I’ve been doing a bit of this lately. I was walking in Akasaka Mitsuke a few weekends ago when I saw Tokyo Random Walk for the first time. The place had some boxes of cheap (well, for Tokyo) paperbacks out front and I dug through them for a while. Found a copy of Virgil’s Aeneid for Y500 . . . I’ll read that after I get through the Iliad. This means I need to find time for that book first, though.

A week or so later I went down to Roppongi and had lunch with Michael Staley. We met at the Tsutaya behind the Roppongi Hills complex . . . I’d thought this was just a music and video rental joint, but this branch was a “fashionable book and coffee shop” with lots of massive coffee-table tomes. Actually we looked at a book about Muhammad Ali that would easily have crushed any coffee table I’ve ever seen. It was 50 centimeters tall and a meter wide when opened, and I’m sure it weighed close to 30 kilograms. Just a huge, huge chunk of dead trees. I can’t recall the price but it was well into the six-digit range.

(OK, after poking around a bit I learn that it was this book and that it’s selling for the low low price of $3,000 on Amazon.com. And it’s 34 kilograms.)

Since I only had my small backpack that day I went for this little book of freeware fonts, complete with CD. Lots of them look fun to play with, and it was easier to drop a little money for this book than it would be to track down all these letters online. Watch me go overboard and turn this website into something that looks like a kidnapper’s ransom note.

Cut to yesterday. I’m tired of the way my website looks and I want to do something about it, but I need more skills. So I’m going to learn CSS properly. So I need some books. I went online and ordered up a couple references: Eric Meyer on CSS and his programmer’s reference that comes with it in an Amazon package deal. As soon as these get here I will absorb their wisdom and make this place a lean thing of bleeding-edge beauty, to be sure.

But I don’t have time for that! Because I’m translating a book. It’s a biography of Noguchi Hideyo, the microbiologist who isolated the agent that causes syphilis. It’s long and dry and written by an elderly fellow whose style is not as vigorous as it could be. Anyhow, I learned that there was another English biography out on this guy, written by one Gustav Eckstein and published in 1931. There are a few copies available in Japan, at the Waseda library and elsewhere, but I found a used copy online at a place called Biblio.com. Just $10, plus shipping, is getting me a copy of this old book, which should come in quite handy . . . I can find all sorts of detailed information on Noguchi in Japanese but since I need to write about him in English it will be nice to get some input in that language as well.

While I was at Biblio.com I threw Who Needs Donuts? into the search form and found out that the nicest copy of the original 1973 book costs almost $300. And that’s with a child’s name scrawlied inside the cover in red pen. The copy I had as a kid still lives in San Rafael, but it’s covered in the ink of three misguided kids who thought their hands were steady enough to stay within those tiny, detailed lines. Probably only worth $100 or so. But the copy that T and Leslie got for me . . . ooh, that’s pristine. It’s got to be the most valuable book I own. Very cool!