Author: Henry Wessells

‘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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recent reading : mid-november 2025

— John Ruskin. Letters on Art and Literature. Edited by T. J. Wise. Privately printed, 1894.
To  J. J. Laing, 1854 : “If you are to do anything that is really glorious, and for which men will for ever wonder at you, you will do it as a duck quacks — because it is your nature to quack — when it rains.”

—Suave Mechanicals. Essays on the History of Bookbinding. Volume 9. Julia Miller, editor. Legacy Press, 2025.

— Patti Smith. Bread of Angels. Random House, [2025].

— Ellen Datlow, editor. Night. Dreadful Dark : Tales of Nighttime Horror [bound dos à dos with] Day. Merciless Sun : Tales of Daylight Horror. Saga Press, [2025].

— Paul Muldoon. Rising to the Rising. Gallery Books, [2016].

Now the world’s been brought low. The wind’s heavy with soot.
Alexander and Caesar. All their retinue.
We’ve seen Tara buried in grass, Troy trampled underfoot.
The English ? Their days are numbered, too.

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— Margery Allingham. The Beckoning Lady [1955]. Penguin Books, [1961].

— Edmund Crispin. Buried for Pleasure [1948]. Penguin Books, [ca. 1980].
——. Love Lies Bleeding [1948]. Penguin Books, [1954].

Boston and other Novemberish things

Your correspondent will be in Boston this weekend for the Boston international Antiquarian Book Fair (Fri. 7 to Sun. 9 November), and I will have copies of Another Green World, The Elfland Prepositions, and The Critical Mess. Come say hello (Cummins booth 213).

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current reading :

— Peter Straub. Wreckage [and:] What Happens in Hello Jack. 447; 141 pages. 2 vols., Subterranean Press, 2025. [Dust jackets after photographs by Jenny Calivas].

— Ellen Datlow, editor.  Night. Dreadful Dark : Tales of Nighttime Horror [bound dos à dos with] Day. Merciless Sun : Tales of Daylight Horror. 171, [5] ; 147, [7] pp. Saga Press, [2025].
Anthology of 18 original stories by Jeffrey Ford, Brian Evenson, Pat Cadigan, and others.

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I am really looking forward to the new edition of The Crimson Bears by Tom La Farge, forthcoming from Tough Poets press with an introduction by Wendy Walker. The novel was first published in two volumes, The Crimson Bears (1993) and A Hundred Doors (1995), and found a small and appreciative group of readers. It is well worth reading.

http://www.toughpoets.com/la_farge_crimson_bears.htm

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[updated 5 November]

person holding a copy of Bread of Angels by Oatti Smith on an autumn afternoon

I bought a book today at my local book shop, Watchung Booksellers  :

— Patti Smith. Bread of Angels. Random House, [2025].
The dust jacket photo is a Mapplethorpe portrait of Patti from the Wave session.

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recent reading : october 2025

current reading :

‘It’s wonderful, Margot thought, Tilly always tells the truth, but it never means what you think it does.’
— Peter Straub. Wreckage [and:] What Happens in Hello Jack. 447; 141 pages. 2 vols., Subterranean Press, 2025. [Dust jackets after photographs by Jenny Calivas].
I am a few chapters into Wreckage, the first publication of the substantial novel left unfinished by Peter Straub, intended as an “interweaving” of Henry James and Jack the Ripper. My understanding is that What Happens in Hello Jack is a detailed summary of the intended arc of the novel. I’ll leave that for later : I dove right into Wreckage. It is wonderful to read passages of Straub’s prose and see connections unfold to certain parts of his late work : the Das Beben movement, Tilly Hayward, the invented memoir of an overheard conversation in the life of Henry James*. “An Incident at Monte Carlo”, extracted from Wreckage, appeared last year in Conjunctions. I don’t know where this is going : off the cliff of incompletion, perhaps, but I am on the road. Straub’s interest in Henry James was of very long standing, but he was also always true to his midwestern roots, and that deep America is everywhere in his books.

* “Beyond the Veil of Vision : Reinhold von Kreitz and the Das Beben Movement” by Peter Straub and Anthony Discenza ; The Process (is a Process All Its Own) ; The Dark Matter, readings at past Readercons, etc.

