Sharing Obscure Literature

There's something about sharing with others your love for less-popular books, works, and writers. So writes Billy Mills in this article, "The Joy Of Sharing Your Favourite Obscure Books", over at The Guardian. An excerpt:

I still remember buying the Fulcrum Press edition of Basil Bunting's Collected Poems. It was a cold London spring day in Foyles on the Charing Cross Road, and the weather had driven me in to the poetry section to see what I might find. I knew of Bunting via Ezra Pound and had read a few poems in anthologies. I'd even read most of the Fulcrum edition of his long poem Briggflatts on visits to the old, now long gone Paperback Centre in Dublin's Suffolk Street, but it was too expensive for a secondary school student's budget. Anyway, that day in Foyles I had money in my pocket and there it was, this near-mythical book that I knew existed but had never seen. So I bought it.

Of course, the main reason for my purchase was that Bunting was a poet I really wanted to know more about, and he was to become important for me as an exemplar as I developed my own voice. However, it would be wrong of me not to confess that there was a certain added pleasure, an obscure pleasure if you like, to be had from owning a book that nobody else I knew had ever even seen, never mind read. This opened up a wonderful opportunity to become a Bunting bore. Over the years, I've taken every available opportunity to encourage anyone I thought might be vaguely interested to read him.

Sent in by Zen In Darkness.