Author: Henry Wessells

commonplace book : late february & early march

current reading

— David Streitfeld. Western Star. The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry. Mariner Books, [forthcoming March 2026].

Even the worst events in America, such as the slaughter of Native Americans, are soon repackaged as entertainment. [27]

There were, he calculated with the help of a detective he hired, at least five Larry McMurtrys operating throughout the Southwest and Mexico. [282]

Larry took the opposite approach. He never complained about any of those who appropriated the Lonesome Dove name for their ranch or saloon, much less sued them. He would tell interviewers that the story was an American version of the Arthurian legends. It overflowed single ownership and had been set loose in the national psyche. [295]

Western Star is an engaging book about an American writer — who once had a sweatshirt reading Minor Regional Novelist — and a fascinating study of obsession, book collecting, and the old ecosystems of the used and rare book trade.

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a title is not a book

— Michael Swanwick. The Universe Box. Tachyon, [2026].
This is another fabulous Swanwick collection ! “Starlight Express” and “Ghost Ships” are subtle ghost stories ; and “The Star-Bear” is a very tricky story to read in the centenary year of Lud-in-the-Mist and The Book of the Bear.
Swanwick must just light up with glee when he decides to take up a literary challenge : what chutzpah to write an interplanetary science fiction story with the title “The Warm Equations” ! And to pull off the critique unspoken but ever-present ! And that is barely scratching the surface of this box of delights.

In the first month of the Endless Bookshelf, a chance comment by a reader prompted me to observe that “a title is not a book” ; and this newest collection  from Tachyon prompts me to note (with glee) the occasional significance of the definite article ; and I can talk the talk, for I am one of the few to have a Universe Box and The Universe Box upon my shelf :

Wait. The cigar box you were carrying around contains the universe ?

The 2016 edition of Universe Box was issued by Dragonstairs Press in an edition of 13, in a cigar box containing the printed book, a shredded printout, celestial map, taxidermy eye, calling cards, and other secret treasures.

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a picture and short essay here at the weekly Shelfies edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin

https://shelfies.beehiiv.com/p/shelfies-78-henry-wessells

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[February]

not the first book fair

in San Francisco for the 57th California International Antiquarian Book Fair, 27 February through 1 March at the Cruise Terminal building, pier 27 on the Embarcadero. I will be in booth 117 (Cummins).
It would have been 1997, I think, that I first came to the book fair at the Brannan Center (long gone). Come say hello if you are here, and write if you would like a pass.

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California poppies

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meanwhile, back at the ranch

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recent reading

— Anthony Powell. The Military Philosophers [1968]. Fontana Books, [1971].
My favorite of the ‘Dance’ novels, a pleasure to re-read.

— Fletcher Pratt. The Blue Star [1953]. Introduction by Lin Carter. Ballantine Books, [1969].

 

re-reading in winter

commonplace book :

From Tatlin !  Six stories by Guy Davenport (1974) :

Our sense of the old is always modern. Starlight is hundreds of years old. We live in the phoenix time of antiquity.
[from “1830”]

Perhaps only in the awful light of the extraordinary was there real calm in human action. Nothing he might do was superfluous to the moment.
[from “The Airplanes at Brescia”]

an everlasting fire, dying and flaring up again
[from “Herakleitos”]

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recent reading :

— Naoto Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison. Super Normal. Sensations of the Ordinary [2007]. Lars Müller Publishers, [2024].
Fascinating exhibition of objects from daily life, Tokyo and London 2006 ; Trienniale di Milano 2007.

— Anthony Powell. At Lady Molly’s [1957] and The Kindly Ones [1962].
I picked up At Lady Molly’s and was drawn in, and then on to another . . . An earlier reader of the copy of The Kindly Ones has noted a few passages  : not always ones I might have marked, but I like these :

Moreland could never get used to the fact that most people — in this case, Templer — lead lives in which the arts play no part whatsoever. That is perhaps an exaggeration of Moreland’s attitude. All the same, he always found difficulty in accustoming himself to complete aesthetic indifference.

It was like trying to shake hands with Ophelia while she was strewing flowers.

One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.

