Books to give away (or bid on! :D )

Started by JasonPratt, August 02, 2018, 04:46:30 PM

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JasonPratt

We don't seem to have a thread like this, so fine I'll start one.

My Mom, long ago back in the 70s (aaahhhh the age, it burrrrnnnsss!) inherited a library of books from her favorite uncle (or cousin of Mom's father rather), who never had any kids of his own. Sadly they rested packed in boxes upstairs at work for decades, but a few months ago we needed to do some repair work up there and this required us to move those boxes out.

I dang well promptly started sorting through the boxes.  :D I ended up having to trash (like twelve 55 gallon bags worth) a large number of old test-books from the 50s, and things of that sort, including some books too water-damaged to be usable. But I scored several dozen books including some complete or near-complete sets of several series of history. (I mean ones with timeless appeal, regardless of superceding research since then, like Churchill's history of English speaking people. Partial collection in that case and I SCOURED that lot hoping to find the missing one or two volumes.)


I've got a few books from the lot which I didn't think needed throwing away, but which I have not much interest in, relatively sometimes (compared to other keepers. I just lack the room, have to make a cutoff somewhere.) So, I'll take offers on...!

Peter Bergman's Chronological History of the Negro in America. 1st edition, 1969, hardback no jacket. The hardback has seen noticable 'storage' wear around the edges, but seems mold-free. Pages are all in good shape, binding is still tight. (Although I don't recommend opening the cover very far! -- age has made it a bit fragile, by feel. No damage yet.) A quick thumb shows no apparent markups.


(I'll post the next one tomorrow.)
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

#1
Today's listing!

Arnold Toynbee's abridged A Study of History, two volume set (summarizing all ten of his original volumes). One of C. S. Lewis' favorite contemporary historians, cited by him a few times. (They worked together at Ox-Bridge.) Publication date is a bit confusing. Volume I seems to have been originally published 1946 in Oxford, 1947 in the US, but with a 14th printing in 1958. Volume II seems to be a first US printing 1957?? Anyway, this is Somervell's abridgment, personally authorized and approved by Toynbee. Hardback set, no jackets. No apparent markings on the pages (on a quick thumb-through). No apparent molding, no water damage. (Bit musty smelling!) Hardback covers themselves are in amazingly good if faded condition, with the slightest age/wear damage (along one centimeter of a bottom edge near the spine). Books can open and be read without much care for damage. Spines look like the volumes were literally never opened.

Bonus collectable 1958 Billy Graham evangelical tract as a bookmark!  :D (...dang, that might be worth some real money, maybe I don't want to offer it...  :o )
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

mirth

This is one of those "read a book to get a book" things innit? :P
"45 minutes of pooping Tribbles being juggled by a drunken Horta would be better than Season 1 of TNG." - SirAndrewD

"you don't look at the mantelpiece when you're poking the fire" - Bawb

"Can't 'un' until you 'pre', son." - Gus

JasonPratt

ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

mirth

"45 minutes of pooping Tribbles being juggled by a drunken Horta would be better than Season 1 of TNG." - SirAndrewD

"you don't look at the mantelpiece when you're poking the fire" - Bawb

"Can't 'un' until you 'pre', son." - Gus

JasonPratt

Today's offering is, unlike most of the other books, a curiosity from 1976 ('77 American publication), Louis J. Halle's ultra-pretentious Out of Chaos, evidently a 10th printing. Hardback, no jacket, binding's a tad loose, no markings, no damage (but some fading on the hardback), page edges are a bit stained with what I can only infer is bug and/or spider juice  :o :P and yes I called it ultra-pretentious.

I called it ultra-pretentious. And I've written an 800 page philosophical argument for trinitarian theism which builds from a basic philosophical foundation.  ::) ;D

Halle wrote a lot of natural history.... um, history, with philosophical musings along the way, and as he declares in his preface, since the beginning of his conscious thought he has tried to grasp a complete understanding of the world (which even I think sounds pompously self-important ;) ). So of course he took a stab at composing a tome of general education about LITERALLY ALL REALITY with an eye toward synthesizing a philosophy from the evidence of natural history (somewhat out of date now).

I'm awwwwwwwfullly tempted to keep this book, if only to duel with it mentally for the fun and exercise. But while I've been poking some fun at it, I honestly admire the effort and sheer chutzpah of his attempt. Plus he brings his signature topical style, as when he devotes a chapter to sandpipers and the goddess Aphrodite. ("Who, for instance, at the outset of this undertaking, could have imagined that a continuous line would connect quantum mechanics with James Joyce's Ulysses, thereby illuminating the significance of the latter?" That's from the Preface as another sample.) If this book wasn't a key inspiration for Carl Sagan, it should have been.

