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a collection of short fiction much expanded from the 2003 work with the same title, and containing several previously unpublished stories.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 the bindery and publication details will be announced next week :
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 autumn 2024.
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. Of the copies printed, 26 lettered copies are for presentation. Subscription details will be announced when a firm date can be set for publication day.
— Adrian Dannatt. Capacity for Loss. [Opium Books, 2024]. Edition of 300. Yellow cloth, dust jacket with illustration, Gaia, from the painting by Danny Moynihan.
Author Adrian Dannatt, debonair man about many towns, is seen in mid-gesture above, just a few minutes ago at the publishing party for the launch of his collection of poems, Capacity for Loss, at Nathalie Karg Gallery, amid an installation of Danny Moynihan’s paintings.
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‘Sard Harker by John Masefield’ is an essay published for the centenary of this adventure novel set in Santa Barbara, most leeward of the sugar countries of South America, now up on Wormwoodiana. It is set in a South America of abandoned villages and mysterious temples, a land of adventure and visions, a paradise of metaphor and simile.
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Your correspondent will be at the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair, Friday through Sunday 8-10 November, at the Hynes Convention Center (Cummins booth 514). Come say hello. I will have copies of The Private Life of Books and others available.
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— Louis Lüthi. On the Self-Reflexive Page II. Illustrated throughout. 298,[4] pp. [Amsterdam: Roma Publications, 2021]. Pictured at right.
I pulled this from a shelf at IRIS, a nice bookstore in Montclair that just celebrated one year as an open shop. I remembered the title from a decade ago and was curious to see what the new iteration would hold. The emphasis is similar, reflections on pages in literature that perform in a different mood than prose text, from Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67) to Walter Benjamin, André Breton, Harry Mathews, Donald Barthelme, and other recent writers. This new edition, with different images of marbled pages from Tristram Shandy for its covers, is much expanded, with more examples of pages : black, blank, drawing, document, photography, and text pages; and the essay is more discursive and takes in a wider scope of material than in the first edition (at left, above), which I had grabbed at a Printed Matter art book fair in the autumn of 2012 and noted here , with a visual nod to the allusions to Tristram Shandy that anchor the book. The 2010 edition is a book of 128 numbered pages, followed by a concise, unpaginated essay of 32 pages (including notes and bibliography).
The first edition included a loose leaf, a Prière d’inserer or “review slip” :
This reminded me of the playful review slip found in the S.P. copies of Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de Style (1947), which prints one of the exercices in the book :
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‘A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container’
snapshots from a recent Futurefarmers event, on a quiet street in the Mission district in San Francisco, wish I were there
with artist Michael Swaine, well known to readers of the ’shelf as one of the instigators of the Weedwalk in San Francisco, an informal botanizing ramble, which included two memorable Book Walks, in 2007 and 2009.
— Richard Powers. The Future Is behind You. Oberlin Commencement Address 2023. The Letterpress at Oberlin, 2023. One of 14 copies, specially bound (edition of 105, all signed by the author). [Gift of VH].
“It may feel like a catastrophe. And yet it may also be the most clarifying thing, if you can step back and read it as part of a story that is much more than yours.”
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‘stealthy book killers’
— Craig Graham. At Night the Silverfish Move. Vagabond Books, 2023.
Snappy collection of three poems by bookseller Craig Graham: the title poem, “At Night the Silverfish Move (For Raymond Carver In Memoriam)”, dark, lethal, and funny; the predatory “Waiting for You”; and ending on the wistful optimism of “Juneteenth”. Graham is also author of Phantom Pain (2014). [Gift of the author].
— Henry James. The Turn of the Screw [1898]. Edited with an introduction and notes by David Bromwich. Penguin Books pbk.
The original serial publication, in Collier’s Weekly, had illustrations by John La Farge :
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— Walter Klinefelter. The Fortsas Bibliohoax [1941]. Revised and Newly Annotated. Press of Ward Schori, 1986.
Anatomy of a celebrated and supremely successful hoax, a book auction catalogue from Belgium, 1840 : the collector, the books, the auction, entirely fictitious ; the original catalogue is now itself a rare book.
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 late autumn of 2022 (what a strange couple of years 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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