I have read the complete cycle, out of sequence, and several of the novels more than once or twice ; with the Dance I don’t think it matters whether or not one reads the books in any particular order, for Powell’s prose moves across time within each book and sometimes within a single paragraph, always with such clarity that there is  no doubt (indirection and obliqueness, yes : muddiness, no). Once one has the work as a whole in one’s head, the characters and incidents and phrases play out in memory and recreation. My favorite remains The Military Philosophers, with At Lady Molly’s close on its heels.
The most interesting parts of Hilary Spurling’s Invitation were the indices of literary or musical references and places, to tease out subtle allusions that slipped by unnoticed ;  the index of persons with biographical summaries and concordance of appearances gives a doleful feeling : a litany of all the facts with none of the pleasure of the text.

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nineteen years of the Endless Bookshelf

Friends,

today marks nineteen years of the Endless Bookshelf website. It was sunny and bitterly cold outside (the rhododendron leaves were tightly rolled) : a good day to be indoors with a book. I looked into Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica (sixth ed., 1672), and dug around in the chapters on the basilisk, bears, mermaids, dolphins, wolves, the phoenix (some of these I can see as touchstones for Avram Davidson). A pleasure to taste again Browne’s leisurely examination of delusions and sloppy thinking.

I have never been what they call a numbers driven person, so I don’t know what sort of “traffic” the ’shelf attracts (the newsletter list hovers around six hundred, and some recipients anyway may read theirs). But I do see occasional remarks or notes from readers, and on this occasion I reprint one which arrived by post last week :

I saw your post “Very Few Letters” and figured that was a good prompt for me to write you this short note.
There is no other site or place on ye olde internet that has provided me with as much continued enjoyment as the Endless Bookshelf. I continually return to the archives to discover new books or authors, and to read your good words.
My TBR pile/list always grows and I always somehow feel better after a visit. Weird, I know, but thought that a letter expressing my thanks might be welcomed.

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Comments arrive at the Endless Bookshelf in many forms : a reader from California has just sent more than two dozen Seville oranges (pronounced in Shakespeare’s day as “civil as an orange” as Much Ado about Nothing reminds us). These will soon be transmuted into marmalade.

I will be in San Francisco at the end of February for the California International Antiquarian Book Fair, 27 February through 1 March at the Cruise Terminal building on the Embarcadero. I will be in booth 117 (Cummins). Say hello if you are there, and write if you would like a pass.

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‘Lolly Willowes’ at 100

I wrote a centenary celebration of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes or the Loving Huntsman for Wormwoodiana (published earlier this week) :

http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2026/01/sylvia-townsend-warners-lolly-willowes.html

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recent reading

— Howard Waldrop. Masters of Science Fiction. Introduction by Paul Di Filippo. 1048 pp. Centipede Press, [2026]. Edition of 500 copies signed by Paul Di Filippo. Just began reading this giant compendium of stories from 1972 to 2005 : many familiar tales and some I haven’t seen before.

— [Charlotte Adams]. Jean Grolier [1884]. [Grolier Club, 2025]. Re-issue of an essay on collector Jean Grolier (1476-1565) from the earliest days of the club, designed by Jerry Kelly and the first use of his new Grolier typeface, based on the earliest roman and italic type cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldus Manutius. The colophon serves as a type specimen (though it does not show the tiny flourishes or extenders which also echo the early type forms).

— Tom La Farge. The Crimson Bears. Part One. A Hundred Doors. Part Two. Tough Poets Press, [2025]. I pulled the new edition from the shelf, started reading, and just kept going on from there. (I re-read the original edition last summer.) What a playful, sophisticated book.

— Ngaio Marsh. Artists in Crime [1938]. Penguin Books, [1957].

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Thank you to all the readers. As always, send me your news or tell me about books I have overlooked.

