America’s premier conservative was also its premier wordsmith, and Buckley: The Right Word (edited by Sam Vaughan) was the book WFB fans demanded. It’s all here: the uses and abuses of language, vocabulary, diction and dictionaries, journals and journalists, style, eloquence, interviews and reviews, verbal encounters with Borges, le Carre, Galbraith, Schlesinger, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, The New York Times, essays on formality and style, a Buckley lexicon – it’s no wonder this 1996 paperback edition (yours for $12, which includes postage and handling) was a bestseller.

Here’s what Booklist had to say about Buckley: The Right Word.

A style manual? A dictionary? A chrestomathy? An apologia pro vita sua? Whatever words define this compendium of Buckleyan writings might not exist, and Buckley, conservative that he is, would abhor pasting some faddish neologism on this title. Suffice it to say, the English language, even with its capacious vocabulary, doesn’t seem big enough to contain Buckley’s subject–the usage of words. His book tries and contains a copious quantity of his letters, memos, columns, novel excerpts, interviews, and, yes, a personalized dictionary (in the sense that Buckley, verbally self-confident and immune to imputations of self-idolatry, uses his own published phrases to display in action some polysyllabic word or other). About the only categories of Buckleyiana not represented here are transcripts of Firing Line debates and songs he might sing while showering. In this variety of formats, one quality associated with Buckley is absent: politics on the Right. This is a collection for word lovers, not partisans of polemics, and so should widen readership beyond the subscription list of the National Review, the magazine that, besides being the voice of conservatism, seems to have as its mission debating the obfuscatory or coruscant meanings of words. A vital volume for verbomaniacs.

We’ve got 2 boxes from Bill’s private stash. These will go fast.

UPDATE: Sold out.