The strange tale of the Karl Jasper biography

One of the books I got out from LSE library last week was a biography of Karl Jaspers. I only know a little about him, mainly as a figure on the sidelines throughout Heidegger's life. But I fancied a little bit of a change from the reading I have been doing. On the coach home to Oxford I read about 30 pages, starting from chapter 9 when he is just being appointed a university professor towards the end of WWI. I was quite impressed with this book.

Over the weekend I was sorting out my weekly book order and one thing that I do as part of this is to see which of the books I have taken out of LSE can be acquired really cheaply. So I soon found an ex-library copy of the Jaspers book for less than £2, which seemed good to me, so that formed part of this week's order.

Later on over the weekend I thought I would have a quick look at the other Jaspers biography I bought a few years ago and hadn't liked. Much to my surprise, this turned out to be the same book as I had out of LSE and which I was really enjoying - and which I had just bought a copy.

So I have bought a copy years ago of a book and not liked it, borrowed the same book from a library in the UK and not realised that it was the same book I had already read, liked the book more this time and so bought a copy from the USA, before discovering I already owned a perfect conditioned UK copy.

Still, my existing copy is perhaps worth £15 secondhand, so I could sell this one, keep the cheap, secondhand one, and be up about £10 on the deal. This all links back rather nicely to Bayard's How to talk about books you haven't read, which I was reading in Austria a few weeks back. This has quite a number of points about questions such as whether, if you can't remember having read a book, the book can really be called a book you have read. As I get older, this sort of thing happens more often. For instance, I frequently come across references to articles that I think would be really interesting only to discover later that I have read the article and, in some cases, may even have previously taken notes on it.