Thurber Thursday: Collecting Himself

Collecting Himself: 

In the pre-personal computer days, I used to carry around a “Want List” — pages and pages of New Yorker-related book titles and magazines that I’d found listed in bibliographies. The Want List was sort of like a shopping list you’d bring to the grocery store. The difference is that most of what I was looking for in used bookstores was obscure and likely not to be found. With the advent of the internet, the list became very short, and then, eventually, completely unnecessary — the obscure was usually easily findable online. If I did have a Want List now, it would consist entirely of this: ?…a question mark. What I hope for now at used bookstores is finding something I didn’t know existed.

Besides the bookstore discoveries are what might be discovered looking at photographs of personal collections of books. Photos of other folk’s libraries are, within themselves, an education. I was recently sent several photos of such a collection. My eyes darted left to right, shelf by shelf, looking at the bindings. The very first binding I spotted that was unfamiliar belongs to the Thurber book you see above left. It’s the UK Hamish Hamilton edition of Thurber’s Collecting Himself. It’s one of many posthumous Thurber books edited by the fab Michael Rosen. I’ve had the US version (above right) since it was published, and have noted the more colorful cover over the years, but never looked into it — I thought it was a later US edition (never assume!). But now, thanks to a library photograph, I understand what’s what. It instantly becomes a desired addition to the Spill’s Thurber library as it fulfills two necessary requirements (with “b” being the more important):

a. It is a UK version of a Thurber book.

b. The UK cover is substantially different from the US edition.

Luckily, Collecting Himself is not obscure, and not going to cost a fortune. It can be found for less than the price of a Big Mac and a milk shake.