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Normally, browsing the bookroom at Kalamazoo is a kid-in-a-candy store type experience. The books are there, physically. You can leaf through them and figure out whether they hit the spot of your particular interests. Not having that direct interaction made it a bit difficult to determine what I wanted to buy, in this case. But there were still the conference discounts…

So here are the titles I ordered, that will trickle in over the next month or so, complete with commentary on why I bought it.

Publisher/Vendor: The Compleat Scholar

One aspect of not having a regular reason to drop by downtown Berkeley, is that I’m less likely to just drop by Moe’s Books or any of the other bookstores and randomly browse for interesting deep-background research materials. But this past week I had to drop off some UCB library books after work, and then wanted to kill some time until the traffic died down, so I did a shelf-browse at Moe’s and picked us some fun stuff. (I am regularly grateful that I don’t have to treat my fiction as the sort of business where research purchases have to pay for themselves.)

I finally--finally!--received the last shipment of books I bought at Kalamazoo. This is the bunch from the University of Toronto Press. It seems that, despite me having filled in my credit card information on the order form, they were waiting for me to tell them where to send an invoice. Invoice, hah! So it wasn't until I emailed asking what had happened that they actually worked on filling the order. So what did I buy? Unusually, all four books are for my "history of magic and mysticism" shelf. The place I go to get inspiration for the magical elements in my fiction.

I'm still stretching the definition of "Kalamazoo books" a little here. The first book was neither purchased nor marked for purchase at the conference, but I was given the reference by someone at my session for inclusion in the expanded version of my paper.

Sturges, Robert S. (trans). 2015. Aucassin and Nicolette: A Facing-Page Edition nd Translation. Michigan State University Press, East Lansing. ISBN 978-1-61186-157-0

It's only cheating just a smidge to consider these part of my Kalamazoo haul. I'd already done my day in the bookroom and missed spotting these, when my girlfriend texted the covers and suggested they might be interesting. I never did make it back to the bookroom to check them out, but when I looked them up online I concurred. Since they'd been spotted at the Powell's Books vendor, I tried the Powell's website first but couldn't find a listing, but I was able to pick them up second hand from another seller.

This is the first of at least two shipments from Boydell & Brewer. (One book was pre-ordered and the other is brand new and may not have been in the warehouse yet when these were shipped.)

Sylvester, Louise M., Mark C. Chambers and Gale R. Owen-Crocker. 2014. Medieval Dress and Textiles in Britain: A Multilingual Sourcebook. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge. ISBN 978-1-84383-932-3

I hadn't quite expected the to-be-shipped books to start arriving this quickly! There was a Fed Ex note on my door when I got home from the airport Monday evening and--having authorized doorstep delivery--the book was there after work Tuesday.

Mechain, Gwerful (edited and translated by Katie Gramich). 2018. The Works of Gwerful Mechain. Broadview Press, Peterborough. ISBN 978-1-55481-414-5

These are the books I’m carrying home with me. I’ll blog the ones I had shipped as they arrive. First, books picked up for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project:

Dipiero, Thomas and Pat Gill (eds). 1997. Illicit Sex: Identity Politics in Early Modern Culture. The University of Georgia Press, Athens. ISBN 0-8203-1884-1

This year's book haul isn't as extensive as the usual. Just like for papers, the topics coming out of publishers run in cycles, and I guess we're just at a low cycle for the topics I'm currently interested in. Due to the weird interface issues I'm having with the website, I'm not going to try to post cover images this time. So here's what I bought:

Ferguson, Gary. 2016. Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome: Sexuality, Identity, and Community in Early Modern Europe. Cornell University Press, Ithaca. ISBN 9778-1-5017-0237-2

I always mean to do these book intake posts more regularly. (Maybe I have and I failed to tag them properly?) But the point when I say, "I need to get these in the spreadsheet so I can shelve them" is at least a reasonable trigger. And it's well past time that I cataloged books I picked up on my travels in Europe last year! So, in some vaguely thematic groupings:

Books bought at Worldcon in Helsinki

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