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A singular interview with Gregory Feeley

Gregory Feeley is author of The Oxygen Barons (1990), Kentauros (2010), and many novellas and short stories published in magazines or anthologies, including “Aweary of the Sun” (1994) ; “The Weighing of Ayre” in Starlight 1 (1996) ; “Fancy Bread” (2005) ; and “The Unpastured Sea” (2023). His work often engages incidents of cultural and technological change. We have known each other for many years through our shared interest in the writings of Avram Davidson. In 2005 I published his short novel of coffee and ideas in early seventeenth-century Venice, Arabian Wine. A recent work,  Th’Erratic Stars (2022) is an extract from his novel « Hamlet the Magician ».

Henry Wessells : Allusions to Shakespeare and his writings run deep throughout your work, including several novellas and your novel Hamlet the Magician. Can you point to a specific line or passage in the Plays and say, “It all started here” ?

Gregory Feeley : I think it must have been sometime around the age of 10 or 11, when I first saw a production of Macbeth and heard Macbeth declare that “Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, / While night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.” I recognized “Night’s Black Agents” as the title of a collection by Fritz Leiber (I was at that time much better read in science fiction than in Shakespeare) and immediately Got It : you could take an especially good phrase from Shakespeare — or anyone else — and appropriate it for a story title ! This seemed such a wonderful thing that when I began reading what Terry Southern called Quality Lit a few years later and noticed how common the practice was, I knew that I could do this myself if I liked.
Macbeth has been heavily picked over, and I suspect I got the last good one. But I notice that Hamlet still has (at least) one left, and am surprised that no one has nabbed “A Crafty Madness”. It’s available for whoever wants it.

 

very few letters

Very Few Letters

— [T. E. Lawrence]. To tell you that in future I shall write very few letters. T. E. S. Printed card, [February 1935], sent by Lawrence to his correspondents in early 1935. O’Brien A161. An uncommon piece of ephemera.

/ from the archives

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Bibliography Week 2026

the A.B.A.A. Bib Week showcase will be held 10:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Wednesday 21 January at the Alliance Française on east 60th street. Open to the public, come say hello if you are in the neighborhood. I’ll be there (Cummins table).

https://bibliographyweek.org/2026/calendar

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If you ever wondered how science fiction writers live on after their death

/ thank you, Bruce Sterling, for this excellent headline

https://brucesterling.tumblr.com/post/796103278446493696/if-you-ever-wondered-how-science-fiction-writers

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current reading

— Tom La Farge. The Crimson Bears. Part One.  A Hundred Doors. Part Two. [Introduction by Wendy Walker]. Tough Poets Press,  [2025].

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Wreckage by Peter Straub : the Endless Bookshelf book of the year 2025

— Peter Straub. Wreckage [Introduction by Susan, Benjamin, and Emma Straub]. What Happens in Hello Jack [Introduction : Linkages, by Gary K. Wolfe]. 447 ; 141 pages. 2 vols., Subterranean Press, 2025. Edition of 500 numbered copies. [Dust jackets after photographs by Jenny Calivas].

‘party to some larger, less explicable understanding’

WRECKAGE, the unfinished final novel of Peter Straub, is the best book I have read this year. “It was to be a near perfect interweaving of Jack the Ripper and Henry James, two of Peter’s abiding interests : a timeless unsolved murderous mystery with the ultimate stylist and artist” (from the introduction by his family). The book is in two parts : the long sustained narrative of Wreckage is as fine and subtle and tricky (and funny) as anything Straub ever wrote, and What Happens in Hello Jack is a succinct, complete linear outline and summary of Straub’s plans for the novel (prepared in 2103), with extensively detailed and even polished vignettes. Why wouldn’t a modern master of horror grapple with the conceits and sources of The Turn of the Screw, that masterpiece of American imaginative prose ?