In case you're wondering, Halle seems to arrive at the evolution of an emergent theism embodied by the humans whom reality has been blindly striving with unpurposeful purpose to bring about, especially humans such as himself -- which won't come exactly as a surprise. Or something like that. He's both tentative and non-tentative about it, and I'm sure both tentativities (so to speak) are intentional. (...yes, I spent way too much time giggle-applauding myself at that one.  :D )

Dangt, I'm poking fun at it again. The book really does have an abundance of, um... ....... ...I'll call it "charm"? I'm never bored randomly thumbing through it. Pretentious it may be, but I've yet to catch it being merely pretentious twaddle. He respects all his cultural topics a lot, and that helps, even when I can see he has very little grasp about the point of some of them. He's the sort of author who can end his book (if I may paraphrase a joke from Chesterton) favorably comparing and complimenting Jesus and Marx as being very much alike, especially Marx.
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

Skipping over Sunday, away from the office (where my stack of books, to move along, stands under a chair), I now come to:

Steve Sloan's little autobiography / homily, A Whole New Ballgame (about 165 pages). I have no idea how this got in the boxes, but the dustjacket has quite a bit of dried resin on it so I can infer one of the workers was reading it long ago (back when they'd sometimes go through the boxes, after we put them up there.) So it's possible this doesn't come from my great-grand-cousin at all, but from one of the guys at work back in the late 70s, and it got inadvertently stuck back up in the boxes during a cleanup.

Anyway. Seems to be a 1st edition, 1975. Dust jacket is not in the best of shape, but is still colorful and whole. Hardback underneath is in great condition, though a little dusty along the internal edges. Pages are in very good shape, aside from a few bug stains, and the binding is tight.

I assume anyone interested in this will know a whole lot more about Sloan than I do. ;) Coach for Texas Tech at the time he wrote this, previously head coach for Vandy, honored player for Alabama in college, fellow Tennessean native. He's doing some exhortation for fellow Christians along the way, maybe some evangelism, too.
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

Today's offering: John Spanier's Games Nations Play: Analyzing International Politics, 1972, but this is a 4th printing from 1974. Large paperback, pages are in good shape (a little staining on the edges), but warped somewhat from storage and maybe reading. Binding is still tight with the quires (the groups of pages glued into a paperback cover). No obvious markups in a quick thumbthrough. An insect of some kind ate into the pages at one point, and then apparently was dragged out of its hole kicking and screaming by something else! Hole still remains but doesn't affect text at all. (A little ichor from the murdered bug also still remains outside the hole where it met its end.)


This book is something of a sequel/remake/update to Spanier's World Politics in an Age of Revolution, which I'd probably appreciate more. In writing that book, he apparently decided he wanted to take a stab at creating an analytical theory of world politics, updating his examples through then-modern times (typically from the 30s to the 70s). So the book is not about what to think of world politics at any time, but how to.

From the promotional back text:

QuoteIf the study of international politics is to be more than the study of current events that soon turn into "ancient history", the student must be given conceptual tools that will enable him to analyze tomorrow's events for himself. Thus [GNP] sets forth a tripartite analytical framework that aims at guiding the reader to a deeper comprehension of the whole range of problems states confront and of why they often act as they do -- whether they are capitalist or Communist, industrialized or developing.

[...][Those three analytical levels are] the state system, with its balance-of-power emphasis; the national system, with its domestic priorities; and the decision-making system, with its dependence on both the policy-makers' perceptions of reality and the institutions that form and carry out policy. [...] [T]he student is able to view a single policy or set of policies from three different and often conflicting perspectives.


While it sounds fascinating, some samples seem rather over my head, and I had to make a tough decision about whether to keep it and trying chewing on it, or not.  :'( I've got to make choices about where to spend my limited energy now.
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

Today's entry is a bit of an odd-duck pairing:

Harry Hansen's one-volume history of The Civil War (meaning the American CW). Seems to be a 1st printing 1961 paperback? Pages are in good shape; the actual cover is stained and starting to separate from the quires at one corner. I have trouble believing that anyone here would want a one-volume paperback of the ACW, but then that's why I'm not keeping it either.

Also up today is Lucien Price's transcriptions of a series of Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, a British philosopher, contemporary of the young C. S. Lewis (who was a bit of a fan, then and later, despite his change in philosophy). Original copyright 1954, but this advertises as 1st printing 1956. Not sure why, maybe the 1st American printing. Paperback, in decent shape, although the cover is getting brittle.

Why is this a pairing? Seems kind of random! Well, they both just happen to be part of the "Mentor" series published by The New American Library.

Not much to say about them otherwise. Tomorrow's entry, my finale for a while, is much more interesting.  :coolsmiley:
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

So the grand finale for what I've got available, is a two-volume set of H. G. Wells' The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind, revised and updated in 1949 by Raymond Postgate. This appears to be a first printing (probably first American printing, Garden City, NY). Pages are in good shape for the age, especially Volume 2, but a little dusty. Hardback (no jackets) on Vol 2 is very good, minor staining and fading, binding still tight, quires still with stitching. Volume I's hardback has a few problems: the back cover has warped somewhat, and the front binding is starting to tear. Binding to the quires is a little loose. Care must be taken to open this volume to a usable degree.

Wells lived long enough (1946) to be disappointed (I would hope horrified) on how his beloved fascist projects in Europe turned out.  ::) The value of the work, naturally, is in Wells' prose style, as a snapshot of his thoughts; although another value for this particular work might be trying to trace the irony of Wells' visions of fascistic and socialistic utopias, and the reality of the Europe those projects created. Originally published in 1920, Wells' own last revision was apparently 1940, but he brought it up to date in between at least once, too. In praising his historical work (particularly), his family-friend (and critic) G. K. Chesterton said that Wells had achieved and established the right of amateurs to be attended to in professional scholarly fields if they worked hard enough at the quality of their craft. (Far from his exact wording, but I can't find the quote this morning.)
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!