Acquisitions, June 27-July 3

• John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi and Other Plays (Oxford pb) -- Beefing up my collection of Shakespeare's contemporaries; the Elizabethan drama "team" is unusually deep. (Book Store)
• Russell Hill, Robbie's Wife (Hard Case Crime pb) -- Hard Case Crime is having a $2.00 on ten of the titles in the series that I don't have, so I ordered all ten. Now there are only three of the 50+ volumes that I'm still looking for; those should be easy to add.
• Cornell Woolrich, Fright (HCC pb)
• Mickey Spillane, Dead Street (HCC pb)
  
• Max Allan Collins, Deadly Beloved (HCC pb)
• George Axelrod, Blackmailer (HCC pb)
• David Goodis, The Wounded and the Slain (HCC pb)
• Richard Aleas, Songs of Innocence (HCC pb)
• Gil Brewer, The Vengeful Virgin (HCC pb)
• Robert Terrall, Kill Now, Pay Later (HCC pb)
• Ken Bruen/Jason Starr, Slide (HCC pb)
• Anthony Trollope, Cousin Henry (Oxford pb) -- Today's trivia question at Half Price Books was "What is the longest-running network television series?" Once I determined that they did not necessarily mean a prime-time or a fictive series, I came up with Meet the Press, which was correct (it debuted on NBC on November 6, 1947). So I got 15 % off my larger-than-usual purchase.
• Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower (Everyman pb) -- I now have copies of all of Hardy's novels but two: Desperate Remedies and The Hand of Ethelberta. Ethelberta, you cannot evade me for long! (HPB)
• Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance (Oxford pb) (HPB, clearance)
• Christa Faust, Money Shot (Hard Case Crime pb) -- Happy to discover that HPB had one of the three Hard Case Crime titles I was lacking. I had driven to the Oshkosh outlet mall yesterday to check out the Hard Case shelf at the remainder store Renaissance Books, since I was pretty sure that they had one or two of the three, only to discover that the store had closed for good. A lot of that going around!
• Simon Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (Harper Collins pb) (HPB, clearance)
• Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods (Houghton Mifflin hc) -- O'Brien is the author of the celebrated Vietnam novel Going After Cacciato, a National Book Award winner. I read his first novel Northern Lights many years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.
• Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost (Riverhead Books hc) -- One of a fairly sizable number of super-lengthy post-modern neo-traditional quasi-historical novels that have been popular in recent years, such as Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Charles Palliser's The Quincunx, A.S. Byatt's Possession, and Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White. All more bought than read, I suspect (but come to think of it, that's true of most books). (HPB, clearance)
• Robert Utley, Encyclopedia of the American West (Wings Books hc) (HPB, clearance)
• Ben Jonson, The Alchemist and Other Plays (Oxford pb) -- Another of Shakespeare's contemporaries; this volume is in the same series as the Webster, above. I've known that it was at the Appleton Goodwill for a while, but they always have a half-off sale going on a certain color of tag and they rotate the colors, so I waited for "purple" to go on sale to grab this book.
• Dave Oliphant, Texan Jazz (University of Texas pb) -- Another purple-tag item at Goodwill; meaty academic history of an offbeat subject.
• Emile Zola, Germinal (Oxford pb) (HPB)