Christmas Passed

Got NO books for Christmas this year, but fair enough - I didn't ask for any!

My Christmas reading matter tends to be on the light side (to give myself a break, and to be capable of being absorbed after a heavy night) and this year I am progressing nicely through The Matchmaker of Perigord by Julia Stuart. It is a very pleasant, undemanding frothy confection in the style of Chocolat, passed onto me by Daughter #1 who likes to de-stress on her train journey home from the Inns of Court.

I still haven't had a chance to look at my new Greek-English New Testament, but I am saving that...I have bought a lovely suade book-jacket for it, which smells just wonderful!

Now that the York Borders store has finally closed, there won't be any spending of my Christmas money there (obviously): Waterstones may get a grudging look-in, but I'll probably get most of my stuff online from now on (except novels - I'll try to source them from charity shops or borrow them from the library).

Christmas Joy!

Oh joy! The post-woman has just delivered two eagerly awaited volumes from the Book Depository which I am just about to unwrap as you read this: No1, in a jiffy bag (no sniggering now, you North Americans!) is Thought and Language, a revised and enlarged edition of Lev Vygotsky's seminal work that I have decided is utterly necessary to my doctoral studies and , along with Wallace Chafe's Discourse, Time and Consciousness will be the touchstones of my thesis. The second (pause to fetch scissors for the altogether more serious cardboard wrapping and shrink-wrap) is a beautiful burgundy Nestle-Aland Greek-English New Testament with full apparatus criticus! I am running my hands over it appreciatively and feel the urge to kiss it.

Not that I am actually short of Greek New Testaments, you understand, as you might expect for someone in my field. The count up to present include my workhorse NA27 (complete with apparatus criticus, blue, underlined and well-thumbed) that I've had since my undergrad days with Keith Elliott, a UBS 3rd edition with app.crit. and dictionary, a UBS 4th edition Reader's New Testament with gloss, both burgundy too, a small, black Englishman's New Testament (1877, interlinear literal, plus KJV translation around the margins, the font almost too small for my poor old eyes to read), a British and Foreign Bible Society 1931 NT, a 1907 diglot Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine and and interlinear with parallel KJV and NIV texts. So I guess you could say that I collect them,but the thrill of opening up a brand new, pristine text is unsurpassable. It's my Christmas present to myself.

A Little Englishman's Greek New Testament

Re-reading F.W.Farrar's excellent (and slightly gossipy) 'Lives of the Fathers' (Church fathers, that is -written in 1889), I came across a reference to his slightly earlier work 'The Early Days of Christianity' written 1884. "Hmmm...." I thought.

Now I have a problem (actually, several problems) in that if I find an author that I enjoy, I hanker after possessing all that author's corpus. It happened with Thomas Hardy. It happened with Nikos Kazantzakis. If it weren't for the fact that there are so damn many of them, I dare say that it would happen with the Loeb Classical Texts too. As I was in town with daughter no3 on Saturday, I bargained with her that if I accompanied her to various music/clothes shops, she might indulge her ma by stopping off at the very excellent Barbican Bookshop on our way home. I love that shop...the smell of old books, damp, mildew whatever....the rickety stairs....the antiquarian section, locked away behind old glazed doors...the sense that there are treasures to be found and bargains to be had. And indeed there were! On the 'Early Church History Shelf' was a copy of Farrar's 1884 volume, for a mere £3!!! Furthermore, in the Greek and Hebrew section my eye fell on 'The Englishman's Greek New Testament', a little 6x4 pocket volume from 1896 (the 3rd edition) that manages to pack onto each page the Greek text complete with an interlinear literal English rendering and, packed around the margins the 1611 Authorised Version. It is indeed a thing of wonder and beauty, but the text is very, very small indeed. Even with my new spectacles, eyestrain sets in within minutes!

Lexicomania

And again. The Christmas shopping season is not conducive to abstemiousness on the bibliomania front. And yesterday I was put at risk of overindulgence when a friend cried off our coffee/chat at the last moment. Since I was in town anyway with the intention of picking up a few festive wotsits, I suddenly found myself with a couple of extra hours spare until the parking ticket expired. As I wanted one of those Advent candles with the dates marked off (yes...we had to have a massive burn-up to get to the appropriate date last night), I went down to the Barbican book shop which not only stocks That Sort of Thing, but has an extensive second-hand theology/religion section. I just popped upstairs to survey their latest acquisitions (recalling my luck with the two ICC's last week) and nestling on the Biblical language shelves...lo and behold! Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon in pristine condition! There's something funny that happens to my brain when I see (a) a lexicon and (b) Greek script....I don't know what it is, and if the font size is sufficiently miniscule, I actually start to hyperventilate and fiscal prudence flies out of the window. I bought it, on the grounds that it was 'coded with Strong's concordance numbers' and the definitions and cross-references seemed superbly detailed. In my defence I did have it open on my desk today and did use it for my analysis of the Galatian verb forms. OK...shall I tell you what else I was using (i.e. had open) whilst I was working, so you can see the extent of my mania? Here's the list, and it does not take into account the shut-up ones in the small book stand adjacent:

