I bought five books during my recent trip to Halifax, and chose one from the cart of free discards at the Bedford Public Library. I used my gift card to get these two at a large retail store:
The Last Farm on McNabs: A Family History of Twentieth-Century Life on the Island by Bruce Scott was published earlier this year. I read of its impending publication when we were in Nova Scotia in April, so I was looking forward to buying it on this trip. Scott transcribed stories his mother told him of her life on the island from the 1920’s to 1970’s.
Secrets of Sable Island by Marcia Pierce Harding is a novel about Caleb, a teenaged boy who is shipwrecked on the island. He is rescued by a wild horse and befriends a man who is secretly living there. The cover image depicts a ghostly girl Caleb sees riding across the island.
I had about an hour to roam around and climb over the piles at John W. Doull Bookseller, an enormous second-hand shop that is run by a bibliomaniac. I had been to the Dartmouth location only once before, when I had hardly any time to shop. In this case I focussed my attention on regional interest and travel books. The store placed its books in other languages, dictionaries and language texts amongst all the books about the country where that language is spoken. Thus German dictionaries and grammars were interfiled with books about Germany. That meant a lot of walking around trying to find things. I love to visit second-hand bookstores–do readers of this blog really need me to say this?–yet I dread places that have stacks and stacks of books piled thigh-high in no particular order, which in some cases block the shelves I really want to get at. I have no desire to move multiple stacks of books to get at the goodies behind them. And at Doull’s I realized that in order to get at some of the stacks I would have to shift half the floor in front of me, because I certainly couldn’t get anywhere close to some areas I wanted to explore. However I was happy to find these three:
John O’ Groats by Bill Mowat is a short 42-page booklet about the northernmost town on the Scottish mainland. I was 31 km west of John O’Groats when our ferry from Stromness, Orkney, landed at Scrabster and then we headed east to Thurso. Chapters include topics such as the town name and why the place is famous, plus its history and the people who live there.
Island at the Edge of the World: A South Georgia Odyssey by Stephen Venables is the author’s account of his time on the island, where he followed in Ernest Shackleton’s footsteps. Venables skied the island’s glaciers and climbed previously untrodden summits. The formal title page states Georgia while the front cover states Georgian.
One might wonder why I bought a dogeared paperback copy of the first edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, since we’re on to the seventh edition now. Fact is, I never owned a first edition. When I joined the Mississauga Scrabble Club in 1993, the second edition of the OSPD was the official word source and I bought a paperback shortly after. The Club’s first director, Shaun Goatcher, seeing how eager I was to learn words and devour lists, was so generous to me in the Club’s early days. He lent me pages of his own study materials and I photocopied them. One of his notes was from the National Scrabble Association, informing its members of the words that were deleted from the OSPD2. One of the reasons I wanted a first edition was to have a print source documenting the brief period that these words were acceptable. Here is the list of Words No Longer Acceptable (Listed in OPSD, not in OSPD2) because “they have been reevaluated and deemed to be either foreign, trademarked, capitalized or otherwise as unacceptable for SCRABBLE® Brand Crossword Game play.”. Words that have since been readmitted to the dictionary are marked with a + :
DUC(S), UIT, AINE, NOIR+, PERE(S)+, SITI, AINEE, ECOLE(S), ENFIN, INVAR(S)+, IODOL(S), NEGRO(ES), ONCES, WAEFU, WITEN, PHYTIN(S)+, BABBOOL, BORAZON(S)+, PAPULAN, STETSON(S)+, THERMIT(S)+, WOTTETH, AUTARKIK, SULFONAL(S), WOSTTETH.
The list erroneously omits the plural of BABBOOL as also unacceptable, thus BABBOOL(S). I recall reading this list 32 years ago and raising my eyebrows at WOTTETH and WOSTTETH. They looked like verb inflections…but of what verb? I can see now that they are inflections of WIT. I am surprised and delighted that this paperback has survived in such good shape. Aside from the stained cover, the spine has held up and no pages are loose. This book was probably much loved and used back in the day.
The Little Bookstore on Heart Lake Lane by Sarah Robinson was a library discard that I could not resist since it was a romance centred on a bookstore. I might not even read it, but it was free so I probably will give it a shot, yet it is not a priority. Maybe I will save it for a Christmas read.