Powell’s

I recently vacationed in Portland, OR. Portland, as you may know, is the home of Powell’s Books, which is sort of like Mecca for bibliophiles. It’s a bookstore that takes up an entire block, and has several satellite shops.
Let me repeat that: it’s a bookstore that takes up an entire city block.
You can see a layout here.
As you may imagine, I bought a few books.

Here’s a list, because I’m nerdy like that:

• Pocket Poets: Rochester (a collection of Rochester’s work printed in 1959)
• Lord Rochester’s Monkey (one of the books I used in writing my thesis
• Profane Wit: The Life of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (the new biography! Squee!)
• Charles the Second, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (by Hutton, who is easily my favorite historian)
• The Annotated Sherlock Homes (the Baring-Gould one, both volumes in a boxed set)
• The Illustrated Library Shakespeare
• Fledgling (a vampire novel by the awesome Octavia Butler)
• The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
• In Search of the Miraculous (Ouspensky’s book about the teachings of Gurdjeiff)
• Sweat Your Prayers: Movement as Spiritual Practice
• Diary of a Psychic (a thoroughly entertaining and fascinating read, I devoured it the next day)
• The Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi
• Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey
• The Black Doll (a silent film screenplay by Gorey)
• Instant Lives (by Howard Moss, illustrated by Gorey)
• Dracula: Prince of Many Faces (a bio of Vlad Tepes)
• The Intuitive Body: Aikido as Clairsentient Practice
• Spiritual Foundations of Aikido
• The Secret Teachings of Aikido
• The Way of Aikido: Life Lessons from an American Sensei
• The Art of Peace (a collection of O Sensei’s poetry and sayings, illustrated with his calligraphy)

So. Just a few books.
I thought my To Read shelves were full before! Man. I’m reorganizing them so that I can actually see and get to just about everything. It is actually making me not want to buy more books for a while (for the first time in my life). Good god.