[Buddha-l] Loving your object of study

[Stuart Lachs]

I was not clear in my earlier post, "The Collected Works of Chinul" is my 
favorite Buddhist book. Fortunately for me,
like Richard I bought the book many years ago. It has gotten a workout.  I 
had to tape the
binding to keep it together, even though it is hard bound.

Richard Hayes wrote:

"What an
> impoverishment of the world it will be when all these wonderfully
> eccentric book dealers have all gone out of business. "

The same here in NYC. Fourth Avenue in the teens was loaded with eccentric 
used book stores in days gone by. Weiser's basement carried used "spiritual" 
books, upstairs was everything else. Desending the stairs with the poster of 
a young Meher Baba with his long black beard and his saying, "I was Rama, I 
was Krishna, now I am Meher Baba" looking down at you was like entering a 
magical kingdom. Even Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn had a number of the 
eccentric used bookstores Richard mentioned. I remember now being so excited 
when buying Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West" back in the 1960's. 
Those used book stores are pretty much all gone today.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard Hayes" <rhayes at unm.edu>
To: "Buddhist discussion forum" <buddha-l at mailman.swcp.com>
Sent: Friday, November 23, 2007 12:52 AM
Subject: Re: [Buddha-l] Loving your object of study


> On Thu, 2007-11-22 at 23:09 -0500, Stuart Lachs wrote:
>
>> "Tracing Back the Radiance" is an abridged version of  "The Collected 
>> Works
>> of Chinul." It is my
>> favorite Buddhist book. It may be much for most undergrads. Amazon has 
>> no
>> new copies and
>> only one used copy for $299.95.
>
> Fortunately, I bought a copy of The Collected Works when it first came
> it. It has a lot of very good material in it that I use for my own
> preparation. The Zen course I teach is an upper level undergraduate
> course with a prerequisite of at least one previous course in Buddhism,
> and the students always love Chinul.
>
> Speaking of book prices, I find myself astonished on many levels. My
> library has outgrown my bookshelves, so I have been trying to sell books
> I no longer use. The last few boxes I have taken to used book stores
> have contained some excellent books, but no one is interested in buying
> them. I sold one fairly uninteresting book for $5, but the dealer
> wouldn't even take the others as a gift. He said there were hundreds of
> copies of most of my books for sale on the Internet, often with the
> first two dozen or so selling for less than $1. In an Internet-driven
> market, he said, many books sell for less than the cost of the postage
> to mail them, while others become collector's items worth hundreds of
> dollars, and none of the pricing has any bearing on the literary or
> scholarly value of the book. This used book dealer is first rate, a real
> bibliophile and great fun to talk to. He has been in business for
> decades, but he fears the Internet may put him out of business in
> another couple of years. This must be going on everywhere. What an
> impoverishment of the world it will be when all these wonderfully
> eccentric book dealers have all gone out of business.
>
> -- 
> Richard Hayes <rhayes at unm.edu>
> University of New Mexico
>
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