Unpacking My Library by Leah Price

Author:Leah Price
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Could you say something about the books you selected for our top ten?

I’ll just pick out a couple.

One is a three-volume set of Cicero that belonged to my father. They’re extraordinary objects: late sixteenth century, I forget the exact year, but printed by the Aldine Press, an innovative Venetian press that is justly renowned for, among other things, having invented italics. At some point this particular set was in the Vatican Library, but they must have been decommissioned and somehow they found their way to a used book store in Chicago, where my father bought them for ten dollars when he was a student and needed a cheap copy of Cicero. The market for old books wasn’t as frantic then as it is now.

The other book I should mention is a beautiful first edition of C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, a book that was one of my earliest and most intense reading experiences. It’s influenced a lot of my fiction. This particular copy was a terrifyingly extravagant gift from a friend, who really shouldn’t have. But it’s not the sort of gift you can refuse. If a fire broke out, I would grab it first. Partly because I suspect it of having magical properties that would be useful in an emergency.

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