Odyssey to Stevie Smith - Bookshops in Vienna

For years I had kept the name at the back of my mind, and recently remembered or rather stumbled upon the poem Not Waving But Drowning again, which together with a remembrance of Our Bog is Dood roused a desire to read more of her works.

Finding a list of her published works was easy enough, though only her better-known works seem easily available; books like A Good Time Was Had By All or Stevie: A Play by Hugh Whitmore are long out of print ... (see also Lehmanns Online Buchhandlung, not reasonably bookmarkable)

I knew I had seen one of her poetry editions at The British Bookshop many years ago, so I hoped to find that and maybe the Novel on Yellow Paper, but had no such luck. In fact I was so disgusted by the display of all but Best of ... and Compilations that I picked up two compilations (and a few novels, since the intent was not only finding brainfood for myself but for my mother's birthday) and fled. Big Ben Bookshop in Servitengasse 4a seems to be closed for good, but after all I did manage to delight the bookseller at Shakespeare and Company who knew the book, remembered the Stevie Smith revival 25 years ago and was quite prepared to order it for me. On my harsh request why she would look it up on the amazon homepage she explained it was easier to see the images: covers changed, but the data was accurate and more intuitive than in her wholesaler's list.

All in all I have forked out more on books in the last two days than in the entire past year, and some of the works ordered with the local bookshops are not even paid yet ... so much for living cheap, it seems even my brain cannot live on bytes alone, but rants on ebooks, etexts, reader devices and screen readers probably each warrant a writeup on their own.