simply messing about in books
This brief note to report that in 2025 Zagava Books will be publishing Another Green World, a collection of short fiction much expanded from the 2003 work with the same title, and containing several previously unpublished stories. The book will be available in two states, a narrow format paperback and a numbered hardcover. The book can be pre-ordered here :
https://zagava.de/shop/another-green-world
Zagava produce beautiful books and I am delighted to join the ranks of their authors.
the next book from Temporary Culture is in press :
A Melville Census. John Marr & Timoleon. With a note by Henry Wessells.
Edition of 52 copies, designed and printed by hand by Jerry Kelly, forthcoming late 2024 or January 2025.
This is just what it sounds like : a report on the location of all known copies of Herman Melville’s John Marr (1888) and Timoleon (1891), the two last books of poems (each printed in editions of 25 copies), with a note about Maurice Sendak, Bill Reese, and others. Subscription details will be announced when a firm date can be set for publication day.
In conjunction with the Grolier Club exhibition “Melville’s Billy Budd at 100”, a symposium will be held on Wednesday evening 9 October, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., at the Grolier Club, 47 east 60th street, in New York City. RSVP required (hybrid event with separate registration for virtual attendance, see link).
A panel of prominent Melvillians will address Melville’s masterpiece, each of them commenting on the centennial exhibition and its implications. This will be followed by a discussion on such topics as textual history, biographical context during Melville’s years of writing his “prose and poem concoction”, the text’s cultural journey in the 20th and 21st centuries, and its adaptations into theater, opera, film, and the visual arts, as well as areas for potential future exploration. The symposium will be moderated by Richard Brodhead, who taught English and American literature at Yale for 32 years before becoming president of Duke University. Brodhead’s writings on Melville include Hawthorne, Melville and the Novel, The School of Hawthorne, and New Essays on Moby Dick. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and chaired the Academy’s 2013 commission on the humanities. The speakers will be John Bryant, David Greven, and Grolier members G. Thomas Tanselle and Henry Wessells.
Dr. Bryant, Professor Emeritus of English at Hofstra University, is a leading Melville scholar. Founding editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies and director of the Melville Electronic Library, he received the Distinguished Editor Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2015. He has contributed several books and numerous essays on Melville, American literature, and scholarly editing, including Melville and Repose (Oxford) and The Fluid Text (Michigan). He is currently working on the last volume of his three-volume biography, Herman Melville: A Half Known Life (Wiley). Dr. Greven is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. His books include All the Devils Are Here: American Romanticism and Literary Influence (The University of Virginia Press, 2024), and a study of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Intimate Violence (Oxford University Press, 2017). Tom Tanselle, a Past President of the Grolier Club, is a bibliographical scholar who for many years was the vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University. He was also one of the three primary editors of the fifteen-volume Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville, and he has published many other books. Henry Wessells is a writer and antiquarian bookseller in New York. He is the author of A Conversation larger than the Universe (2018), a catalogue accompanying his Grolier Club exhibition of the same name, The Private Life of Books (2020), and A Melville Census, John Marr & Timoleon (in press, forthcoming 2025).
Readers of the ’shelf and friends in the New York area are invited to an event and presentation, this year honoring PEDRO PONCE, the winner of the Second Tom La Farge Award for Innovative Writing, Teaching and Publishing
It will be held on Friday 11 October 2024, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., at the Ground Floor Gallery of the Grolier Club, 47 East 60th St..(between Madison and Park aves.), NYC, NY 10022.
Pedro will be interviewed, discuss the writing of Tom La Farge, and read from his own work.
This annual award in the amount of $10,000 is designed to encourage and foster literary activity that combines serious play, imagination, erudition and innovative practice. To learn more about the Tom La Farge Award :
https://www.thetomlafargeaward.com/
Refreshments will be served and the doors open at 6:30 pm.
The event is free and open to the public but seating is limited so please RSVP to : Wendy Walker, wwalker377@gmail.com
We look forward to sharing an evening of wonderful writing with you!
