Book Catalogs
By book catalogs, I mean those periodic sales catalogs that show up offering deals on remaindered books. The perennial chief among these, I guess, is the Bargain Books catalog offered by Edward R. Hamilton. I’ve been getting this sales catalog off and on for my entire adult life, I think. In fact, if I recall correctly, it was Edmond Hamilton, the late science fiction writer, who first told me about the Edward R. Hamilton catalogs. That would have been around 1976 or 1977. Back then, the catalogs were in the style of tabloid-sized newspapers: small, sans serif (I think it was sans serif) type and maybe a few black-and-white photographs of book covers screened in huge Ben Day dots.
Maybe my fondness for these kinds of catalogs goes back to when I was in junior high school and used to send away for lists of old comic books for sale. I don’t remember paying for these. Did I? Maybe they were a buck, but that seems high. A dollar was a lot of money back then for a kid in junior high school. Maybe you just requested one. A first-class stamp was about eight cents then, so maybe these were free. Anyhow, I’d spend an entire period in study hall reading these dumb lists that offered such items for sale as the first issue of Detective Comics with a Batman story in it—Batman when there was no Robin and he was more like the Shadow and he killed guys with a .38 revolver. Or the first Superman comic for sale, or the first issue of other old comics from the 1940s and 1950s. It was the same romantic thrill I got from looking at Johnson Smith catalog, the one with the infamous X-ray specs and whoopee cushions. So the lesson is: you get a catalog in the mail with lots of small print and tiny pictures, well, the amount of cool stuff you could add to your life is pretty much endless.
This is absolutely true when it comes to remaindered-book catalogs. I’m looking at the new Edward R. Hamilton catalog right now; it came in the mail yesterday. It categorizes all of the titles in a table of contents on the inside front cover, and the result is that this makes me feel like I have the encyclopedic interests of a Renaissance man or an intellectual titan. I can’t do higher math to save my life—lower math itself is a daily challenge—but, as I browse through the titles listed on page 60, why, I come to understand that there is hope even for me. My latent or nascent fascination with higher math, which did not exist until I turned to page 60, comes to life. Algebra Demystified by Rhonda Huettenmueller! Calculus Demystified by Steven G. Krantz! Come on, if these people can write a book about it, I can read the book and master calculus. It’s like being in a candy shop, the list of books in these catalogs. Like the library was when I was a kid. The whole world is here, the whole freaking world, and so, by extension, I am capable of anything. It’s kind of like watching the cooking shows or the woodworking shows on PBS on Saturday afternoon. You have these people who cook moose ribs with a red wine reduction over campfires and produce five-star meals and they make it look so nonthreatening that I feel I’ve already done it. Come on, I want to say, give me a challenge. Moose ribs? For babies. Read more…
