...a very unusual novel.  Considering when it was written, one might even say an extraordinary novel.  The Adventures of Jonathan Corncob was published in London in 1787.  It is one of fewer than a hundred eighteenth-century novels that even refer to the American Revolution. It is one of five written from an American point of view.  It is the only comic one.  It is, in fact, the -Catch-22- of the Revolution--shorter than Heller's masterpiece, much less sophisticated in terms of technique, but just as full of black humor, and really just as funny. --Noel Perrin, "Two Hundred One Years Old and Still Impudent: The First Novel about the American Revolution" in A Reader's Delight Corncob, Jonathan. THE ADVENTURES OF JONATHAN CORNCOB. Loyal American Refugee. Illustrated by Mark Livingston. David R. Godine, 1976. Hardcover. Edited by Noel Perrin himself. Price blacked out on dustjacket.   VG/VG <SOLD> Cozzens, James Gould.  Guard of Honor. 1948. No one can call it a forgotten book.  It has been in print continuously since its publication in 1948.  People who read lists in almanacs will find it securely in the list of Pulitzer Prize winners in fiction.  In its first year it was a modest best-seller, and last year it still sold seven hundred copies.  Not bad. But it -is- an underrated book by an almost sinfully underrated author.  (Cozzens did other first-class work besides Guard of Honor.  Of his thirteen novels, three and perhaps four belong in the small but high hushed world that Melville spoke of: the world of greatness.) --Noel Perrin, "The Best American Novel about World War II" in A Reader's Delight. Cozzens, James Gould. S.S. SAN PEDRO. Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1931. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Previous owner's inscription on front loose endpaper.   VG- /G+ $25.00  Cozzens, James Gould. GUARD OF HONOR. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1948. Hardcover. Previous owner's inscription on front loose endpaper.   VG-/G+ $15.00  de la Mare, Walter.  The Three Royal Monkeys. 1910. It is a children's book like very few others in our language.  In some ways it's a classic quest story, carefully following the traditions of the youngest-son-as-hero and the test by ordeal.  But it is both wilder and stranger than most quest stories, and it is far richer in language. It is thus not a book for every child but only for those with active imaginations and perhaps some taste for unfamiliar words. --Noel Perrin, "Quest of the Mulla-Mulgars" in A Reader's Delight Dunsany, Lord.  The Blessing of Pan. 1928. There are many kinds of rebels.  One of the oddest and most delightful is the establishment figurewho, not seeming even to notice what he's doing, subverts with his dreamy left hand all that his powerful right hand continues to uphold. Lord Dunsany was just such a figure.  The eighteenth holder of a barony created in 1439, he behaved much like any other British peer.  He went to Eton.  He loved fox hunting.  He married an earl's daughter.  He lived in a castle.  He and his whole family fought for whomever happened to be the king or queen.  He served in the Coldstream Guards and the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers.  His younger brother, Admiral the Hon. Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax--a name that P.G. Wodehouse himself would hardly have dared to invent--commanded a good part of the British navy.  How can you be more establishment than that? But all the time Lord Dunsany was leading a separate fantasy life, and in that he did not uphold the established order at all.  Sometimes, as in The King of Elfland's Daughter, he merely ignored it.  And sometimes, as in The Blessing of Pan, he dreamily turned it on its head. --Noel Perrin, "Lords and Pagans" in A Reader's Delight. Eden, Emily.  The Semi-Attached Couple.  1860. The Semi-Attached Couple is the answer to a good many prayers.  It is the book you go on to when you have run out of Jane Austen's novels. Since Miss Austen wrote only six, people who love them run out rather quickly--and then have to wait a few years until they can read them again.  Meanwhile they could be reading Miss Eden. --Noel Perrin, "After Jane Austen, Who?" in A Reader's Delight. Graves, Robert.  Watch the North Wind Rise.  1949. One thing that nearly all these future worlds have in common is that they are depressing.  