What the spade encountered

Inter alia:

Viereck's Salome (I think it materialized.  I have no memory of buying it).*

Johannes Kepler on the Harmonies of the World.  He transcribed the music of the spheres.

David Ferry's translations of the Georgics and the Eclogues (widely separated, of course)

Evening's Empire : A History of Night in Early Modern Europe (Craig Koslofsky).

Lucifer's Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry. By a physicist, Frank Close.

My copy of Francis Spufford's Backroom Boys.

Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imagery (been looking all over for that).

A lovely little pocket hardcover of Camden's Remains Concerning Britain (on which Grevil's Reliquiae is modelled).

Max Beerbohm's The Poets' Corner (a tiny book full of demurely wicked caricatures).

Gay, Bejeweled, Nazi Bikers of Gor, Verisillius of Er.  Slid between two other volumes.  Heh.

The Complete Enochian Dictionary: A Dictionary of the Angelic Language As Revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley.

P. G. Wodehouse's The Great Sermon Handicap, a translation of the story into scores of languages, ancient and modern. Inter alia: Romansch, Catalan, Middle English, Yiddish, Faroese, Old Norse, Esperanto, Papiamento, Finnish, Basque, Breton, Sanskrit, Maltese, Aramaic, Somali, Coptic, Czech... Alas!  No Sumerian.  No Akkadian.  Or indeed, any of whole classes of languages:  no East or South Asian, barely any African languages, no indigenous tongues.  Where’s Navaho?  Where’s Tibetan?  Plucked from the shipwreck of McIntyre & Moore.  Missing v. 1, which is why I could afford it.

Thor, with Angels: A Play.  Christopher Fry, 1948.  Scene:  A Jutish Farmstead, A.D. 596.  The characters include Merlin and a Messenger.

Maurice Dolbier's The Magic Bus, illustrated by Tibor Gergely.  Not my childhood Little Golden Book, but just as I remembered it.

A fine wooden teleidoscope, rolled under a bookcase.

And a missing Harvard library book (Theatrical training during the age of Shakespeare) that I finally paid the earth for two years ago, shoved under a stack of pitiable non-entities (stuff abandoned on sidewalks, guillotined discards, flyblown 19¢ paperbacks) in the dustiest, most buried shelf. Huh? I know I never put it there.  I’d've had to move furniture to put it there.  Not as strange as the missing cellphone that turned up under the blanket chest inside my best black shoe, but strange.

Nine

*Wait, wait.  It’s coming back to me.  From a very nice secondhand bookshop on the Cape, on that splendid trip with teenybuffalo and skogkatt to see Edward Gorey’s house.  Now there was a packrat.  They had to shovel out about 10,000 books just to dig walkways.  I felt right at home.