ACQUISITIONS

Last year, on a field trip to the Northern Catskills town of Hobart, also known as Hobart Book Village, Darbie and I discovered Bibliobarn, which, as the name implies, is a giant barn full of books. Darbie even posted about it.

Last week, we passed through Margaretville on a day of wandering, and I stopped at Bibliobarn Too, the smaller, though no less charming, sister store to Bibliobarn.

Here's what I got:

Mozart: A Life by Peter Gay

Part of the Penguin Lives series, which I've been interested in investigating. I've also been looking for a Mozart book.

Freud: A Life for Our Time by Peter Gay

Reading the flap on the slight Mozart biography drew my interest to Peter Gay, whose life seems to have been spent mostly thinking about Freud. And the Enlightenment. This book is by no means slight.

Here Am I -- Where Are You? by Konrad Lorenz

Following a lead from Wildwood, I looked for King Solomon's Ring, but found this book instead. Lorenz, a controversial German naturalist, spent years living among and learning how to communicate with greylag geese, and this book is the result.

Parts Unknown -- A Naturalist's Journey in Search of Birds and Wild Places by Tim Gallagher

Itself an unknown. It was near the Lorenz book on the shelf, and starts with Gallagher explaining how, as a kid, he developed a fascination with the regions of old maps designated "parts unknown." Auspicious.

Expression in Singing -- A Practical Study of Means and Ends by H.S. Kirkland

The front of this book is printed with what is either a summary or a crazy screed (or both) detailing how "the author shows that a student of singing must learn to think before he can understand the thoughts of others; that he must have definite ideas before he can express ideas definitely; and that he must understand the cause of emotion before he can express the concepts of emotion." I've been looking for something to help me sing like Tom Waits. Or Morrissey.

The Hudson River 1850-1918 -- A Photographic Portrait by Jeffrey Simpson

I want to follow the Hudson from Lake Tear of the Clouds to the harbor in Manhattan. I want to know what everything looked like here in Kingston, in the Hudson River valley in general, back in the time of the ice barons. I started flipping through this book waiting for Darbie, and it followed me home.