Wendy Walker
& the Tom La Farge Committee :
Corina Bardoff
Daniel Levin Becker
Sam Goodman
Michael Kowalski
Eliza Martin
Philip Ording
posted on behalf of the Committee by
Henry Wessells
Readers,
I try to post here on the ’shelf first, and sometimes then drop a link in the minuscule social media presence I maintain. I remember the early years of twitter with pleasure, but I scraped and escaped that platform a year ago ; I mothballed instagram at about the same time, abandoned in place and still accessible as there are videos relating to the Magazine of Poetry and readings at 725 Fifth avenue worthy of persistence (catalogue to come). I picked a mastodon iteration in the autumn of 2023 (what a long year it seems) : @endlessbookshelf@mastodon.iriseden.eu.
A small organic following evolved, but in recent months the iteration has been routinely unreliable and inaccessible to me : first I couldn’t upload images, and now I cannot even log on at all. Possibly it is user error, but equally possible, not. So I have established another account at : @endlessbookshelf@mastodon.social
fall feuilleton
fall feuilleton, part two
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“oscillating revisions”
— John Bryant, on certain passages in the fluid text of Melville’s Billy Budd
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the view from the hammock
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“You can’t always count on / things opening up for you / Know when to let go / learn how to fall.”
— “Skydiving”, Ishmael Reed, from Conjure, in a reading with Allen Ginsberg at the Library of Congress 29 April 1974
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“Writing within conventions of language, and of genre, is like swimming in society rather than in a pond under a waterfall.”
— William S. Wilson
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The illusion grew more perfect the closer to the trees he went. Now the needles seemed almost to be suggesting the grain of polished wood. It was the way they alternated colors and shades, darker green above lighter above darker, a random pattern solidifying into the whorls on a slab of monkeywood.
It was the door to his bedroom.
— Peter Straub. Ghost Story [1979]
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— Kasper van Ommen. “The Einstein of the sixteenth century”, in : Books That Made History. 26 Books from Leiden That Changed the World. Edited by Kasper van Ommen and Geert Verhoeven. [Translated by Claire and Mike Wilkinson]. Brill, 2022.
Excellent essay on J. J. Scaliger (1540-1609), polyglot scholar of classical and near eastern languages, whose Opus de emendatione temporum (1598) integrated astronomy and history from Jewish, Babylonian, Persian and Egyptian sources as well as Greek and Roman works ; “he also incorporated the latest astronomical understandings of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) and Tycho Brahe (1546-1601)”. Scaliger came to Leiden University with his library in 1593; it soon grew, and has been kept there ever since. Your correspondent is the lowest amateur polyglot in the presence of such erudition; there were some remarkable books on view during a visit last week (including a presentation inscribed from Brahe to Scaliger).
A summary note on Scaliger’s career by van Ommen on the University website (Dutch for ‘grouch’ is brompot), Josephus Scaliger : famous scholar and grouch
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— Janwillem van de Wetering. Hard Rain [1986]. Soho paperback, [1997].
Had to pick this one up again, an old favorite by an old friend, for a re-read now that I have been to Amsterdam, and have walked and bicycled along the canals and into the Amsterdamse Bos. It was a Depression-era landscaping project around the Olympic rowing basin of 1928 and is now a mature city forest and a green lung in the midst of a densely populated zone.
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— Heather Swan. Where the Grass Still Signs. Stories of Insects and Interconnection. Pennsylvania State University Press, [2024].
Memoir and travelogue on insects and landscapes from the rural midwest to Colombia and Ecuador, richly illustrated with works by contemporary artists. Seen in the window of Architectura & Natura, an inviting bookshop on Leliegracht in Amsterdam.
— Christian de Pange. Le Bréviare du Quintivir. Une enquête bibliographique en Franche-Comté. [Lusove: Imprimerie de Bacchus] Pour la Société des Bibliophiles Francois, 2022.
Bibliographical account of a private social club in Vesoul in rural France at the turn of the nineteenth century, and their festive book, printed circa 1813 for the five members. The bibliographer has traced three copies to the present day; a fourth copy was last seen in 1896. Edition of 100 copies, from the author.
— Choosing Vincent. From family collection to Van Gogh Museum. Lisa Smith and Hans Luijten (eds.). Van Gogh Museum / Thoth Publishers, [2023].
