F. W. Walbank. 1957–1967. A Historical Commentary on Polybius (Volumes 1 & 2). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

In downtown Copenhagen Vangsgaards Antikvariat has an ongoing Antikvariske Bogudsalg (Antiquarian Book Sale) that is kind of run like a Dutch auction. In short, the maximum price for a single book in the book sale on the first day when all the new stock is put on the shelves (starting at 100 kr. or roughly $14.32 USD) and then this number is gradually decreased incrementally as the days go on, and this is done over the course of month at a time until finally it reaches 5 kr. per book (about $0.72 USD) by the final two days (but by which time the good stuff is largely picked over). I have been frequenting this sale fairly regularly for about a year now and while there is often lot of random stuff that is of no interest to me, I have made some occasional surprising finds including Robert Beekes' A Grammar of Gatha-Avestan, the first volume of the second edition of Johannes Friedrich's Hethitisches Elementarbuch, Rüdiger Schmitt's edited volume of essays on Indogermanische Dichtersprache in the Wege der Forschung series, and more. Basically, the impression that I have gotten (this is just a guess) is that Vangsgaards Antikvariat has so much overstock from buying out other antikvariater in Denmark and it would cost far more to appraise the market value of what they have and store it (until the right buyer comes along) than to just sell it off like this.

Anyway, I went there yesterday for the first time since the new stock was put out and found myself a very bonny first two volumes of Frank Walbank's A Historical Commentary on Polybius in good condition, and in the first printing with the original Oxford University Press red cloth bindings. The third and final volume was not to be found, but I will take my good book-hunting fortune as it comes. Polybius is, of course, one of our most important sources for the period 264 – 146 BCE, covering the early expansion of the Roman empire down to the sack of Corinth and the sack of Carthage (both in 146) which cemented Rome as the dominant state in the Mediterranean, so I am sure that I will probably have some use for these at some point. Total cost to me for these two was 120 kr. or approximately $17.31 USD, a right bargain, considering how much various sellers are trying to get for them on the online international book market.

If you happen to be in Copenhagen in the near future, this is the current schedule for the book auction. I have no doubt it will repeat again in the months to come.

W. Skalmowski & A Van Tongerloo (eds.) (1993). Medioiranica. Louvain: Peeters Press.

New stock recently appeared in Vangsgaards Antikvariat on Fiolstræde – not in the shelves near the front windows where covers and spines are left exposed to bleach by the sun's UV radiation – but in the back in back room on the top shelf marked Filologi where the good shit is kept. I laid my hands on a volume of papers about Middle Iranian philology and linguistics and I knew it had to be mine.

Lots of fun stuff in here (table of contents below). I started reading the first paper by R. Bielmeier on Alanic glosses in John Tzetzes and I was delighted to find some interesting stuff on the first attestation of an obscene Greek word μουνί 'cunt'. Apparently in Tzetzes' Theogony there is an epilogue as a show of his learnedness in which he gives greetings in many different languages. The glosses the article looks at are:

Greek:  

τοῖς Ἀλανοῖς προσφθέγγομαι κατὰ τὴν αὐτῶν γλῶσσαν· 

καλή ἡμέρα σου αὐθέντα μου ἀρχόντισσα πόθεν εἶσαι·

"I greet the Alans in their language:

Good day my lord, noblewoman, where are you from?"

Alanic: 

ταπαγχὰς · μέσφιλι ·· χσινὰ · κορθὶ · καντὰ; καὶ τἄλλα.

To which is also added, where the gloss is found:

Greek:

ἄν δ᾽ἔχη ἀλάνισσα παπᾶν φίλον; ἀκούσαις ταῦτα·

οὐκ αἰσχύνεσαι αὐθέντριά μου νὰ γαμῇ τὸ μουνίν σου παπᾶς;

"But if an Alanic woman has a priest as an intimate companion, you might hear:

Aren't you ashamed, my lady, that a priest fucks your μ.?"

