[OPE] Riccardo's books

Hey, the reference to "secret Marxist elite" was just a tongue-in-cheek
poke, you know, hence "?!" Since we live in an age where people are scared
to say anything themselves lest it be held in evidence against them, I guess
I should try in future to make my intention absolutely clear. As against
that, if I spell out everything, people might just say "Duh".

Senator Reuten very kindly gave me a copy of his value-form book, and also
handouts from his course, many years ago, but he never got the UVA library
to get the books which Chris Arthur mentions. I do not exactly how the
collection policies work in Dutch libraries, but typically they are patchy.
That is, you can get some works by an author, but you cannot get all the
works from one place, then you have to put in interloans. I donated some
rare or expensive books to two Dutch libraries (UVA and IISH) but to my
chagrin, I discovered they did not put them in their collections and resold
them in their sales bin. So I am not doing that again.

Just for Paul Zarembka: I am INTERESTED to study the volumes which Chris
Arthur mentions, to catch up with the most recent scholarly Marx-reception,
it is just that it is not really possible for me to shell out, like, 300-400
euros just for a few books. Most of the books I buy, are second-hand copies;
the most expensive book I own (on architecture, also secondhand, you can't
get it new anymore) I financed with the aid of a birthday gift from my old
mother. I wasn't attacking anyone, merely lamenting the hefty price of good
books, and wondering whether there is a solution that would reduce the cost
for interested readers like me. I don't like digital readers much.

Haymarket does a good job of publishing classics and new stuff at an
affordable price. So why not publish directly with Haymarket or a publisher
like that? The book by Marcel van der Linden on "Western Marxism and the
Soviet Union", which I translated was, for example, republished by
Haymarket. Recently, Marcel van der Linden's "The workers and the world" was
republished in a cheaper paperback edition by Brill itself - I assume
because they felt sales warranted it. You can now get it for 60 dollars
instead of 192 dollars!!! Yes, that's right, the first edition of what I
copyedited went for 192 dollars a copy. It has a bluish cover.

Meantime I found at least a partial solution: some of the Bellofiore
editions are available from Scribd - for example, The Constitution of
Capital. I don't even know though whether getting this from Scribd is legal.
Marcel's stuff is also on Scribd, and available online from other sources, I
don't think it's legal, but there you go.

Michael Perelman pointed out to me that it is possible nowadays to make
available the fruits of intellectual work at near-zero cost or zero-cost,
but what if it happens to his own books, haha ;-)

Sorry to tread on your toe, Paul Z. but really you know I didn't mean any
harm... :-] (I think I will have to use emoticons more often in future, to
convey intentionality).

Paul Valery quipped once, "Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with
ideas are never serious." Maybe not entirely true, but there's something in
it.

Jurriaan

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Received on Sun Dec 19 02:55:44 2010