Very scientific and very depressing. It is not inevitable that imagined futures be dreary, however. Suppose that instead of a team of economists or the world's six leading demographers, a poet did the gazing.  Suppose that poet was a well-known wit, and as much at home in prose as in poetry.  Suppose him an enemy of the bureaucratic state. But no need to suppose--this work exists.  It is Robert Graves's glorious novel Watch the North Wind Rise.  It presents one of the oddest and most delightful futures I know.  At times I can persuade myself that something like it might really happen. --Noel Perrin, "A Future Ruled by Magic" in A Reader's Delight. Graves, Robert. WATCH THE NORTHWIND RISE. Creative Age Press, Inc. , 1949. 1st Edition. Hardcover.   VG-/VG  <SOLD> Howells, William Dean.  Indian Summer. 1886. One of them doesn't just sparkle--it flashes with wit, gleams with intelligence, glows with sense.  That book is Indian Summer.  it's a true minor classic. --Noel Perrin, "A Nearly Perfect Comedy" in A Reader's Delight. Howard, Maureen.  Bridgeport Bus. 1965. The basic plot is a familiar one, because it expresses one of the very commonest of human fantasies.  Ugly duckling becomes a swan.  Man or woman trapped in boring routine breaks loose, makese a new start, achieves a glamorous life.  Seemingly ordinary person proves exceptional.  All of us -are- exceptional, at least to ourselves, only the world fails to treat us so.  It is deeply gratifying to read about someone who gets a grip on himself or herself and makes the world respond properly.  Maureen Howard's treatment of the theme is something else.  In the usual book of this kind--and I am talking about true novels, not easy romances-- the Ag character has center stage all to herself, while we, entranced, watch her transformation.  And in the usual book of this kind, swanhood turns out to be a really nice thing.  Some of the other swans may prove vicious; some of the glitter of the great world may prove to be tinsel; the transformed life may even end in tragedy.  But that it is a glorious thing to become a swan, and that the great world is truly great, these assumptions are not questioned. Bridgeport Bus is not like that. --Noel Perrin, "Ugly Ducklings and Unhappy Swans" in A Reader's Delight Howard, Maureen. BRIDGEPORT BUS. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965. 1st Edition. Hardcover.   VG/VG <SOLD> Jacobs, W.W.  Many Cargoes. 1896. But it wsn't all white whales and perilous voyages either.  There was also plenty of humdrum sailing.  Up until about a hundred years ago, for example, garbage was taken out into Chesapeake Bay in sailing barges, and cargoes of beer and cowhides went up and down the coast in dirty little schooners that hugged the shore. It is this kind of seafaring, in its English version, that W.W. Jacobs writes about in Many Cargoes. Never condescending and seldom false, W.W. Jacobs made glorious comedy out of lives that to most people would have seemed brutal or humdrum, or both. --Noel Perrin, "Sailing to London" in A Reader's Delight. Jacobs, W. W.  MANY CARGOES. Illustrated by E. W. Kemble. Grosset & Dunlap, 1903. Hardcover. Some bumps to back cover.   VG-.  $18.00  Jacobs, W. W.  MANY CARGOES. Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1898. Hardcover. Small volume. "Collection of British Authors: Tauchnitz edition, vol. 3256. Spine also reads "Abercrombie's Moral Feelings". Pages not warped; this is a little book with character, matching the stories within perhaps better than do the reprinted versions.   G. <SOLD> Kenko.  Essays in Idleness. 1332. Kenko's principal prose work is a collection of 243 tiny essays, ranging in length from a single sentence to three or four pages.  They are in the form the Japanese call -zuihitsu-, meaning scattered thoughts, and they remain to this day the most famous example of -zuihitsu- in all Japanese literature.  Many of them also remain as deliciously readable in the 1980s as they were in the 1330s--and not because of their quaint medieval charm, either.  On the contrary, one thing that's striking about Kenko is that his sensibility seems so in tune with the contemporary world.  He would be quite at home in present-day Japan or America. --Noel Perrin, "In Medieval Japan" in A Reader's Delight King, Henry.  "The Exequy." 1624. But the greatest of the one-poem survivors is, I think, Henry King, an Englishman born in 1592.  His 'Exequy to His Matchless Never-to-be-Forgotten Friend' is quite simply one of the supreme laments in our language. The friend that King promised never to forget was his wife Anne. She dies young.  