incidents in the life of Henry James

Wreckage is nineteen chapters (most with multiple episodes) chronicling events in the life of Tilly Hayward, whose activities as a serial killer in Milwaukee are masked by the deep and undetectable cover of his life in Columbus, and his sister Margot Mountjoy, whose married life in one of the richer suburbs of Minneapolis was one hell of an American Dream, the anatomy of which is charted as she begins her new life as a wealthy widow. These two lines are deeply rooted evocations of midwestern America in the late 1950s, even as they are connected to The Gathered Clan, a painting stolen from the ancestral home, Blane, by an English great grandfather as he fled to America, and to other events of seventy years before, when Henry James accepted an invitation to a country house weekend and encountered uncertainty. The “interlude” early in the novel, a vignette of Henry James in Monte Carlo (published last year in Conjunctions) makes explicit one of the transtemporal narrative threads. The Archbishop’s Tale, recounted in slightly different form in The Process, takes on new implications in Wreckage when a sinister group of three persons, that “larger, less explicable understanding”, recurs in odd variations throughout the novel (in the 1950s as well as the 1880s). The settings and minor characters are as accomplished as anything Straub has written. And the conversation between Tilly Hayward and one of his victims after her death, and more precisely, how and where the narrative runs with this, where the ghost of Lori Terry leads Tilly — “Ridiculous, he knew, yet . . .” — are quite simply spectacular, and a key to understanding the psychogeography and chronology of the narrative. Wreckage is, of course, a gripping headlong race to the cliff of incompletion, but the reader, this reader, goes willingly.

What Happens in Hello Jack offers pleasures of a different order. It dates to 2013 and Straub continued to work on the book for a decade beyond that fixed moment in time, so that the two volumes are sometimes usefully at odds with each other. I have no issue with fragmentary or even contradictory narratives, and the summary carries the several arcs through to the end. The prose is accomplished even as the terrain remains inherently unstable : “as James watches, Ayling seems briefly to vibrate in and out of sight [. . .]. James thinks he may have tricked himself into seeing this, but Ayling appears to waver in front of his canvas”. And then, in the space of a few pages, Straub thrusts Henry James into primal territory and a scene unlike any other in any fictional account of Henry James. Following this encounter, Straub has James draft two letters unknown to scholars, along with the explanation of how what we have just read is not preserved. The insightful and provocative Henry James set pieces are inseparable from the entangling narratives, and both volumes resonate with elements from A Dark Matter and The Skylark and The Process (a short novella which I loved), and offer variant riffs on earlier, teasing pieces presented at Readercon and in accounts of the artistic movement Das Beben. All of this amplifies the stories nested within Wreckage.

WRECKAGE is facinating in so many ways, chief among them the way in which the main narrative Wreckage demonstrates how Straub repeatedly altered and reworked the lines laid down in the Hello Jack summary. It is a gripping tale. The matter of Jack the Ripper is addressed and is made new. The playfulness of the novelist, is found everywhere, too, with stray shots at a country house partridge shoot (in equal measure homage to Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party and riff on an incident in the life of Dick Cheney, I think) ; the imaginary books, especially “that dreary children’s book”, The Distant Land, and what ripples out from it ; the episodes in the life of painter Hugo Ayling gleaned from a fourth volume of the Autobiography of Francis Frith ; and in the cameo appearances by Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, and “Little Alex C.”, a depraved juvenile Aleister Crowley ready to embark upon mischief and worse.

When, deep in the labyrinth of story, when Henry James tells Tilly Hayward : ‘It is in the nature of this place, which is not real except in the mind’, it is Peter Straub who has led the reader there.

The Endless Bookshelf book of the year.

ROUND-UP OF BOOKS FROM 2025 WORTH LOOKING FOR

— Charlotte Brontë. A Book of Ryhmes. [Introduction by Patti Smith.] Brontë Parsonage Museum / Tartarus Press, [2025].
Photographs and transcription of the small book of poems written by Charlotte Bronte October to December 1829. Samantha Ellis in the TLS : “it is amazing to read a young writer loudly, exultingly, exploring her ideas on the page.” [Also includes “Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Blue Profound’” by Barbara Heritage, and my essay, Travelling with Charlotte.]

— Brendan C. Byrne. Another World Isn’t Possible. Stories. [Melbourne :] Wanton Sun, [2025].
Dark, tricky, and often formally innovative stories from the hybrid digital interface of present and future, including “a Stone and a Cloud”, about two perilously immersive video games ; the oh so deftly choreographed bar room encounter of “There Is No Comte de St. Germain for I Am He” ; “reviews” of nonexistent stories ; tales of artists making art in media that may someday exist ; and the surprisingly touching arc of “The Ideal and the Actual”.
“Ruthlessly hip, transreal surreal. Worth your time.” — Rudy Rucker
Available in U.SA. from Barnes & Noble or bookshop.org.