— Emile Schriver and Heide Warncke. 18 highlights from Ets Haim, the oldest Jewish library in the world. Walburg Pers, [2016].
Illustrated selection of books and manuscripts from the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam (founded 1616).
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— Avram Davidson and Grania Davis. A Goat for Azazel. [Afterword by Michael Swanwick]. Dragonstairs Press, forthcoming 5 September 2024. Edition of 80 copies, stitched in mourning lacework paper wrappers, signed by Swanwick.
Reproduces the text of a proposal for an Eszterhazy “ghost novel” (circa 1993 or 1994), with a note by Michael Swanwick, whose friendship back then encouraged my researches and the formation of the Avram Davidson website.
— Nancy Isenberg. White Trash. The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. [With a new preface to the paperback edition]. Penguin, [2017].
The persistence of early modern English hierarchies and economic structures from the earliest beginnings of the enterprise. Dispossession, servitude, and the upward concentration of wealth.
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afternoon sun in Amsterdam, Leidseplein
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The Endless Bookshelf will be filing despatches from Amsterdam and environs during the week of the A.I.B congress (words and images dropped in here as found).
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things are symbols of themselves / semiotics of Amsterdam
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vegan potato truffle cappuccino
[surprise innovation offered during the medley of the Daalder experience, vegan mode]
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Vondelpark
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Watcher at the edge of the cow pasture, in the Amsterdamse Bos.
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Herengracht
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‘Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres’
The earliest surviving manuscript of Caesar’s De bello gallico (On the Gallic War), ca. ninth century CE, at the Allard Pierson collection, University of Amsterdam.
At the other end of the table, a stack of more than 80 ‘feuilles volantes’ (1916-28) of Kaváfis (Cavafy), scattered leaves of his self-published Poems.
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Breestraat, Leiden
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color in the Rijksmuseum library
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— H. N. Werkman. Hot Printing. [Groningen, ca. 1936]. One of three known copies of a portfolio of prints and poems.
At the Koninglijke Bibliotheek = KB, nationale bibliotheek :
Onze wereld is gebouwd met woorden en gevormd door mensen
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— Vincent van Gogh. Trois romans.
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At the Ritman Library, Keizersgracht 123, Amsterdam.
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Compagnieszaal, West-Indisch Huis, Amsterdam (this is the room where New Amsterdam was planned)
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rainbow at Schiphol
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Tony Saunders
21 September 1961 – 11 July 2024
My friend Tony Saunders, artist, musician, and social worker, died in New York City earlier this summer. I wrote a note to be read at private memorial gathering :
Tony was my friend from the moment we met in sophomore year, to the tunes of Brian Eno’s Another green world and the Velvet Underground. If we had some similar high school background stuff, he was very much the City Mouse to my Country Mouse. He encouraged me to question myself, and Princeton, about how I was seeking to educate myself. This (and the music) were early, spontaneous gifts to me. If our paths crossed and diverged and crossed again, our friendship was constant, and regularly renewing. He was a brave person who looked at himself and chose sobriety, and his life was enriched by that choice. He kept making his art, in a variety of media, and on his terms, not following some temporary fashion. And he found a way to integrate his art into a later career as a social worker. He was very articulate about the playful presence of his approach. Not long after Tony died, MJ and I saw the Eno documentary, and both of us said, how much T would have appreciated that; but in truth he had already lived many of Eno’s insights into art and process. He was a great friend and we are lucky to know him and to remember him.
In 2016 Tony recorded a statement for his friend Michael Schickele that is worth looking for : https://matthewschickele.bandcamp.com/track/tony
It feels like the end of summer here in Montclair, with the hop cones turning, and the tables at the farmers’ market asprawl with the last of the bulbous heirloom tomatoes and an abundance of pawpaws. And some interesting books in the the mail recently :
— Peter Bell. Two Weird Tales. Zagava, 2024. Collects “On the Apparitions at Gray’s Court”, a ghost story and haunted house in York, and “Labyrinth”, an uncanny tale set in one of the northern dales.
— John Crowley. Le Parlement des Fées. Traduit de l’américain par Doug Headline. 2 vols., Paris : Rivages / Fantasy, [1994, 1995]. The French edition of Little, Big (the pseudonym of the translator is a jest, for he is the son of crime novelist J. P. Manchette, hard-boiled trail blazer in the Gallimard Série noire, whose surname translates as : headline).