She was twenty-four (and he thirty-two); they had been joyfully married since she was sixteen.  Soon after her death he wrote his great poem. --Noel Perrin, "Lament for a Young Wife" in A Reader's Delight. Larkin, Philip.  "Church Going." 1955. ...he holds a sure place in the anthologies, and in the reference books, too. But there is no line of his you can count on people to recognize--no world ending with a whimper, no rough beast slouching along, no fences making good neighbors.  There is no book of his everybody has read.  Surprisingly few people realize that Larkin has written one of the great poems of our time. That poem is called 'Church Going.'  Fundamentalists of all sects should probably avoid it, because its sensibility is so alien to their own.  Most other people will find it profoundly moving.  That's especially true for people who don't even believe in profundity (or in being moved).  They will be hit hardest of all. --Noel Perrin, "Philip Larkin's Greatest Poem" in A Reader's Delight Lewis, C.S.  They Asked for a Paper. 1962. I do have space to say one last thing.  I dare to recommend Lewis in his scholarly role to the general reader because he is that rarity among great scholars, a person with a clear and extremely readable prose style. Other scholars have sometimes called him -too- clear, meaning they think he oversimplifies.  And I confess that occasionally, like Saint Thomas Aquinas, he will be sheer force of logic make what seems to be an overwhelming point; later, looking back, one suspects the evidence has been forced into a neater pattern than complex truth will bear. But mostly Lewis is amazing in his ability to express the full complexity of a thing in language as clear and ringing as crystal. --Noel Perrin, "A C.S. Lewis Miscellany" in A Reader's Delight Macaulay, Rose.  A Casual Commentary. 1925. In 1925, shortly before the -New Yorker- was founded, Miss Macaulay published an enchanting book of essays called A Casual Commentary. There are about forty essays in it (thirty-nine, if you must know--but it's breaking all the rules of casualness to have counted).  Two generations later, most of them remain intensely pleasurable to read. Considering that Miss Macaulay wrote solely for an English audience, and considering that what she wrote was a series of offhand reflections on events and ideas and even politics of the early 1920s, giving no thought to posterity or high art, and considering that the book is thus both parochial and ephemeral, this is no mean feat. --Noel Perrin, "In an Offhand Manner" in A Reader's Delgiht Mathers, Michael. RIDING THE RAILS. 1973.  'I rode so fast on a hotshot one time I passed a mudhole and a tomato patch and they was a mile apart.  I passed them so goddam fast they looked like tomato soup.  After that I caught a local--a real slow train and he stopped at every house, and when we come to a two-family house we stopped twice.  That was in Arkansas.'  That's a beautifully paced story.  Riding the Rails is a beautifully paced book.  It is one of the gems of photojournalism--and there are not many. --Noel Perrin, "Men in Boxcars" in A Reader's Delight. Mathers, Michael. RIDING THE RAILS. Gambit, 1973. Hardcover. 1st Printing. Ex-library copy with usual markings.   G+ /VG- <SOLD> Maxim, Hiram P.  A Genius in the Family. 1936. Who needs -two- books about dominant WASP fathers in late nineteenth-century New York?  Well, as it happens, anyone who enjoys good reading does.  Hiram Maxim, Jr., doesn't write nearly as well as Clarence Day, Jr., but he has the same total recall of his childhood. He has as keen a sense of the ridiculous--and he has even richer material to work with.  Father Day was a normal Victorian writ large: a well-bred New York businessman in a tall silk hat, self-assured enough to allow his eccentricities free plan, but underneath made of the same kind of flesh as the rest of us. --Noel Perrin, "A Genius Grew in Brooklyn" in A Reader's Delight Mitchell, Joseph.  The Bottom of the Harbor.  1960. The other five are a kind of writing for which tere is no name. Each tells a story, and is dramatic; each is both wiildly funny and so sad you can hardly bear it; each tells its story so much in the words of its characters that it feels like a kind of apotheosis of oral history. Finally, like the Icelandic sagas, each combines a fierce joy in the physicality of living with a stoical awareness that all things physical end in death, usually preceded by years of diminishment.  