— Tom La Farge. THE CRIMSON BEARS [and] A HUNDRED DOORS. [Introduction by Wendy Walker.] Tough Poets Press, [2025].
This is delightful news ! This two-part novel of talking animals of all kinds (only the human animal is irrelevant and absent) was first published by Sun & Moon in 1993 and 1995. Its cult readership included your correspondent and Austin mage Don Webb who each discovered the work independent of the other.
Tom La Farge was a very tricky writer whose erudition was never ostentatious. Wendy Walker knew the book from its origins as bedtime story and illustrated letters for Tom’s son Paul La Farge, who grew up to be a novelist ; her introduction is deeply personal and touching and also charts the many layers on which Tom was playing with words. Glimpses of the earliest manuscript adorn the inside of the covers.
READ THIS BOOK, you won‘t regret it.

— 100 Years 100 Voices. The Chapin Library. [Edited by Anne Peale. Photography by Nicole Neenan]. Williams College, [2025]. A beautiful and richly illustrated celebratory catalogue, presenting selected items from the Chapin Library at Williams College, established with gifts from Alfred C. Chapin in 1923. This is an important publication, a concise and compelling testimony about why books and libraries are central to education.

— Patti Smith. Bread of Angels. Random House, [2025]. Excellent and touching memoir of a rock ’n’ roll heroine, a great artist, uncompromising in matters of language ; and what a reader.

— Mark Valentine. Borderlands and Otherworlds. Tartarus Press, [2025].
Collection of 32 essays on books and reading, with an emphasis on the fantastic and supernatural in the interwar years and into the 1950s. The hardcover edition sold out, but it is now available in paperback.
— —. The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things. Tartarus Press, [2025].
New edition, expanded from the 2018 Zagava printing, with nine additional stories and vignettes. Includes “Vain Shadows Flee”, which was included in Best British Short Stories 2016.

— Michael Zinman. The Critical Mess. 2025. [Distributed by Temporary Culture].
I was involved in its production, yes, but it is really one of the most original books to appear this year.

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commonplace book : december 2025

far fetch :

— Mark Tewfik. Two Weeks in Ecuador and the Galapagos [drop title]. [8] pp. Santa Cruz, Galapagos Islands : Lanterne Rouge Press, 2025. Printed self wrapper with ornamental headpiece.
Fun travelogue with a truly exotic imprint, even for this peripatetic press.

and at the foot of the last page, the imprint, below :

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farewell to an old friend :

— Raymond Chandler. Killer in the Rain. With an introduction by Philip Durham. [1964]. Ballantine Books, [1972].
This book collects eight early pulp stories Chandler which had refused to reprint in his lifetime, because he had “cannibalized” them and transformed the raw material into the substance of three novels : The Big Sleep ; Farewell, My Lovely ; and The Lady in the Lake. Reading it was an education and single dose corrective to prose excesses rooted in obsessive teenage readings of H. P. Lovecraft. This copy, bought for 50 cents at the State Street Book Mart, a paper back exchange shop in New Orleans, has stuck with me for many years.

After re-reading parts of MacShane’s Life of Chandler, I pulled down Killer in the Rain to look at some of the stories, and it will not survive this reading. I will save the browned flyleaf and title page for a bookmark in a copy of the original Houghton Mifflin printing I bought last month : so I still havea copy of  Killer in the Rain ; and I will wait for a stormy day to say farewell to Killer in the Rain in the rain ; but the small gap on the paperback shelf will stay open for a time.

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from the Epigrammata of Martialis (Epigrams of Martial)

Lucanus
Sint quidam qui me dicunt non esse poetam :
Sed qui me vendit bibliopola putat.

Lucan
[Some say I am no poet : but the bibliopole* sells me as one]

 

* – bookseller, for you moderns, sez Old ’Pole

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Sonnet 151 with initial L by Edward Johnston, in the Doves Press edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1909.

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‘Pardon this intrusion’

The first words the monster speaks, in vol. II of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Philadelphia : Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1833.