i) The Interlinear KJV-NIV Parallel New Testament

ii) Hans Dieter Betz's 'Hermeneia' commentary on Galatians

iii) Bauer's Greek-English Lexicon of the NT and Other Early Christian Literature

iv) The Oxford Classical Dictionary (to look up Grammarians)

v) Moulton and Geden's Concordance of the NT

vi) Han's Parsing Guide to the Greek NT (see last week's post)

vii) E de Witt Burton's ICC commentary on Galatians

viii) Swete's 3rd volume of the LXX (for looking up a cross-ref. in Isaiah)

ix) NA27

You see....I just can't be trusted around small Greek print.

I shan't tell you that I actually put an illustrated Jeromite missal back. It was volume 3 of 3, and the others were not there. DG.

A Book as a Present. For Me.

For once I had a really good excuse to go shopping for books: a family Christening. Now, most Christening presents are useless tat that get shoved to the backs of cupboards to tarnish and eventually get thrown out. Really good presents are really expensive, things like a vintage port to lay down for the eventual 21st birthday (what 21 year-olds like port anyway?), or gold sovereigns...so I hit on the idea of a Really Nice Old Book. Will probably increase in value and prove saleable should the recipient be in need of a cash-injection in the future. Off to the local antiquarian book-shops, of which there are a few locally. My goodness, the Rackham-illustrated fairy tales are expensive: hundreds of pounds! As are most of the things that I had in mind. So what about a modern first edition? What I really wanted (perverse sense of humour surfacing here) was 'The Devil Rides Out' by Dennis Wheatley, and although there were Wheatley first editions, they looked a bit raunchy for an eighteen-month old. More suitable for his Dad, I think.

It was at this point that I got distracted, as I so often do, and I decided to go up the winding stairs to the theology section. Doing a doctorate gives me a sort of licence to peruse this section for Useful Books and, hey - what do you know - Nathan Han's 'A Parsing Guide to the Greek New Testament'. Wow - how fortuitous: a complete list of the verb forms as they occur. How useful is that for discourse prominence analysis?! And in good condition too - no dust-cover, but never mind, I'm running out of that adjustable film book-cover stuff anyway. So I bought it, chortling at my good fortune, and scuttled of to Starbucks where it is totally acceptable to sit awhile, reading like a Clever Person.

I have to confess a few previous sins to you at this point: I am addicted to online book buying. My favourite supplier is The Book Depository, because they don't add a delivery charge to most of their stuff, which tends to be as cheap, if not cheaper than Amazon. Though I do like Amazon too, because the sidebar options to buy second-hand from small dealers can yield some real bargains viz. my recent purchase 'A Greek New Testament Reader's Edition' in pristine condition from a guy at Oxford. And I like ABE Books to for the more obscure/out-of-print stuff (most recently 'Syriac Grammar: A New Approach'). Birthday money allowed me legitimately to buy 'A Dictionary of Paul and His Letters' (now satisfactorily covered with a film book-preserver) initially through the web, but when they postponed delivery I cancelled and bought it from the local St Paul's shop. The staff seemed so surprised that someone had actually bought something that they gave me a free St Paul calendar of saints' days. Another local second-hand bookshop had recently just got in a number of International Critical Commentaries (I am trying to collect a pre-owned copy for each of the books of the NT), including 2nd Corinthians which I was lacking and thereby hangs another shameful book-buying tale (for that, see another of my blogs 'parablepsis'). Suffice to say that I ended up buying 1st Corinthians too. Yesterday.

Being interested in language, I had been intending to buy the Penguin Classics annotated 'Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking-Glass', mostly for the brilliant word-play, and insights into Dodgson's mind and world. As I was going up the stairs in Borders, I picked up a copy of it to scan as I had my coffee (coffee is another addiction of mine, so there'll probably be many a mention of it in this blog unless I start another one dedicated to that too). I had taken the precaution of getting a mini bank statement before I started out, so I knew that I only had £7.55 to last me until Monday, having bought the parsing book - and I know that Penguin Classics tend to be expensive. Oh - and I had picked up a copy of Petronius' 'Satyricon' which I had been intending to read ever since I had read Apuleius' 'The Golden Ass' which I found surprisingly funny (tho' it did go off a bit at the end) - and that was £10.99! This last was just a reprint of a 1965 text, so the translation was a bit evasive to say the least, so I put that back. But for some strange reason the Lewis Carroll was only £5.99, well within budget so, reader, I bought it.....