One winds up admiring Mitchell's characters (all real people), loving them, all but weeping for them, maybe hoping to live as gallantly. --Noel Perrin, "A Kind of Writing for Which No Name Exists" in A Reader's Delight. Newby, Eric. When the Snow Comes, They Will Take You Away. 1971. Eric Newby's When the Snow Comes, They Will Take You Away is simultaneously one of the best and one of the most unusual escape books yet written.  What makes it good is the writing.  What makes it unusual is that the author is not the hero of his own escape--though he is obviously a brave man.  Instead there is a heroine: the daring and strong-willed girl who engineered the escape for him.  And there is a whole group of lesser heroes: Italian farmers who at fearful risk contrive to hide this enemy stranger, an Italian doctor who saves him under the very noses of the Germans simply because helping Allied POWs is the one thing he can do at that moment to express his antifascism, and so on. --Noel Perrin, "Prisoner in Wartime Italy" in A Reader's Delight Marcel Pagnol.  My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle. 1960. Was there ever a French equivalent of Huckleberry Finn?  Yes, as it happens, there was.  The equivalence isn't exact, because turn-of-the-century France and nineteenth-century Missouri were extraordinarily different places.  Furthermore, the French boy really existed, while Huck came mostly from Mark Twain's imagination.  But there's still enough overlap to make Marcel Pagnol's memoirs of his childhood in Provence even more interesting to an American than they would be to, say, an Egyptian or a Czech. --Noel Perrin, "Huck Finn's French Counterpart" in A Reader's Delight Perrin, Blanche C.  Born to Race. 1959. But horsy novels for the younger set tend to be specially shoddy, just like first-kiss novels, diet books, computer guides--all the sorts of books that get written primarily to tap a market rather than to say something an author wants badly to say. Born to Race is one of the occasional exceptions.  In form it is like many another: The main characters are a thirteen-year-old girl named Suzy Taylor and a horse named Whickery.  The setting is a horse farm in Virginia.  The action consists primarily of Suzy riding horses, feeding horses, solving mysteries, outthinking her father and his head stableman, eventually getting to go to the Kentucky Derby and getting to see Whickery win it. But three things distinguish it, maybe four. --Noel Perrin, "A Girl, a Horse--and for Once a Good Book" by his mom, in A Reader's Delight Perrin, Blanche Chenery. BORN TO RACE. Illustrated by Sam Savitt. St. Martin's Press, 1959. Hardcover. Ex-library copy with usual markings. Front dustjacket flap has been clipped. Previous owner's inscription on inside front cover.   VG- /VG- <SOLD> Raverat, Gwen.  Period Piece. 1953. The happy couple--they really were--bought a big house in Cambridge called Newnham Grange and settled down to a high-Victorian life.  It was tempered on one side by American independence and on the other by Darwin eccentricity.  In due course they had four children.  One grew up to marry Lord Keynes, another, named for his grandfather, to be the physicist Sir Charles Darwin (1887-1962), a third to be a distinguished artist. All this is prologue to Period Piece.  Period Piece is a recollection of that era by one of the participants.  Gwen Raverat was the daughter who grew up to be an artist.  In this book she tells what it was like to be in that first generation of faculty children, and also what it was like to be a Darwin surrounded by other Darwins.  There are few memoirs more charming. --Noel Perrin, "Moving in Eccentric Circles" in A Reader's Delight. Raverat, Gwen. PERIOD PIECE. A Cambridge Childhood. W. W. Norton, 1953. Hardcover. Some chipping to dustjacket. Front dustjacket flap has been clipped.   VG/VG- <SOLD> Raverat, Gwen. PERIOD PIECE. A Cambridge Childhood. Faber & Faber, 1960. Softcover. Some scuffing to bottom right of paper cover.   VG-.  $7.00  Read, Herbert.  The Green Child. 1935. There are odd novels, and then there are very odd novels.  Sir Herbert Read's The Green Child is one of the very odd ones.  It's about nirvana.  Nirvana is hard to define, even for Buddhist and Hindu theologians, and harder still to dramatize.  The word means "extinguished"--from the Sanskrit verb -nirva-, to be blown out like a candle--and how are you going to write a novel about the state of being blissfully not there?  