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recent reading :

— Michael Innes. Operation Pax [1951]. Penguin Books, [1964].
— —. Silence Observed [1962]. Penguin Books, [1964].
— — . The Ampersand Papers [1978]. Penguin Books, [1980].
— —. A Night of Errors [1948]. Penguin Books, [1966].
— —. The Appleby File. Detective Stories [1975]. Book Club Associates, [1975].
— —. Appleby Talking. Twenty-three detective stories [1954]. Penguin Books, [1973].
— —. Appleby Talks Again. Eighteen Detective Stories [1956]. A Four Square Book, [1966].
— —. The Bloody Wood [1966]. Penguin Books, [1968].
— —. The Daffodil Affair [1942]. Penguin Books, [1968].
— —. The Open House. [1972]. Penguin Books, [1973].
— —. The Long Farewell.[1958]. Penguin Books, [1971].

I have now read through most of the box of Innes, and always with pleasure. I found the three collections of Appleby short stories witty but lacking in the digressions and piled up absurdities and extended word play that are at the heart of the novels. I particularly enjoyed The Ampersand Papers and The Long Farewell.  I have even started notes toward a Note or Essay.

The Tom La Farge Award 2025, 16 October 2025

Readers of the ’shelf and friends in the New York area might be interested in the following notice :
Please join us at the Grolier Club (47 East 60th St.) at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday 16 October  to honor Zack Darsee, this year’s recipient of the Tom La Farge Award for Innovative Writing, Teaching and Publishing.
We will meet to celebrate a courageous new voice and take pleasure in each other’s company in a place where literature and physical books are afforded the love and respect they deserve.
The event will take place in the first floor gallery. There will be an introduction about the award, a reading, an interview, with a private reception to follow.
We very much hope to see you there.
Posted on behalf of
The Tom La Farge Award Committee

30 years of the Avram Davidson website, and other news

Some thirty years ago this month, in September 1995, the Avram Davidson website went live on a subfolder of a borrowed server, courtesy of my former colleague Jim Nicholson. He responded to my asking for help turning a mess of information into a database by saying, Let’s turn it into a website. And so using a primitive DOS text editor, I coded a preliminary title index to the writings of Avram Davidson (1923-1993), and the website was launched. I never met Davidson but when I first started reading his work it compelled my interest and curiosity. Science fiction is a warm room on a cold night, as Paul WIlliams once wrote, and the field is pretty welcoming to newcomers. As electronic penpals and in real life, I met dozens of readers who shared an interest in Davidson’s work, or who had known him, or edited him, etc. The list is long: Michael Swanwick, Eileen Gunn, Gregory Feeley, Gordon Van Gelder, Phillip Rose, and others; and also friends now dead, among them Reno W. Odlin, David G. Hartwell, and George Scithers.
The first few years were rich in correspondence, especially once The Nutmeg Point District Mail electronic newsletter took shape, and the Avram Davidson Society (still largely a notional organization). The late Grania Davis, executor of the Estate, worked diligently to bring new books into being over a period of a decade, and I helped with many of them. The website grew organically and sent out digressions and personal flourishes, and even produced a monograph series of the publications of the Avram Davidson Society (the most substantial evidence of its existence). In 1999, the website came into its own with the avramdavidson.org domain. Always coming back to the work of Avram Davidson, with delight and wonder.  For me it was always an irregular shoestring midnight sort of operation, with periods of high yield followed by fallow periods. That title index remains at the core of the website : a bibliographical resource for the ages.
And if some of those digressions of mine (such as the Endless Bookshelf) are now more active than the Avram Davidson website, that is partly because other writing projects compel my energies and attention (there might be one of two publications still to come from The Nutmeg Point District Mail). But most importantly, once Grania’s son Seth Davis started his own process of discovering the writings of Avram Davidson, he began building the Avram Davidson Universe —  https://avramdavidson.com — and recruited a wide pool of new contributors and participants for interview podcasts and simultaneously embarked on a systematic project to publish the works of Avram Davidson. Always coming back to the work of Avram Davidson, with delight and wonder.
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2025 has been a bonzer* year for me in books, with publication of the following works :
A Melville Census, John Marr & Timoleon (January)
A Book of Ryhmes by Charlotte Bronte (Brontë Parsonage Museum / Tartarus Press, April), which includes my essay, Travelling with Charlotte
Another Green World (Zagava, June 2025)
The Critical Mess by Michael Zinman (Distributed by Temporary Culture, August 2025)
and the hardcover issue of Another Green World is in production at Zagava’s binders.
If you haven’t already done so, buy a book or two from Temporary Culture. The Private Life of Books is always a nice gift for a friend.
* (that’s an Avram Davidson word, which he traces to bonanza and the Sydney Ducks, a California Gold Rush era gang in a neighborhood of San Francisco)
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I have been reading my way through a box of Penguin paperback editions of works by Michael Innes, whose books were recommended to me (independently) by John Clute and Mark Valentine. I share their high esteem for Appleby’s End (1945), also praised by H. R. F. Keating in Crime and Mystery The 100 Best Books. I am having a fine time and will write something about the Innes books. Kelly Link sent me the beautiful Small Beer edition of The Book of Love (2024) in four volumes, and that is next on my reading list.
I will be in Boston for the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair 7-9 November 2025, if you are there, come say hello (at the Cummins booth 213)
Peace,
Henry Wessells, 29 September 2025

