most valuable books in my collection

Let’s try something different today.

Not a book review, but something more personal. Particularly, my list of the three most valuable books in my collection. I’m limiting myself only to three, because they all exceed $50 range and it’s a small number. The books under that range are plenty in my collection, so it makes no sense really to list any of them.

I warn you from the start: do not expect any three and four digits numbers. No $5000 books, not even $300. It is expected considering my position: part-time work, low income, living in non-English-language country, it’s all there. But bear in my mind: I here present most valuable books for me. That means they ranks in amount of money I paid for them. A market price doesn’t matter in this case. I own a lot of books that I paid little for, but their market price is much higher.

Also bear in mind that the value of these books in $ is nominal. For me once I’d bought a book, this book became invaluable. I own only the books I like and I don’t sell books for any price.

Top-3 of most valuable books in my collection:

1. Charlotte Armstrong, I See You
Published by Coward-McCann in 1966

Price: $65.

It’s not that rare a book, even first edition hardcover. The reason I paid the price is that it is a signed HC, and that is rare. Armstrong signed her books on very special occasions. You won’t find signed copies of her books lying around on the net. But what makes this even more valuable is a typed letter signed by Armstrong and addressed to her girlfriend. And that is scarce.

I got it off eBay, me being the only bidder. Fools, you’d say.

(I have a rule not showing signatures and inscriptions on my books. Sorry.)

2. Ross Macdonald, The Barbarous Coast
Published by Knopf in 1956

Price: $59

It is said that in very good condition this HC costs almost a grand. You can see I got mine much cheaper. Vintage Macdonald (pre-60s especially) are not exactly offered at reasonable prices, though they’re not in a short supply. This particular copy has a curious history, or more precisely not a copy itself, but the way this copy went to get to me. But that’s another different story.

I got it off eBay.

3. Boris Slutsky, Memory (Pamyat)
Published by Sovetsky pisatel in 1957

Price: 2000 rubles ($57)

That’s a debut poetry collection by a Soviet poet Boris Slutsky. Slutsky is my favorite Russian poet, so I decided to collect all his books. Now I own around 20 Slutsky’s books, and all of his original collections. This debut is scarcest of his books. The first printing was only 1000, therefore the price is quite high.

I got it from used books store in Moscow, and a friend of mine sent it to me.

Share in the comment your most valuable books.

best books of the year: poetry

I can't imagine my life without poetry. However, I've read only a few poetry collections this year. All of them made my top:

Matthew Zapruder
Come On All You Ghosts (review to come)

runners-up:

Robin Robertson
The Wrecking Light

Jennifer Grotz
The Needle

The Wrecking Light

Robin Robertson
The Wrecking Light

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011

This collection by British poet Robin Roberston consists both from his own poems and translations. Among those who Robertson translated, there are names such as Baudelaire, Ovid, Neruda. And if translations are often ploted, Robertson’s own poems are plotless (except for those that are based on myths.)
Robertson's eye is the photographer’s eye, how accurately he captures some part of the nature. Nature, everything that surrounds us, according to Roberston, is ominous and sometimes dangerous. But the poet finds those words that even at the most terrible you look at least with curiosity.


I go to check the children, who are done for.
They lie there broken on their beds, limbs thrown out
in the attitudes of death, the shape of soldiers.
The next morning, I look up at my reflection
in the train window: unshaven, with today's paper;
behind me stands a gunman in a hood.



Roberston is often contemplative, but not a participant. And to contemplate, it is necessary to step back, refuse to contact. Because of that the lyrical hero, sometimes present in the poem as "I", sometimes as a spirit standing behind photocamera, just pushing on the button of the camera, that seems a lonely and sympathetic, hiding his secret desire to get into nature, into the nature of things.


I remember the tiny stars
of her hands around her belly
as it grew and grew, and how
after a year, nothing came.
How she said it was still there,
inside her, a stone-belly.
And how I saw her wrists
bangled with scars
and those hands flittering
at her throat,
to the plectrum of bone
she'd hung there.

When the lyric hero finds himself in his own image as he becomes part of a sinister world, the hero does not experience the illusion of his own purity and integrity. He is as grim as the world around: No light shining back at me, just shame.
Robertson’s poems are not loudly; on the contrary - often full of ominous silence: If you're absolutely silent and still, you can hear nothing but the sound of nothing.
You want to remember by heart the poems from this book, to pronounce privately, but not out loud.

The Needle

Jennifer Grotz
The Needle

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011

In her second collection of poems Jennifer Grotz looks at people and urban landscape of the modern city. In an interview Grotz noted that she’s tried to make this book more objective. Indeed, the poet is almost merges with the world. In the first part of the book most of the poems are about a city, and in them there is almost no "I". City in Grotz’s poetry is not mythologized, it remains what it has in a very material sense: the walls, roads, the smells, the colors, of course, people.

The city would begin as slowly as the old man in a brown fedora
making his way down the street, a walking stick in one hand
and the arm of the elderly woman beside him in the other.

The author has traveled extensively, and this is reflected in Grotz’s poems. Icons, Town Square, a nun, break-dansers, street theater - all this the author brings with her from the travel, putting into verse.

I can't make out their words, but I'm thinking about an actor
who bequeathed his own skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company
to serve as Yorik's in the graveyard scene,

wanting perhaps to serve later Hamlets in this modest way,
having spent many nights holding up a plaster copy
and looking deep into the empty eye sockets, open jaw.

The second part consists of poems about the deseased brother. Grotz writes about it without any strain, with love sometimes not even sister’s but mother’s: «I mothered you, I protected you, you were my baby, my toy». Together with memories of the brother the memories of childhood come. Serenity (not coldness) of poems of Grotz also is in the selected rhythm. Almost all the poems here are written in long lines, with correct, complete sentences. Grotz’s world is not broken, it is too beautiful, though at times is painful, to break down, roll into individual words.

Grotz’s poetry is natural poetry, the poetry of life and prosperity. But the poems in this book were written even with that degree of intelligence, when you look at clouds and see a cat's face, but understand that this is primarily just a cloud.

books of the year: poetry

Richard Wilbur - Anterooms

I'm cheating now: it's the only poetry book I've read this year but it's a great book.