Who wants to be extinguished, anyway?  Maybe in the Far East they like the idea, but westerners cling to identity, and read -Self- magazine.  Wouldn't such a novel have to be all exotic and oriental, full of holy men in saffron-colored robes and quotations from the Upanishads? Well, no.  There are some other and much more daring options, and Sir Herbert took one of them.  Or, rather, he took two of them, because The Green Child, though quite a short novel, is in two distinct parts... --Noel Perrin, "A Novel About Nirvana" in A Reader's Delight Roosenburg, Henriette.  The Walls Came Tumbling Down. 1957. Here is a book full of utterly unselfconscious heroism.  Here is an author who shows in the most matter-of-fact way just how generous and brave human beings can be.  She even shows, without particularly meaning to, that patriotism can be a solemn and lofty thing--it may be the last refuge of scoundrels, but under the right circumstances it is also the first thought of heroes.  Best of all, her story is both true and well told. Henriette Roosenburg, a middle-class Dutch girl with a fondness for literature, was a graduate student at the University of Leiden when World War II came along.  She became a courier in the Dutch resistance movement, code name Zip.  In 1944, she was caught and condemned to death. --Noel Perrin, "The Night-and-Fog People" in A Reader's Delight. Roosenburg, Henriette. THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN. Viking, 1957. 1st Edition. Hardcover.   VG/VG <SOLD> Seton, Ernest Thompson.  Wild Animals I Have Known. 1898. Heroic animals are hardly scarce in literature.  Where they are scarce is in books by naturalists--who indeed are much more apt to discuss populations of animals rather than individuals, heroic or otherwise.  What gives Seton his appeal is the combination of exciting and sometimes even melodramatic stories with meticulous and authoritative detail.  The detail had every right to be meticulous. After all, Seton had written a manual called Birds of Manitoba in 1891; he had published another book called Art Anatomy of Animals in 1896; it was a painting of a sleeping wolf that got admitted to the Salon.  He knew what he was talking about, and in the hundreds of little marginal sketches that are one of the great charms of his books, he knew what he was drawing.  If he says that crows have blue eyes when young and brown eyes when full grown, or that male rabbits rub their chins as high up as they can reach on small trees, and thus leave a scent mark for other male rabbits to investigate, or that dogs cannot be induced to hunt she-wolves during mating season, you know that you are getting facts. Well, there is one more thing a child could ask for.  He (or she--my daughters love Seton) could ask that a book this good stay in print, so that he or she could get it as a Christmas present.  Canadian publishers, to their credit, -have- kept Wild Animals I Have Known steadily in print.  In the United States it is sometimes available, sometimes not.  Right now it is, which is cause for rejoicing.  But even now one's joy is qualified.  The book has a masterly successor called Biography of a Grizzly and a fine sequel called Lives of the Hunted, both of which any child would naturally wish to read right afterwards. Both are about to appear as paperbacks and if we are lucky will stay in print several years.  But after that?  If the past is any guide, they will revert to beign available only in one of those library-edition reprints that seem to have been priced by the people who price Godiva chocolates and Gucci purses.  I mean, a quite ordinary edition cost around $40.  Pity. --Noel Perrin, "Thinking Rabbits and Talking Crows" in A Reader's Delight. Stark, Freya.  The Valleys of the Assassins.  1934. She had many purposes: to explore places where few or no other Europeans had ever been; to find historic sites such as the old battlegrounds of Alexander the Great; to make maps; to look for hidden treasures of various kinds; to climb mountains like Takht-i-Suleiman, the Throne of Solomon.  Most of all, though, she wanted to lead the life of the country and to be in the middle of whatever danger or excitement there was to be in the middle of.  She generally was. Back in 1921, when a very great professor, a family friend, was urging her to learn Icelandic (so as to read the sagas), she chose Arabic instead.  