Whether one thinks that online-booksellers have taken the fun out of buying used books depends on whether one's fondness for book-shopping is about actually acquiring the stuff (what my mother would distinguish as book-buying, not shopping) or about kneeling in front of dusty shelves and digging through dross in hopes of buried treasure. [I like both.]

But even so, there are some books I hadn't expected to be hard to find that I have had no luck with. (I am slowly attempting to replace my favorite acquisitions from the Yale libraries with my own copies in preparation for my clerkship):

William Duker, A Constitutional History of Habeas Corpus (there's a copy for $150 at Amazon, but that's simply unreasonable-- this book is not that old, or that obscure. Does nobody read it who doesn't have access to a large research library?)

Office of Legal Policy, Original Meaning Jurisprudence: A Sourcebook (this is cool-- essentially a catechism of early originalism, written by the Meese justice department. I've never seen it outside of the YLS library, but that's weird; it's a government document, for heaven's sake.)

I have just finished Curves and Angles, the new book of poetry by one of my favorite living poets, Brad Leithauser (for my complaints about the lack of respect given him by the hoi polloi, see here). It's a book about hard edges and soft touches (what an ex-girlfriend would have called corners and roundnesses). Or as Leithauser puts it:

I trust readers won't object to a brief clarification of what might otherwise seem a puzzling title and organizing principle. My "curves" are the body's curves; my "angles," the less giving lines of an inanimate world. My book's intended, then to get colder as it goes along.

Theirs is that special condition of plenty

available only to those with nothing

on or between them.