exchange

It's present-gifting season, so I managed to hand off to appropriate hands some of the treasures I picked up in Portland last June.

From Powell's, I had a sturdy old copy of Things That Have Interested Me, a book collection of 1920s blog posts (really, that's what they read like) by the novelist and social commentator Arnold Bennett.

From Classical Millennium, I had the slightly misleadingly-named A White House Cantata by Leonard Bernstein, which is in fact the surviving releasable music from his infamously disastrous last musical, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It wasn't the music that was disastrous, although Bernstein's reaction was to withdraw the score and not allow any of it to appear during his lifetime. I hadn't realized that any of it had escaped perdition since then until I saw this CD on the shelf.

These went to hands that will most appreciate them.

In return, I got a variety of things, from a monogrammed bathrobe to a new biography of T. Woodrow Wilson by A. Scott Berg.