Author: Henry Wessells

commonplace book : march 2025

31 March current reading :

— Winsor McCay. The Complete Little Nemo 1905-1927. / Alexander Braun. Winsor McCay A Life of Imaginative Genius [2014]. Taschen, [2022].

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— Raphael Cormack. Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age. A Forgotten History of the Occult. W. W. Norton, [2025].

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26 March / homeward bound

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Zocotora insula

Your correspondent will be far away, and farther, and off line for the next couple of weeks, and will report upon re-entry. [Image above, Zocotora insula, detail from Turcicum imperium, in a Blaeu atlas at the Beinecke.]

Looking ahead to April, the Brontë Society and Tartarus Press will be publishing A Book of Ryhmes by Charlotte Brontë, the manuscript book from 1829 now at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, in a fully illustrated edition with an introduction by Patti Smith, a scholarly essay by Barbara Heritage, and an afterword by Henry Wessells. Publication is scheduled for 21 April (birthday of Charlotte Brontë) and further details will be available at http://tartaruspress.com/bronte-a-book-of-ryhmes.html.

Also in April, the New York Antiquarian Book Fair will be held 3-6 April at the Park Avenue Armory. Come say hello (Cummins booth A3).

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recent reading :

— John Crowley. Little, Big [1981]. Harper Perennial paperback.
Just felt like re-reading it, again.
[added note : an old and trusted friend, carried to the end of the world and back ; always something new arises from the experience of reading Little, Big]

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William Morris on the shelves at Chenati

William Morris on the shelves of the Judd Foundation

The library of Donald Judd at at La Mansana de Chinati/The Block in Marfa, Texas, has been catalogued in a neat interactive (and searchable) display. When we visited back in May 2015, I remember being struck by the extent of Judd’s holdings of another artist polymath, William Morris ; the detail above shows most of those holdings. [Thanks to CB for the link.]

https://library.juddfoundation.org/#about

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recent reading : 

— Walter Abish.  99 : The New Meaning. With photographs by Cecile Abish. Burning Deck, [1990].

The few books I have published, however, won me no fame. I do not complain of this, anymore than I brag of it, for I feel the same distaste for the “popular author” genre as for that of the “neglected poet” (from “What Else”)

— Philip K. Dick. Radio Free Albemuth [1985]. Mariner pbk. [printed 29 Jan. 2025].
/ re-reading, though I have been thinking about “the tyranny of Ferris F. Fremont” for some time, indeed for much of the past decade

— Peter Straub and Anthony Discenza. “Beyond the Veil of Vision : Reinhold von Kreitz and the Das Beben Movement” [in:] Conjunctions 65, 2015.

— Mark D. Tomasko. Wish You Were Here. Guidebooks, Viewbooks, Photobooks, and Maps of New York City, 1807-1940, from the collection of Mark D. Tomasko. Grolier Club, 2025.
Illustrated catalogue for an exhibition on view through 10 May 2025. The Viele Topographical Map (1865) displays all the watercourses and terrain of Manhattan before the city became part of the built environment.

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commonplace book :

“Elfland as implacable as ever, but now ruthlessly enmeshed in contemporary mortal affairs.” — Mark Valentine, at Wormwoodiana

https://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2025/03/henry-wessells-elfland-propositions.html

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books received :

— Michael Swanwick. A Fantasist’s Guide to Venice. Dragonstairs Press, 2025. Edition of 79.
Collection of nine anecdotes about Venice, life and death, and writing, by the author of “The Mask” (collected in Tales of Old Earth).

— Marjan Beijering. Op zoek naar het ongerijmde. Leven en werk van Janwillem van de Wetering (1931-2008). Asoka, [2021].

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‘we are a verb, not a noun’

— Mark Valentine. Fairy Chess [cover title]. 2025. Edition of 100.
Collects five poems written in response to words or phrases in the work of Veronica Forrest-Thompson, with allusions to Wittgenstein, Gauloises, libraries, and bicycles.
— —. Fire Signs. [cover title]. 2025. Edition of 100.
Visual record of found poetry from Sunny Bank Mill, Farsley near Leeds.

commonplace book : february 2025

The Elfland Prepositions, published 27 February

advance copies of The Elfland Prepositions, at the Post Office

advance presentation copies, at the post office ready for mailing [26 February]

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in production

The Elfland Prepositions. Cover image
— Henry Wessells. The Elfland Prepositions. Temporary Culture, 2025.
Edition of 126 copies (26 copies lettered A to Z, and 100 numbered copies), printed on Mohawk superfine white eggshell. Pictorial wrappers.

