Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

That will probably be it for now for the library's boom sector in the last few months, the Samuel Johnson shelf. Any economy would envy growth on that scale but it is now a relatively mature market. The Leopold Classic Library's Selected Letters isn't quite the neat little Penguin Classic I'd expected. Maybe I should have checked but I dare say I'd still have had it. It's one of those 'print-to-order' jobs and not necessarily the worse for that but is effectively a facsimile of an OUP edition from 1925.

The good doctor has put on the afterburners and gone ahead of another favourite, the still very much alive Sean O'Brien whose books are on the shelf above but it is to be hoped there's more to come from him and the O'Brien section doesn't include the anthology he edited, The Firebox, which is quite wide.

They could be in a better organized order but while I'm firstly distracted from Dr. Zhivago by Glyn Maxwell's On Poetry and secondly by celebrating being a racetrack wiseguy, sorting them out is not a priority job. I'd give a copy of Ghost Train away if it weren't for them both being signed and special, to me at least, for different reasons and it being a paragon example of what poetry could still do in 1995 and, almost like Hunky Dory, from 1971, something seminal the like of which has not been seen much since.

 

I don't know what it was about the last few posts here that caused an alarming upswing in readership, according to the 'metrics'. I'd like to think it was the Motown or the Dee Dee Bridgewater but I wonder if it not just 'bots' exploring to see if they can invade. I wouldn't know. Science Fiction never did much for me but now we live in a world in which some bits of it have come true.

I wasn't much for fantasy either but sometimes it can fuse with reality. We also now live in a world in which the free market, for once, is something I can exploit- for fun, for irrelevant gains really - but where once bookmakers had it all their own way and punters were losers, they now compete with each other for the business of those who are 90% losers. But, as Carole King and Gerry Goffin didn't quite say, Oh, No, Not Me, Baby, I'll 'keep on plugging at the four aways' like Mr. Bleaney did, especially if I can do it for free, and keep trying to get seven horses placed. And eventually you do.

Suddenly, with an astonishing burst in the last few yards of the year - my financial year for these purposes goes to about 8th or 9th of January because I do it by bank statements- I produce a personal best, by some way, thank you very much. It's not the money. It's about the sport. The sport is betting. Sport is about trying to win. I don't know if I could get those sentences past my first year University lecturer on Logic as an Inductive Argument but it doesn't matter how you do it as long as you remain, always, your humblest, most abject and appalling,

Racetrack Wiseguy. 

HNY