— Mark Valentine. The Thunderstorm Collectors. Tartarus Press, [2024]. Collection of twenty-nine essays and vignettes, including pieces on Arthur Machen, A. J. A. Symons, M. R. James, and lesser known figures from the “curious alleys and byways” of literature and folklore.
— David R. Gillham. Shadows of Berlin. Sourcebooks Landmark, [2022].
A fun trip down to Austin to see old friends, attend Armadillocon, make new friends, eat good vegan food, and, as usual, look at books. (This is one of those postcards that gets mailed after leaving the place.) I hadn’t been to Austin or Armadillocon for several years, so it was good to be back. A curator friend recommended a vegan sushi place Nori. I headed there after our meeting and was impressed by the Katana-ya (deep-fried nori roll with avocado, cucumber, kanpyo, shoga, surimi mix; topped with wasabi mayo, unagi, ponzu green salad, jalapeño, red onion, and cilantro). The convention was in the same hotel as before, an odd, anonymous late 1970s exurban architectural mode that could have been at the edge of Anywhere, USA. Inside, though, it was all Armadillocon, a small friendly convention with a good mix of panels and readings (even sometimes forcing one to make hard choices).
One of the reasons I went was to show up at the Howard Waldrop celebration, a panel moderated by Scott A. Cupp and also including Sanford Allen, Robert Taylor, and Don Webb: all friends who knew Howard for decades. I hadn’t been able to attend the Waldrop Memorial in June; I was glad to attend this gathering. Towards the end of the allotted hour (the anecdotes and yarns could have gone on for hours), when the floor was open for comments, I stood up and said something like this:
My name is Henry Wessells and I’m from New Jersey, where we also esteem Howard Waldrop. He excelled at integrating incompatible ideas into improbable fictions that suddenly reveal truths about life, literature, and America; and the stories equally suddenly show themselves to be inevitable and essential parts of American literature. If “The Ugly Chickens” is often mentioned as Howard’s best known story, for me his masterpiece is “Heart of Whitenesse”, where the ambitious conceit is executed with perfect skill. Not a word out of place, and the madcap humor is controlled in the service of the tale.
I have it from a reliable source that as an angler Howard practiced catch and release, and thus understood the impossibility of clinging to things. And so we now mark his departure; the stories, and the ideas, remain.
— Christopher Brown. Field Notes. September 2024. [Austin, 7 September 2024]. Gift of the author, inscribed, one of the first copies out of the box. Two essays, two reading lists, and twelve photos. Newsletter for advance orders to his new book.
——. A Natural History of Empty Lots. Timber Press, [September 2024]. Advance copy, inscribed.
Live to Build a Better World. Despair, Survival, and Hope in Science Fiction’s Response to Environmental Change. [Introduction by Jeremy Brett]. Texas A&M University Libraries, 2021. Illustrated catalogue for the exhibition at the Cushing Memorial Library (January to June 2021). An interesting selection of mostly twenty-first century books and films, with the earliest titles being The Lorax (1971), by Dr. Seuss, Brunner’s The Sheep Look up and Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (both 1972), and Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower (1993).
— Avram Davidson. The Avram Davidson Treasury. Tor, [1998]. Book club edition which I hadn’t known existed. The copyright page is altered, the dust jacket carries no price and has a number slug on the back panel, and the black boards are smooth.
— Delilah S. Dawson. Bloom. Titan, [2023].
— Joe R. Lansdale. Things Get Ugly. The Best Crime Stories of Joe R. Lansdale. [Introduction by S. A. Cosby]. Tachyon, [2023].
— Josh Rountree. Death Aesthetic. Underwood, [2024].
——. The Legend of Charlie Fish. Tachyon, [2023].
— John Varley. The Persistence of Vision. [Introduction by Algis Budrys] [1978]. Dell [Quantum Paperback], [1979]. Varley was the first Armadillocon guest of honor.
— Howard Waldrop. Howard Who?. Stories [1986]. Peapod Classics. [Small Beer Press, third printing, 30 March 2024] [replacement copy].