Proof copy above (received 12 February 2025) ; proofs corrected & in production (14 February 2025), published 27 February 2025. A few copies offered for sale, click on link or photo to order.

Collection of four previously unpublished short stories.

Elfland is not a nice place, but it’s important to know how it works.

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seen in the imagination, and at the Grolier Club :

two entries from the recent Grolier Club exhibition, Imaginary Books. Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books, from the collection of Reid Byers.

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current reading

— Charles Robert Maturin. Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale [1820]. With introduction and notes by Victor Sage. Penguin Books, [2000].
/ into the labyrinth, again

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recent reading

— Len Deighton. Hope. HarperCollins, [1995].
— — Charity. HarperCollins, [1996].
— — Winter. A Novel of a Berlin Family. Knopf, 1987.
Germany in the world, 1899-1945 ; back story or bedrock for the Bernard Samson novels.

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‘away from the clank of the world’

— Walt Whitman. In Paths Untrodden. Printed in brown ink, blockprint illustrations in green and blue. [16] pp. [The Letterpress at Oberlin, January 2025]. Edition of 217.
Calamus 1, from the 1860 Leaves of Grass, with blue herons and green marsh plants. [Gift of VH].

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Hard Rain
by Janwillem van de Wetering

A short note now up (in English) on the excellent and informative Dutch site

https://janwillemvandewetering.nl/favoriete-boek/

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“not relics of the past, but pockets of the future arriving ahead of schedule”

— Christopher Brown, over at The Clearing (the blog of Little Toller Books)

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“When I look at that obscure but gorgeous prose-composition, the Urn-burial, I seem to myself to look into a deep abyss, at the bottom of which are hid pearls and rich treasure ; or it is like a stately labyrinth of doubt and withering speculation, and I would invoke the spirit of the author to lead me through it.”

— Charles Lamb on Sir Thomas Browne, quoted by Hazlitt, in “Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen” (1826)

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commonplace book : january 2025

31 January 2025

in today’s mail

— Conjunctions 83. Revenants : The Ghost Issue. Edited by Bradford Morrow and Joyce Carol Oates. Bard College, 2024.
a big issue, with “An Incident in Monte Carlo”, a fragment or outtake from the forthcoming Wreckage by Peter Straub, new work by Elizabeth Hand, James Morrow, Timothy J. Jarvis, Mark Valentine, Reggie Oliver, and many others.

“Fern’s Room” by Liz Hand is pitch perfect, deftly moving from a gentle rom-com American anglophile country house idyll to a very dark endgame, with clues scattered all along the way.

“Plunged in the Years” by Jeffrey Ford, with a few steps off the path in the woods, gets right to the heart of the American ghost story : time and memory (and childhood).

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recent reading

— Len Deighton. Faith [1994]. Grove Press, [2024].

— Margery Allingham. Sweet Danger [1933]. Penguin Books, [1963].

— Nathan Ballingrud. Crypt of the Moon Spider. Nightfire, [2024].

— Avram Davidson. The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy. Owlswick Press, 1990.

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books wait for their readers

All antiquarian booksellers have a shelf of what Bill Reese called ‘intractables’ : things that sit on a shelf and seem unsaleable, or just beyond the grasp of one’s understanding, or, indeed, actively resist the efforts of the cataloguer with what M. R. James called the ‘malice of inanimate objects’. And then, suddenly, one finds a new perspective, or works with someone who has the key, and the door unlocks. I am fortunate to have experienced this a few times in my career. To watch this phenomenon in real time is one of the delights of the profession.

The question of whether or not books wait for their writers is trickiet to answer. This is a questionof a different order. I would say yes, on bakance, but one feels the clock ticking, and the list of books not written is very long.

Books Never Written, label on box from literary archive of george plimpton
Books Never Written, label on a box from the literary archive of George Plimpton.

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‘to escape the straitjacket that had been science fiction’ — Paul Kincaid

an excellent essay by a clear-eyed critic ringing the changes on Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthologies then and now :

http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/who-is-in-danger/

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Eighteen Years of the Endless Bookshelf

Last week marked eighteen years of ‘simply messing around in books’ and reporting the pleasures on this website. It is still fun and so I will continue to note interesting books, curious passages, announcements, occasional snapshots, and digressions.