She foresaw the changes oil drilling was likely to bring to the whole Middle East, and she wanted to watch them happen: 'I thought the most interesting things in the world were likely to happen in the neighborhood of oil.'  Even then, as a very young woman, she knw she wanted to take part in current sagas more than she wanted to read old ones. --Noel Perrin, "To Awaken Quite Alone" in A Reader's Delight. Stark, Freya. A WINTER IN ARABIA. Century Publishing, 1984. Softcover.   VG.  <SOLD> Stark, Freya. DUST IN THE LION'S PAW. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961. 1st American Edition. Hardcover. Ex-library copy with usual markings.   VG-/VG- <SOLD> Stark, Freya. ALEXANDER'S PATH. Century Publishing, 1984. Softcover. Smudge to side of text block.   VG.  <SOLD>  Stark, Freya. THE JOURNEY'S ECHO. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964. 1st American Edition. Hardcover.   VG+/VG+ <SOLD>  Stendhal.  On Love.  1822. Stendhal is pre-Freudian but aware of psychology.  He begins by recognizing that love is largely self-generated.  The beloved is less a person one meets than a person one creates.  This process Stendhal calls crystallization, taking his metaphor from the salt mines of Austria.  He had seen miners there stick a bare twig into the saturated water and later pull it out covered with glittering salt diamonds.  Before you fall in love, you see the other person as a bare branch; as you fall, you coat him or her with jeweled attractions about 80 percent of your own making. --Noel Perrin, "Falling in Love with Stendhal" in A Reader's Delight. Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris.  Far Rainbow. 1964. Of major living Russian writers, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are perhaps the least known in America.  There are numerous reasons, most of them bad. One is that they write science fiction.  Many, perhaps even most serious readers, intellectuals, persons of letters disdain science fiction.  Knowing what is true--that throughout its hundred-year history, most science fiction has been tripe, and poorly written tripe at that--they have simply dismissed the genre.  (Some of them make an exception for Ray Bradbury, a curious choice.  He is actually minor as a science fiction writer, though a find and fancy stylist.)  They have no idea that there are a handful of writers, such as Ursula LeGuin, Walter Miller, E.M. Forster (in his 1904 novella The Machine Stops) and the brothers Strugatsky, whose work will be deeply interesting even to people who ordinarily spurn science  fiction.  One reason the Strugatskys are little known is that they are victims of this prejudice. --Noel Perrin, "Tanya Must Die" in A Reader's Delight [Strong] Nevins, Allan and Milton Thomas, ed. The Diary of George Templeton Strong.  1952. A century and a half ago, when New York was a minicity of 250,000 people, and Columbia University was a minicollege with barely a hundred students, a boy named George Templeton Strong graduated at the age of eighteen, and immediately began the study of law.  At twenty-one he entered practice with his father's Wall Street firm.  Soon he plunged headlong into the life of the city.  At twenty-seven he became a vestryman of Trinity Church, at thirty-three a trustee of Columbia.  At thirty-six he helped to found the Columbia Law School.  At forty he found himself placed (to his astonishment) on an all-male committee that was to decide who was 'in' society and who was out. At forty-one he all but laid aside his law practice for four years to work for the great Sanitary Commission that saved so many soldiers' lives during the Civil War.  At forty-four he declined the  presidency of Columbia.  At fifty he became president of the New York Philharmonic Society.  Meanwhile, he had married and raised a family, been to almost every fire in the city, attended all the concerts, heard all the gossip, followed all the elections, been interested in pretty much everythign that happened in this country in his time. He had meanwhile kept a four-million word diary.  It begins when he is fifteen and ends only with his death in 1875.  It is full of nuggets, delights, and gems. --Noel Perrin, "America's Greatest Diarist" in A Reader's Delight. Strong, George Templeton. DIARY OF THE CIVIL WAR, 1860-1865. MacMillan, 1962. Hardcover. 1st Printing. Front dustjacket flap has been clipped.   VG/VG <SOLD>  Vare', Daniele.  The Maker of Heavenly Trousers.  