I've had these two copies in my book collection for the past twenty years, give or take, and I have a hard time figuring from where I got them. They have no prices written on them anywhere and were printed and bound in Denmark. Both copies have a statement on the copyright page stating how they used non-chlorinated paper pulp and the majority of the energy used to produce the book came from hyrdoelectricity thereby conserving fossil fuels and minimizing their contribution to the "greenhouse effect". Neat.
I think I remember picking them out, specifically because I knew they were somehow important, and I had a habit of collecting things back in 1993.
I remember thinking that the handsome cover design and matching quality of the "Wordsworth Classics" branding helped me with my decision to add them to what would become a library.
I've carted these books all over the country...moving to San Luis Obispo from Sacramento, moving to Brooklyn, then to Austin, then to Long Beach...
Truthfully, I haven't read either all the way through. The first time I picked up Dracula, back in 1994, after already owning it for a year, I was confused by all the diary entries and letters. What the hell? It was the same thing with Frankenstein...letters? I never really got into it.
I started reading it again while living in New York, and my bookmark remains at the last place I got back in 2009. I think Inherent Vice came out and I ditched my fellow Irishmen for Pynchon. Maybe I started reading Sagan's The Dragons of Eden, a nice little book about dreams, fears, and evolution.
I remember learning that T.E. Lawrence was Lawrence of Arabia, from the back of this copy of Homer's Odyssey, and I began to wonder about a person's place in time and space. It was pretty heady for my fourteen year old self.
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