At Tim’s New & Used Books in Provincetown today, I found this (“Freely Espousing” by James Schuyler, hardcover, first edition, a very rare and very exciting book to find and get to hold). I grabbed at it and threw myself on the wood floor of this tiny bookstore, set back from busy Commercial street (you have to walk down a sort of rickety boardwalk covered in vines to get there). It costs $150 and I want it very, very badly. “Does this really say one hundred and fifty dollars?” I asked the dude at the tiny desk with the cash register. The dude came over, looked at the number over my shoulder, and said, “Yes.” It’s not often that books worth so much are found on a physical shelf–mostly they’re squirreled away on some boring internet bookshelf where no one can touch them or faint over them or swoon over their very small and well-chosen fonts and the thickness of their paper and the now historical significance of their existences.
To console myself I bought “Other Flowers,” the uncollected works of Schuyler, edited by none other than JAMES MEETZE of the Summer Sideyard. I also bought the tiniest deck chair ever, because, you know, small things. They really get me.
panache, perhaps 