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As I've been a bit preoccupied with other regions lately I thought I'd treat my brain for a change. My old Chambers Thesaurus has begun shedding leaves at an alarming rate, so I thought I'd buy a replacement (as opposed to wandering down to the warehouse and thieving another).
I found a new Oxford Concise in W H Smith's for half price which didn't hurt at all, so I added a copy of Roget's. In a spendthrift mood I also picked up the 'New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors'. I don't know about the rest of you, but there's something declasse about paperback reference books, and when three hardbacks were rung up on the till I winced a little... luckily they didn't have a cased copy of Brewer's 'Phrase and Fable' and I remembered that I have a perfectly good 'Oxford Modern English Usage' back in my mother's house (which I'll retrieve next week on my visit home, along with a leather-bound Chamber's Dictionary which I also left there).
Brace yourself for some flowery prose to come :)
Comments
You need your tools
Even though I usually look things up online, I've got a shelf full of dictionaries, English, Spanish, and French, and other writer's references. I like to carry them around and read them at the dining table.
You never know when such propinquity might engender some Promethean enlightenment. :b
jijillian
Books, tomes, and variorum
A good thesaurus is worth its weight in aurous metal.
If you think that paperback reference books are declasse, I shudder to think of how you must regard the online variety.
I enjoyed reading your entry; it brought me right into the booksellers, and that experience of "Oh, my goodness, look what they have here!" In that way, I once found, quite by accident, a collection of letters from D.H. Lawrence to Bertrand Russell. As you might imagine, it was a very small book, but for years it was my prize possession.
I've found many times in the past that when I was feeling blue, that a visit to a bookstore, particularly to a used bookstore, was an excellent restorative, even if I didn't buy a thing.
Kaleigh
Another Stone to Check Under
I'm sold on the "Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus." It is always at my right hand as I write. I've also a list of other references I draw upon listed at my web site. Some I seldom use, but there are none I have never needed.
Nancy Cole
Web Site: www.nancycole.org
"You may be what you resolve to be."
T.J. Jackson
nirvana
I have loved bookshops since I was very young, and my return from lunch with a bag full of books is always a source of hilarity in the office... after all we're sitting above several hundred thousand books, and thanks to an industry reciprocity agreement we can order most titles published in the UK at a 50% discount (it's also because we're an IT department and most of the staff are not great readers, a paperback on holiday perhaps, or if a title becomes fashionable).
I just love wandering around the shelves, and walking out of a bookshop with a different book from the one you went in for, or even better, one you never knew existed is one of life's great joys. One of the last times I seriously lost my temper was in a bookshop, with a bloke in his twenties who was playing music aloud on his mobile phone - I reminded him where he was, was answered with 'it's not a library or nuffink', and I saw red, though very quietly. Not my finest moment I'll admit, that was when I had a spotty undergrad thrown out of a restaurant in Swansea, for claiming 'Thomas Hardy was a sh!t novelist.'
Not much annoys me more ...
... than people who insist on sharing their taste in music with the rest of the world. That ranges from youths driving with wide open windows and the thump! thump! thump! of whatever pop group they favour making a mockery of the legal engine silencing requirements to people old enough to know better playing loud music in their gardens. I suppose there's nothing wrong with rock and pop music between consenting adults but it offends my ears and I much prefer silence.
I wish I had the courage to complain more often or even to retaliate with loud renderings of Schumann or Schubert lied but it's not in me, I'm afraid. Perhaps Mahler symphonies, being louder, might be more effective :)
Geoff
We look forward
in eager anticipation to further elements of liguistic sesquipedalianism.
Angharad 8)
Angharad
Tweedledy-Dee
As much as I share your love for a quiet bookstore (I always stroll through the reference section and cannot leave without a purchase) I have to admit an increasing fondness for Amazon.
No bookstore can match their list and neither Barnes nor Noble can make the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" suggestions that challenge the limit on my MasterCard.
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Og ..
Og need big word book.
John in Wauwatosa
John in Wauwatosa
amazon
I use it mostly for second hand books, either out-of-print titles or to match bindings with other books I already have, I don't think it'll ever replace bookshops in my affections, as I'm far too attached to the thrill of emerging from Waterstones holding a new book aloft, like a hunter bringing home a trophy :)
They're a big part of my working life in many ways... we use them to check bibliographic data on our own titles, as production / marketing are far more likely to pass informaton to them and Whittakers than they are to us... we have in the past had to check an ISBN/EAN delivered to the warehouse against Amazon to find out if it's one of ours at all!
At the moment I'm wading through code trying to find a bug in their ordering interface - they insist on using their own standard, not the industry's. I'll give it till the end of the day, or I go crosseyed - whichever come first.