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recent reading :

— J. I. M. Stewart. Myself and Michael Innes. A Memoir. W. W. Norton, [1988].

— Charles Willeford. Everybody’s Metamorphosis. Dennis McMillan, 1988. Edition of 426 copies signed by the author.

— Dorothy L. Sayers. Whose Body ? A Lord Peter Wimsey Novel [1923]. Harper & Row, [n.d., ca. mid-1950s]. Dust jacket design by Shirley Smith.

— Hilary Spurling. Invitation to the Dance. A Guide to Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Little, Brown, [1977].

— Margery Allingham. The Case of the Late Pig [1937]. Penguin Books, [1957].

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Cat and Girl in Oz

Dorothy Gambrell’s Cat and Girl are somewhere in Oz. They started on the yellow brick road here :

https://catandgirl.com/were-off-to-see-the-boss-class/

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read this

Erin Kissane’s remarkable essay on the geophyics of the 1964 tsunami at Valdez, Alaska, and her extrapolations to articulate a brilliant, useful metaphor for the post-information age :

https://www.wrecka.ge/landslide-a-ghost-story/

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“Two sculptural titans are thus now fittingly face-to-face, Rodin the culminating figure of an ancient representational tradition that was revived during the Renaissance and Calder the initiating figure of a modernist reconception that took the medium off its pedestal.”

— Martin Filler, from his review of the Calder Foundation gardens in Philadelphia, in the New York Review of Books .

[what a sentence ! 2,500 years of art history in a single swoop]

 

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Andromeda
Now Time’s Andromeda on this rock rude,
With not her either beauty’s equal or
Her injury’s, looks off by both horns of shore,
Her flower, her piece of being, doomed dragon’s food.
     Time past she has been attempted and pursued
By many blows and banes ; but now hears roar
A wilder beast from West than all were, more
Rife in her wrongs, more lawless, and more lewd.

     Her Perseus linger and leave her tó her extremes ? —
Pillowy air he treads a time and hangs
His thoughts on her, forsaken that she seems,
     All while her patience, morselled into pangs,
 Mounts ; then to alight disarming, no one dreams,
With Gorgon’s gear and barebill, thongs and fangs.

from : Gerard Manley Hopkins. Poems (Oxford, 1918).

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‘The Modern Movement’ Sixty Years On

‘a Bloomsbury ghost story’

This month marks sixty years since publication of The Modern Movement 100 Key Books from England, France and America 1880 – 1950 by Cyril Connolly and the anniversary prompted me to look into my copy again, to see how many titles from this perpetual argument I have read. There are a few clippings from contemporary reviews in London newspapers tucked in the back, with comments ranging from bilious persnickety objections about the “crazily unsuitable title for such a very personally conducted excursion” (Tour d’Horizon, in the Times Literary Supplement for 23 December 1965) to complaints of omission of works from central and eastern and southern Europe (let alone non-western literatures !). The funny thing about this “kind of  Michelin Guide to the 100 key resorts of modern literature” (Anthony Curtis, Knocking up a Century, in the Sunday Telegraph, 12 December 1965)* is that all of the praise and criticisms of the book are still true, and the passage of time has made the omissions only more evident.
And yet it does not matter. “Connolly’s list had to be judged within his own terms of reference. They were meticulous” (Oliver Edwards, Talking of Books, in the Times, 9 June 1966). He did not aspire to universality : his hundred comprises books in English and French (languages Connolly read with facility) and constituting “a revolt against the bourgeois in France, the Victorians in England, the puritanism and materialism of America.” Some of the choices seem at first glance a bit old-fashioned and nostalgic in 2025 (“Nostalgia, nostalgia” was a complaint of reviewers at the time), but when reading Connolly’s summaries and the context he offers, the relevance becomes clear.