Alanic: 

το φάρνετζ, κίντζι · μέσφιλι · καὶτζ · φουὰ · σαοῦγγε ·

Now, I don't know what the pejoration of μουνίν is at this time in Medieval Greek, nor if it is necessarily Tzetzes' original or a scribal interpolation (Nick Nicholas over at Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος gives us some context about this). I suspect Bielmeier's translation (in German) is given in the way that it is ("Schämst du dich nicht, meine Herrin, (daß) ein Priester (mit dir) Geschlechtsverkehr hat?") to avoid having to deal with this issue, but intransitive Geschlechtsverkehr haben "to have sexual intercourse" isn't exactly what the Greek actually says. The verb γαμέω definitely has a direct object that is possessed by the αὐθέντρια.

Anyway, that was quite fun to learn about. I have not yet had a chance to read much of the rest of the volume yet, but 10/10 I would buy again.

Russell Meiggs & David Lewis (1969). A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century B.C. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

I've been feeling a bit out of it for the last few days, so I was really looking forward a day off where I could go see if there was anything new or interesting in the local used book shops. There wasn't really anything of interest at the book auction other than a copy of the second volume of Gotlands Runinskrifter (which is incidentally available online so I might as well leave that for someone who actually does runology), so I moved onto Vangsgaards main shop on Fiolstræde. 

It appears that there were a few new books in the Greek history and literature section, including a copy of Meiggs & Lewis' A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century B.C.

I admit I already have a copy of the revised version of this which was reissued as a Clarendon Paperback in 1992 (a purchase from the very fine Hellenic Book Service in London some years back), but it is always nice to get a good clean copy of the original hardcover – especially at a reasonable price of 125 DKK (ca. $17.61 USD). Also, my paperback copy is currently in storage in Canada and it's not really helping me at the moment.

I believe I would also be somewhat remiss to mention that the book has been in-part superseded at least with regard to the coverage of fifth century inscriptions following the Persian Wars has by Robin Osborne and Peter Rhodes' Greek Historical Inscriptions 478–404 BC (Oxford, 2017), but it's still nice to have for the selection the inscriptions from 479 BCE and earlier.

Karen Rørby Kristensen (2005). Gortynloven: Den store indskrift fra Gortyn på Kreta. København: Museum Tusculanums Forlag.

Museum Tusculanum Press publishes a series of books called Selskabet til Historiske Kildeskrifters Oversættelse (The Society for Translation of Historical Source Texts) which I first noticed when I saw in shops their latest offering, a complete Danish translation of Pausanias' Beskrivelse af Grækenland (Description of Greece) in a very attractive hardbound volume with lots of pretty maps and illustrations (but I've been having difficulties convincing myself to purchase a copy for the asking price while I am not yet fully fluent in the Danish language). The series seems to translate all manner of historical source texts primarily from Ancient Greek and Latin, although I note there is also a Danish translation of the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon (Sangen om slaget ved Maldon) as well.

While I was looking up the other titles in this series I noticed that there is among them also Gortynloven: Den store inskrift fra Gortyn på Kreta (The Gortyn Law: The large inscription from Gortyn on Crete), and I am not going to lie: those who know me know that I am an enjoyer of archaic Greek dialectal inscriptions. I am also supposed to be teaching the MA Greek (Indo-European) course next spring which has had a selection from the Gortyn Code on its reading list in the past syllabus and I'm probably going to keep it on mine. So this seems like a useful thing to have around and possibly something I can recommend to students that they can read in their own first language if they want and not have to resort to English, German, or French publications for once.

As it turns out the ordering system on Museum Tusculanum Press's website is currently borked (I know the person responsible for making the new website so hopefully that will be fixed soon), but I did manage to find a copy of the book at the Paludan Bogcafé & Antikvariat on Fiolstræde for the low, low price of 125 DKK (approx. $17.72 USD) which frankly I think is a steal for a recent-ish introduction, text, translation, and historical commentary of such an important Ancient Greek text. I do not need to think twice about adding this to my collection.

