Trying to keep second-hand booksellers in business… a pile of recently bought books, including Paul Veyne’s memoirs, the English translation of the Bataille-Leiris correspondence, the first volume of Mircea Eliade’s journals, a collection of interviews by Madeleine Chapsal, and some more Bataille translations for the bibliography project.

The book with the unmarked spine is perhaps the most intriguing, certainly in terms of its provenance. It’s a copy of Georges Dumézil’s 1949 book Le troisième souverain, which compares Indo-Iranian and Irish myth. According to a stamp in the book, and the bookseller’s description, this was one of the copies owned by Dumézil himself, sold in the auction of his library at the end of 1987.  While it’s nice to have that copy, it’s a bit sad to think his library was scattered in that way. I know some of it was donated to the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire des langues orientales in Paris. But unlike other thinkers such as Derrida at Irvine, Canguilhem at the ENS, Gillian Rose at Warwick, or (in part) Foucault at Yale, it’s unfortunate there isn’t a single place where his books can be consulted.