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an Endless Bookshelf quiz

Who is the Widmerpool ?
— from your year(s) at school or university
— of your chosen field or profession
— observed recurringly elsewhere

/ wrong answers accepted
/ bonus points for naming your favorite book in ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’

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4 January 2025

early in January, and it is already a good year in books, having just received two long-awaited titles in this week’s mailbag

Billy Budd at 100 (continued)

— Herman Melville. Billy Budd. A Centennial Edition with Fourteen Illustrations Cut in Wood by Barry Moser.  Pennyroyal Press, 2024. Edition of 50 copies signed by the artist.
A spectacular new large format edition of Billy Budd Sailor (An Inside Narrative) — as the half-title names the book. The text of the novella is set from the Melville Electronic Library, with original woodcuts by American master Barry Moser.

 

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a Tim Young trifecta

— Timothy Young. Isness & Aboutness. Thoughts on Bibliography. Publication Studio, 2024.
With two single sheet ’zines, printed rectos only :
— 10 Reasons Libraries Matter, 2021.
— 10 Reasons Books Matter, [2015].

Isness & Aboutness is a really great essay on thinking about books and thinking about the world (it is the text of Tim’s Sandars lecture at Cambridge University in November). He cites Donald McKenzie to good effect, on bibliography as

the only discipline which has consistently studied the composition, formal design, and transmission of texts by writers, printers, and publishers; their distribution through different communities by wholesalers, retailers, and teachers; their collection and classification by librarians; their meaning for, and — I must add — their creative regeneration by, readers [. . .] no part of that series of human and institutional interactions is alien to bibliography

His essay moves beyond McKenzie’s assertion to identify new modes of bibliography and to assert the primacy of bibliography as a means of uncovering what books are and what they do in the world. Highly recommended.

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snow day, 11 January 2025

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great blue heron flying low over the silvered mere
alighting on the ice beside a stand of reeds
in the distance, the pulaski skyway

/ from the train window this morning [16 January]

/ file under : extreme commute

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ROUND-UP OF BOOKS FROM 2024 WORTH LOOKING FOR

— Christopher Brown. A Natural History of Empty Lots. Timber Press, [September 2024].
This was one of the most interesting books I read this year.  Chris has written three novels of near future  dystopias where characters are finding their way through an America  reshaped by climate change (and political turmoil). The first of them, Tropic of Kansas, was the best book I read in 2015. In A Natural History of Empty Lots, Chris looked at the world around him and questioned his own assumptions and prejudices (as Thoreau suggests in Walden), and tries to see how we humans might find a way to live in the world that does not involve devouring it. The fact they that I appear in the book and our friendship of many years, obliged me to exclude Empty Lots from the running for the book of the year. This is a book that traces its origins to the excellent Field Notes Chris has been publishing online ; he has entirely transformed them and has written a beautiful and thoughtful book. https://endlessbookshelf.net/2024/09/03/singular-interview-christopher-brown/
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— Mark Valentine. Lost Estates. Swan River Press, 2024.
Collection of a dozen stories, four unpublished, including the excellent title story.
——. 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. Fifth volume in his series of collected essays.
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On afternoons my heart / feels like an out-of-season hotel
— Adrian Dannatt. Capacity for Loss. [Opium Books, 2024]. Edition of 300.  Yellow cloth, dust jacket with illustration, Gaia, from the painting by Danny Moynihan.
Collection of poems.
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— John Clute. The Book Blinders. Annals of Vandalism at the British Library : A Necrology. Illustrated. Norstrilia Press, [2024].
I wrote a notice, here :
https://endlessbookshelf.net/2024/03/24/the-book-blinders-by-john-clute/

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— This Is Only Earth, My Dear. Images by Trillian Stars & Kyle Cassidy with poems by Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal. Laurel Tree Press, [2024].
Selection of poems by artist Lizzie Siddal (1829-1862) and photographs in and around east London by Kyle Cassidy, with a smouldering Victorian palette. A delightful pre-Raphaelite counterfactual : what fun !
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— Ray Russell. The Woman Who Fell to Earth. Tartarus Press, [2024].