Any list is an invitation to argument, of course, that is half the fun. Attempts to define a canon by their very nature invite readers to form their own opinions, to determine positions of resistance or opposition, and to propose alternative or transgressive views. There is long tradition of these lists of key or influential works in literary history and in collecting : think of the Grolier Club hundreds in English and American literature, science, medicine, typography, and children’s books. In the category of superlatives, there have been Best Book hundreds in science fiction, fantasy, and horror (the Horror volume edited by James Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock elicited some very acute contributions from contemporary writers). Even in adhering strictly to 100 titles, Connolly still manages to cram in allusions to dozens of other “key” writings from Leaves of Grass and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Sartre (H. R. F. Keating did much the same in his detective fiction hundred).

— The Modern Movement 100 Key Books from England, France and America 1880 – 1950. Chosen by Cyril Connolly. Bibliography of English and French editions [by] G. D. E. Soar. Andre Deutsch | Hamish Hamilton, [1965].

Back cover photo of The Modern Movement by Otto Karminski, 1965. [What the hell is going on there ?]

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In “Apotheosis in Texas”(Sunday Times, 6 June 1971) Connolly recalled how his book was “marred by misprints, savaged by critics and immediately followed up by a polymath compendium which included scientists and film stars as if to prove how mine should have been done. Only in booksellers’ catalogues did my own selection and phrasing — fruit of years of love and worry — begin to make headway.” No surprise, really, lists are useful for collectors as well as for readers and booksellers — and the ambivalence of academic critics was water off a duck’s back to him, particularly after 1971, when the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin, mounted an exhibition of books and manuscripts based on Connolly’s hundred, The illustrated catalogue continues to dazzle, with manuscripts, inscribed books, letters, and more.

— Cyril Connolly’s One Hundred Modern Books from England, France and America 1880 – 1950. Catalog by Mary Hirth with an introduction by Cyril Connolly. An Exhibition : March – December 1971. The Humanities Research Center – The University of Texas at Austin, [1971].

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* Curtis has one of the best observations about The Modern Movement : “Anyone who thinks it is impossible to say anything significant in under 800 words ought to read some of these brilliant compressions ; if this is ‘instant criticism”, let us have more of it.”

And I still have a fair bit of reading to do.

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George D. Smith, rare book dealer

Book Bloggers before the internet
(an irregular series)
— Charles F. Heartman. George D. Smith. G. D. S. 1870-1920. A Memorial Tribute to the Greatest Bookseller the World has Ever Known. Written by a Very Small One. [Cover title : George D. Smith Gentleman Bookseller]. With two plates from photographs. [2], 31 pp.  Privately Printed as a Yuletide Greeting for Charles F. Heartman. From the Book Farm in Beauvoir Community, Mississippi, 1945.
Among antiquarian booksellers, the name George D. Smith is somewhat legendary. he bought for Henry Huntington, so those books rarely come back in circulation, but he also bought for other major collectors in the gold age. Two spectacular books from the Bixby library that I have seen both came from Smith. So it was a pleasant surprise to find this excellent memoir by the prolific Americana dealer Charles F. Heartman, who wrote on a variety of subjects, including the New-England Primer. His bibliography of Phillis Wheatley (1915) is a reminder that certain booksellers have always been far in advance of the academy.
George D. Smith started age thirteen as an untrained stockboy and bookseller’s apprentice at Wiley and Son, for a little while at Dodd and Mead. Smith followed Walter Benjamin who set up his own business in 1885. Smith had a retentive memory and with Benjamin, who dealt not only in rare books but also in prints and autographs. “Young Smith’s horizon was not only widened but his intellect was called upon to observe and assimilate many diverse elements.” By 1889, Smith had set up his own shop, with a meager capital of sixty-three dollars. “Of course his capital was not sixty-three dollars. It was his incomparable knowledge of the principles of what constituted a rare book and the value of such material. It was his acquaintanceship with the sources of supply, his indefatigable energy, and the assurance of having the good wishes of many generous collectors.” Heartman charts Smith’s career with verve and interesting detail. He was well placed to write this memoir, for in late 1919 Smith offered him a long-term job. Their discussions were well advanced when Smith died suddenly. The decline and extinction of the George D. Smith Company is also noted. Heartman was going to put up money to buy the remains with another bookseller. The junior partner instead borrowed money from Jerome Kern, cut Heartman out of the deal, and quickly steering the ship onto the rocks.
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