Incoming Books: Week of 3/11

Ten days or so ago, I put in an order for nine books at ABEbooks.com (a used-book aggregator I use a lot for SFBC stuff) -- I usually do this once or twice a year, for whatever out-of-print books I most want at the moment and am tired of looking for in "real" stores.

This time, it turned out that I'm getting eight books (one had already been sold), seven of which were pretty cheap (even with postage) and were mostly hardcovers, too. The last, well, wasn't cheap or a hardcover:

• Adios, Scheherazade by Donald E. Westlake
  I've been working my way through Westlake's stuff for almost a decade now, and I've got most of the ones he did under his own name. This book, though, is easily the rarest and most expensive -- a battered paperback cost me about thirty bucks, almost as much as the rest of the books I ordered put together. And now that I've finally bought it, I bet there will finally be a modern reprint -- maybe Subterranean, since they did Lawrence Block's similar Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man a few years back? -- and I'll end up buying that, too. But now I can finally read the damn thing, once I clear out the stuff I'm in the middle of for SFBC.
  
• I Know a Trick Worth Two of That by "Samuel Holt"
  Speaking of Westlake, this is one of his pseudonyms -- he wrote four books under this name (in a mystery series) in the '80s, and I'm working through them now.
  
• The Lunatics of Terra by John Sladek
  A late-ish short story collection (1984) by a criminally underrated SF writer.
  
• He: An Irreverent Look at the American Male by Florence King
  I discovered King around fifteen years ago, with her great book With Charity Towards None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy (and also from her columns, which were appearing at the end of the National Review at the time). So I set out to find all of her other books, and got most of them (she only wrote ten or so) quickly. But two eluded me for ages, long enough that I sort-of stopped really caring. This was one of them, and I finally decided to get it through ABEbooks and stop hoping I'd find it in a store one day. I hope I like it.

And two books from the big ABEbooks order are still in transit; I imagine they'll make it into next week's tally.