A wild short novel of doublings, tricks of memory, serious ontological ambiguities, and the perils of close involvement in the life and writings of a neglected author. Tanya and Caroline were friends from university days, though Caroline had become reclusive after her husband’s death. Caroline, literary executor of one hit wonder and horror novelist Cyril Heldman, had resurrected his name and formed an online community of readers (we see a bit too much of the hostile behavior that such small stakes games can provoke).  Caroline gets back in Tanya’s life when she lands on Tanya’s roof: a corpse fallen from the empty sky. At the heart of the novel is and a house in Wales where time stands still, and the the Sixtystone, the object from Arthur Machen’s “Novel of the Black Seal”, which confers dangerous powers upon those in proximity. The resolution is deeply shocking, sudden and unexpected and seamlessly integrated into the narrative, even if some of the interesting implications are not fully explored. The ending is restorative and curiously cozy, almost pastoral.

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(MELVILLE, HERMAN). Melville’s Billy Budd at 100. A Centennial Exhibitionat the Grolier Club and Oberlin College Libraries. Introduction and Descriptions by William Palmer Johnston. Frontispiece portrait of Melville by Barry Moser, color plates. The Grolier Club, 2024.
— Herman Melville. Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces. Constable, 1924.
——. John Marr and other Sailors with some Sea Pieces. DeVinne Press, 1888.

2024 is the centenary of Melville’s Billy Budd, and there have been many phases in the year-long celebration. The catalogue of the Grolier Club show is well worth looking for. I was delighted to be a panelist on the symposium organized in connection with the exhibition. These events prompted me to publish A Melville Census, a bibliographical work looking at the last two books published in Melville’s lifetime : https://temporary-culture.com/product/henry-wessells-melville-census/#310899

It also prompted me to go back to primary sources, and and so on a recent visit to the Lilly Library I re-read John Marr, a book of ghosts and roll-call of the dead. The whole book speaks to Billy Budd, especially the quip of Captain Turret, “submission is enough”. De Vere was not so sensible an officer. There are other things I noticed which will require more time to contemplate ; these thoughts will show up in an essay sometime.

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford : the Endless Bookshelf book of the year – 2024

— Francis Spufford. Cahokia Jazz [2023]. Scribners, [February 2024].
Cahokia Jazz is a Prohibition novel, a jazz novel, a detective novel, and an excellent science fiction novel set in an alternate America, and the best new book I read in 2024 (it was published in England last autumn but I did not see a copy).
The novel opens with the investigation of a gruesome crime by two Cahokia police detectives. Joe Barrow is a deracinated veteran of the an Indian orphanage school and the first world war. It’s a toss-up which was the harder school. Phin Drummond, is also a veteran of the trenches, a poor white opportunist and a joker in the face of death. Barrow plays piano in speakeasies and hotel nightclubs,  and Cahokia Jazz rolls out to the plink and rumble of piano music from ragtime to Satie to Jelly Roll Morton.
How many ways can the dominant Anglo-Norman colonial history of North America be subverted ?  It’s one thing to invoke a distinguished name, as Spufford does with the novel’s sly dedication ; it’s another to deliver the goods. The narrative of Cahokia Jazz is not rote or formulaic but organically rooted in language and anthropology and invented historical documents. To get technical for a moment, the Jonbar Point is a milder Columbian exchange and the introduction of a less virulent strain of smallpox to the Americas, so that indigenous populations survive in larger numbers and the political and cultural shape of the continental United States is altered. St. Louis remains a small rural trading post ; on the east back of the Mississippi, Cahokia is the industrial powerhouse and nexus of commerce and transportation. This is another America, but certain characteristics persist and Spufford plays the tensions well : the polity of Cahokia is a syncretic multi-ethnic Catholic commonwealth with an indigenous American aristocracy whose matriarchal line of succession contrasts with the Protestant merchant-industrialist capitalists slavering at the opportunities they seek to create by fomenting unrest and playing the Red Menace card. An investor says, “One hopes that when the, ah, obstacles of the present arrangements have been cleared away, the place will still preserve its character. As much as possible, anyhow.”
One arc of the novel is Joe’s recovery of his takouma (indigenous) heritage through his connections with the Sun and Moon. The Sun is the de facto ruler of Cahokia — Harvard-educated, cosmopolitan descendant of the long line of princes, with a Boston Brahmin drawl, “long hair and earrings and a face the color of old, oiled wood”, and someone deeply attentive to the power of symbols. “The Man” gives Joe his card (like the Provót “ASSIST” in Avram Davidson’s Eszterhazy tale “The Crown Jewels of Jerusalem”) to ensure the cooperation of the takouma population, and brings Joe along to witness the Green Corn Planting ceremony in a rural suburb. Joe meets the Moon — the niece of the Sun, stylish couturière and cultural benefactor of Cahokia. She tells him the tale of Thrown-Away Boy and his brother Lodge Boy, and he accompanies her to a dinner at the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Algonkian Hotel.
At any moment the relationship between the two detectives could edge into Laurel and Hardy — or Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, or the Keystone Kops — but it doesn’t. Cahokia is a gritty, stinking, beautiful city, seething in the build-up to a KKK riot, and as the detectives criss-cross the map in search of the murderer, they meet and interview  individuals  so distinctive — German gangsters, a tough-talking red-headed newspaper reporter, hicks, takouma crazies and political activists and poets and office workers — that the moments of wit and levity never tumble into slapstick. There are many pleasures throughout the novel, some involving a sense of alternate possibilities. Spufford integrates ritual and mystery into a twentieth-century America : the appearance of the Four Winds Society when Joe joins the detective bureau is a rite of welcome by his colleagues in masks, but the power of that society is revealed when the police are suddenly ushered out of a takouma neighborhood by citizens whose masks no longer seem so benign. Another delight is the long scene in the Algonkian’s Catawba Room, where Joe meets the takouma cultural elite and a visiting professor of Anthropology, sits in at the piano with the band, and dances with the Moon. The week of the novel is packed with incident.
“To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth”, as Conrad wrote : the effect upon the reader, that’s what it all comes down to. Cahokia Jazz makes it happen.
The Endless Bookshelf book of the year 2024.

