Today marks seventeen years of reports of messing about in books under the sign of the Endless Bookshelf. I’m still at it, and glad to be reading and thinking about books, and occasionally writing or publishing them. What a delight to discover new books and writers or to find that a book published a century ago is fresh and nimble. I have a few essays in the works, either scheduled for publication or due this spring, and other things in progress. To my few readers, it is always a delight to hear from you, keep sending me your news.
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current reading :
— Marcel Proust. Le temps retrouvé [1927].
— Herman Melville. Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces. Constable, 1924. This was Melville’s last book, unpublished at the time of his death and closely connected to his book of verse, John Marr and other sailors (1888). Billy Budd grew out of a note to “Billy in the Darbies”, the poem that concludes the book. The manuscript re-emerged in the early 1920s and first published by Constable as vol. 13 in the Standard Edition of the Works, a landmark in the rediscovery of Melville. There will be an exhibition on Billy Budd and Melville at the Grolier Club in September and I am celebrating the centenary by reading the book. For now:
In this matter of writing, resolve as one may to keep to the main path, some by-paths have an enticement not readily to be withstood. Beckoned by the genius of Nelson I am going to err into such a by-path. If the reader will keep me company I shall be glad.
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[In September 2023, I left Twitter after nearly 15 years of marginal glosses and other ephemeral notes. I don’t miss it for an instant, though I do remember the days when it was a fun mode of quick communication. I post occasional announcements at @endlessbookshelf@mastodon.iriseden.eu and send out semi-annual newsletters.]
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recent reading :
— Marcel Proust. Albertine disparue [1925].
— Michael Swanwick. Phases of the Sun [bound with:] Phases of the Moon. Dragonstairs Press, 2020 [i.e., 2024]. Text printed dos à dos, leporello binding of yellow and blue boards. Edition of 19. Swanwick at his bleakest and most romantic in these two sequences of short short stories about writing and love.
— Howard Waldrop. The Ugly Chickens. [Old Earth Books, 2009].
— Ron Weighell. The Mark of Andreas Germer. Quire 13. The Last Press, 2022. Edition of 100. Original short yarn from the estate of Ron Weighell (1950-2020), moving nimbly from a thoughtful citation of Milton to the tale of a book with a dreadful effect upon its reader.
— Arthur Machen. The Three Impostors or the Transmutations [1895], in The House of Souls. Tartarus Press, [2021].
— Samantha Harvey. Orbital. A Novel. Grove, [December 2023].
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I am looking forward to receiving the Conway Miscellany, a collection of four books by John Crowley from Ninepin Press in varying formats, comprising: The Sixties, A Forged Diary; Seventy-Nine Dreams; Two Talks on Writing; and Two Chapters in a Family Chronicle.