Holger Pedersen (1948). Hittitisch und die anderen indoeuropäischen Sprachen (2e Aufl.). København: Ejnar Munksgaard.

Since I been living in Copenhagen over the last year and a half I have been actively on the lookout in the local antikvariater for works of philological scholarship, especially those produced and published locally in what has been historically – and continues to be – a vibrant scholarly community. Many of these have been one-off chance finds in local bookshops and book auctions, but there has been one bookshop in Copenhagen I have had previously not yet visited. The bookshop Herman H. J. Lynge & Søn on Silkegade (branching off from the Købmagergade main street) is a high-end rare book store which I first became aware of when finding their their AbeBooks listing when I was (as I occasionally find myself doing) looking to see myself a good copy of Lilian Jeffery's Local Scripts of Archaic Greece. Oxford University Press does new reprints of a 1990 edition with a supplement, but the print-on-demand reprints only have grainy reproductions of the plates that aren't on high-quality photographic paper like the original printings... I eventually decided that their list price of 2,200 DKK (ca. $311.93 USD) for a version of the book that was not the revised 1990 edition with a supplement (a crucially important extra if I am going to use the book as a reference for actual scholarly work) despite that I could be sure that the plates would be of good quality. Oh well. So I put Lynge & Søn out of my mind for the time being, at least until a friend recently pointed out their storefront in person and mentioned how he was intimidated to go in and ask to look around.

Well, I decided to take one for the team and went through Lynge & Søn's online catalogue. I identified a few more volumes of interest to me that I might be willing to pay a premium for and emailed ahead of time so that they could be expecting us to enter and we wouldn't have to resort to an awkward 'Can we look around?' as though we were tourists who happened to wander in and not in fact holders of Oxbridge-granted doctoral degrees (as our unkempt appearances might disguise).

As it turned out, on the day we made the appointment to visit the shop my companion had fallen ill so I had to forge on alone. Upon entering I was greeted by a pleasant young chap who presented the volumes which I had asked about over email, one of which was the second edition of the well-known Danish philologist Holger Pedersen's work Hittitisch und die anderen indoeuropäischen Sprachen (Hittite and the other Indo-European Languages). This work of Pedersen was critical of the Indo-Hittite (or Indo-Anatolian) hypothesis that the Anatolian subgroup of the Indo-European language family was an outlier to the family as a whole, while all the others had their own separate period of linguistic unity with new innovations before splitting off into the remaining nine-ish major subgroups of the Indo-European language family that scholars agree on. While consensus in the intervening decades has fallen on the side of Indo-Anatolian hypothesis, Pedersen's work still has lasting value for individual points of analysis which he advanced here.

So I did purchase this book for 500 DKK (ca. $70.89 USD), but I should give a casual warning to those reading this post that apparently the list prices on Lynge & Søn's website do not include VAT, so an unexpected additional 125 DKK was heaped onto this. Additionally, my friend and I were right to suspect that the storefront is not well-suited for casual browsing. I am sure that there is a system in place for the people working there to find their holdings and dispatch them to their online buyers I had the impression from the way things were organised that the staff would not be too happy with people coming in to casually handle their sometimes extremely rare and expensive books. This impression was reinforced by the fact that they were not set up to take card payments in the shop itself, but I had to first make the purchase through their online shop before they handed over the goods in person. That said, the shop staff was very pleasant and for a brief while I had a short time to ogle the rare books on hand while they were setting up the card payment on the store computer.

While shopping at this rare book store was an odd experience with some unexpected difficulties, the staff was helpful and pleasant, and I am now in possession of yet another piece of Copenhagen philological ephemera which I might actually use for real scholarly work. I would probably still much prefer to do the in-store experience for Lynge & Søn if I were an actual rich person looking into to buying one of their more expensive manuscripts for thousands of kroner as an investment, but since I do not have that kind of money to spend next time it might just be easier to order online next time if it is just something costing the low hundreds as something I am actually going to read and use in my work (and yeah ok, I admit it, collect for my aesthetic sensibilities).