recent reading : november 2024

 

— Romance in the Library. The Romance Novel in English. Gallery Guide. [Cover title]. Illustrated. [64] pp. The Lilly Library, [2024].
Curated by Rebecca Baumann, this remarkable exhibition, Romance in the Library, likely the first of its kind, charts a revisionist history of English literature, with emphasis on women as readers of novels from the eighteenth century to the present, and claims an oft-scorned modern-day marketing genre construct — the romance novel — as a badge of honor. In the heyday of the gothic, which included the sentimental as well as the historical and supernatural, writing novels was an economic activity open to women even while the reading of them by women (especially young women) was viewed as unsuitable. Baumann’s retrospective claim is an assertion that works pretty well, but one has to abandon one’s preconceptions to find more than superficial kinship between The Wild Irish Girl or Pride and Prejudice and modern formula fiction. The shift from novels aimed at a genteel readership to a vast popular appetite for novels of romantic entertainment is rooted in greater educational opportunities for women at all economic levels and the nineteenth-century achievement of near universal literacy. A welcome and provocative exhibition.
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) is in original boards, untrimmed. The stylish yellow and red dust jacket* for Boy Crazy by Grace Perkins (1931) is spectacular (and it’s inscribed to Upton Sinclair)! I wish I had taken a picture.
[lightly edited for clarity 16 Nov.]
* here’s an image of another copy of the book :

Grace Perkins. Boy Crazy, 1931. Dust jacket by WJH. Courtesy of Long Bros., Seattle.

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— Kasper van Ommen. Joseph Scaliger. His Oriental library, and the meaning of scholarship. [Cover title]. Illustrated. Brill, [n.d.].
——. Josephus Justus Scaliger. Sieerad van de Academie. Ornament of the Academy. [Cover title]. Text in Dutch and English. Illustrated. [Universiteit Leiden, 2020].
Two illustrated monographs on the great sixteenth-century polyglot and polymath Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609).

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— The Dagon Collection. Auction Catalogue of Items Recovered in the Federal Raid on Innsmouth, Mass. Edited by Nate Pedersen. Cataloguing by Rebecca Baumann, with assistance from Jonathan Kearns. Illustrations by Liv Rainey-Smith and Eduardo Valdés-Hevia. Layout and Design by Andrew Leman. [PS Publishing, January 2024].
A catalogue of imaginary objects, rigorously described, with their history in vignettes by a wide variety post-Lovecraftian authors. Lot 13, The Geometry of Nowhere, is a dizzying book ; and lot 33, the Tiffany Lamp, is an unsettling piece.

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— Michael Connelly. City of Bones. Dennis McMillan, 2002.

man about town

poet Adrian Dannatt gestures after signing a copy of his collection of poetry, Capacity for Loss. It's a pretty good book

— 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.
Danny Moynihan paintings at Nathalie Karg Gallery

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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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