The Book Display!

The last time I was at the World Congress of Jewish Studies was not the previous one four years ago but rather two congresses ago, in 2005. I had just graduated from college, was living in Jerusalem and basically just went up for one day to hear a friend who is somewhat more senior to me in the profession give a paper. Going back, I have the sense that I must have been a little kid then. Everything seemed a lot smaller and more manageable this time.

Tomorrow I give my paper and I will listen to papers on Wednesday, as well.

But today was for meeting colleagues and buying books. When I was last at the World Congress this friend and I each bought a copy of Joshua Blau's descriptive grammar of Judaeo-Arabic and then went out to the botanic garden and had a race to see who would exclaim "Cool!" first while reading. That is the kind of dork I was and am and associate with. (Although I don't actually associate with that particular dork anymore.) This time, though, I was looking for text editions, which is pretty much what I've limited myself to buying these days; and this book fair is actually a pretty inexpensive way of buying books (all told, the one pictured below plus one that I picked up at the request of a colleague was just under $100 US) and so I bought three editions that I needed:

I also purchased this earth-shatteringly important work of Hebrew literature:

(The really funny thing is that the way that they've translated "terrible-horrible," as "ayom ve-nora" makes it sound like Alexander and Yom Kippur.)

I recently submitted an abstract for a paper on the seriously confused provenance of a Hebrew Alexander the Great manuscript to an edited volume under the title "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Codes." The paper was accepted, but I was told that I definitely could not keep the title. They have to let me use it now, right?