1935. The Maker of Heavenly Trousers is not a great work, but it's a splendid romance.  It's erotic, exotic and unrealistic--and it's all of these things with style and dash.  Even with substance.  It's the sort of book a Harlequin would be if it could. There is no redeeming social value whatsoever to the stories of Kuniang and Elisalex.  But they form one of the most delightful daydreams you could possibly rent. --Noel Perrin, "A Tale of Many Virtues" in A Reader's Delight. Williams, Charles.  All Hallows Eve. 1944. There is a lot of writing (and filming) about the supernatural going on currently, nearly all of it cynical.  It's cynical in the sense that the authors don't believe for a second that there really might be a vampire lurking in Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C., or that some large dog is possessed by the powers of evil.  All they believe in is the marketability of plots like that.  Such cynicism has a price. Almost inevitably their books and movies come out shallow.  Serious writing about the supernatural is quite another matter. That can wind up deeper and more powerful than almost anything else in our literature.  The Divine Comedy, for example, or Beowulf.  The reason is obvious.  A universe in which the supernatural operates is a universe charge with meaning.  And to invest action with meaning is perhaps the most important thing literature does. Charles Williams's novel All Hallows Eve is one of the most powerful works of supernaturalism to appear in our century. --Noel Perrin, "Taking Ghosts Seriously" in A Reader's Delight Williams, Charles. ALL HALLOWS' EVE. Noonday Press, 1977. Softcover. 9th Printing.   VG.  <SOLD> Williams, Charles. ALL HALLOWS' EVE. Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1948. Hardcover. Dustjacket has folds, fading and minor tears.   VG/G+  <SOLD> Wright, Austin Tappan.  Islandia. 1942. Cult books come and cult books go--that's part of what it means to be a cult book.  A few keep reappearing, however.  They get discovered over and over by successive waves of admirers.  After the third or fourth reappearance, the suspicion begins to arise that this isn't a cult book, after all.  It's a masterpiece with problems.  Islandia is such a book.  This obscure novel, the lifework of a man who wasn't even a professional writer, has had a devoted following for forty-five years.  It has gone out of print numerous times, and always triumphantly returned.  Some of its admirers would emigrate in a minute to the country where the story takes place, if only they cdould find it.  Others know the book very nearly by heart, even though it's a thousand pages long.  All this spells 'cult.'  That Islandia is also a masterpiece is what I'm about to argue. And that it has problems, no one who learns the plot is likely to dispute. --Noel Perrin, "The Best of All Imaginary Islands" in A Reader's Delight Wright, Austin Tappan. ISLANDIA. Rinehart & Company, 1958. Hardcover. Front dustjacket flap has been clipped.   G/G <SOLD>  Noel Perrin himself Perrin, Noel. AMATEUR SUGAR MAKER. Illustrated by Robert MacLean. University Press Of New England, 1992. 1st Edition. Softcover. 20th anniversary edition.   VG+.  <SOLD> Perrin, Noel. AMATEUR SUGAR MAKER. Illustrated by Robert MacLean. University Press Of New England, 1972. 1st Edition. Hardcover.   VG+/VG+ <SOLD> Perrin, Noel. FIRST PERSON RURAL. Essays of a Sometime Farmer. Illustrated by Stephen Harvard. David R. Godine, 1979. Hardcover. 3rd Printing. Boards are warped. Previous owner's inscription on front loose endpaper. Interior is clean. Book club edition.   G/G+ $8.50  Perrin, Noel. FIRST PERSON RURAL. Essays of a Sometime Farmer. Illustrated by Stephen Harvard. David R. Godine, 1979. 1st Edition. Hardcover.   VG+/VG+ $25.00  Perrin, Noel. FIRST PERSON RURAL. Essays of a Sometime Farmer. Illustrated by Stephen Harvard. David R. Godine, 1979. Hardcover. 3rd Printing. Book club edition..   VG+/VG+ $12.00  Perrin, Noel. A PASSPORT SECRETLY GREEN. St. Martin's Press, 1961. Hardcover. 2nd Printing. Ex-library copy with usual markings.   VG-/VG- <SOLD> Perrin, Noel. A READER'S DELIGHT. University Press Of New England, 1988. Hardcover.   VG+/VG+ <SOLD>  Perrin, Noel. A READER'S DELIGHT. University Press Of New England, 1988. Softcover.   VG+.  $10.00  Perrin, Noel. SOLO. Life with an Electric Car. W. W. Norton, 1992. 1st Edition. Hardcover.   VG+/VG+ $24.00  Perrin, Noel. THIRD PERSON RURAL. David R. Godine, 1983. 1st Edition. Hardcover.   VG+/VG+ $18.00