commonplace book : autumn 2025

Poetry and the materials of poetry are interchangeable terms. Wallace Stevens

/ inscription in a copy of The Man with the Blue Guitar, 1937.

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I collect only words : the books on the shelves are forests and mountains, pathways and tools and ore and tailings

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What is a book but the record of the struggle of a story to tell itself ?
— Henry Wessells on the writings of Peter Straub

/ from the archives

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Il représentait en ce siècle, et contre l’Histoire, l’héritier actuel de cette longue lignée de moralistes dont les oeuvres constituent peut-être ce qu’il y a de plus original dans les lettres françaises. Son humanisme têtu, étroit et pur, austère et sensuel, livrait un combat douloureux contre les événements massifs et difformes de ce temps. Mais, inversement, par l’opiniâtreté de ses refus, il réaffirmait, au coeur de notre époque, contre les machiavéliens, contre le veau d’or du réalisme, l’existence du fait moral.
— Jean Paul Sartre, on Camus after his death in 1960

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“It feels extraordinary to be reviewing now, in 2025, a new book of ten poems by Charlotte — astounding not only that they have not been published before, but also that they have never been transcribed or photographed.  [. . .]

“But they make their own argument for publication. It’s not just that they are good, but that it is amazing to read a young writer loudly, exultingly, exploring her ideas on the page. [. . .] perhaps Charlotte’s book has been rediscovered just when it is needed — as a reminder of what can happen when children are allowed to write headlong and with joy, spelling everything wrong, but getting everything that’s most important right.”
— Samantha Ellis, reviewing A Book of Ryhmes by Charlotte Brontë in the TLS

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”

late september : more Innes, book fair, etc

It’s late September, and preparations are afoot for the Empire State book fair (Friday to Sunday (26-28 September) at Vanderbilt Hall near Grand Central Terminal. I continue to read my way through the box of Michael Innes, always with pleasure. If you come to the fair, come say hello, I’ll be there (at the Cummins booth). Copies of The Critical Mess by Michael Zinman will be available, as well as copies of my own books.

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recent reading :

— Michael Innes. Christmas at Candleshoe [1953]. Penguin Books, [1961].
— —. A Connoisseur’s Case [1962]. Penguin Books, [1966].
— —. A Family Affair [1969]. Penguin Books, [1972].
— —. Death at the Chase [1970]. Penguin Books, [1971].
— —. An Awkward Lie [1971]. Penguin Books, [1974].
— —. Appleby’s Answer [1973]. Penguin Books, [1978].
— —. Appleby’s Other Story [1974]. Penguin Books, [1978].
— —. Appleby and Honeybath [1983]. Penguin Books, [1984].

And with two additions to the titles in the box :

— Michael Innes. Appleby’s End. Gollancz, 1945. File copy in the (slightly faded) yellow dust jacket.
This is the best of them all, (though The Secret Vanguard runs a close second).

— Michael Innes. From London Far. Gollancz, 1946. File copy in the (slightly faded) yellow dust jacket.
Hilarious, madcap conspiracy of international art smuggling in a background of  the end of the second world war, impeccably choreographed (with knowing aside to John Buchan), and a crazed mastermind whose secret lair is the wildest ever, and with a suitable catastrophe ending.

/ file under : Fleming (or : Bond) and his precursors

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how I spent my summer vacation, part ii

the first part in Copenhagen (see : here) and the second bit near the seashore :

sunrise on a beach

(this is the etc. in the title)

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end of summer mailbag :

— Michael Swanwick. Life : a User’s Manual. [Dragonstairs Press, 2025]. Edition of 40.
Seven miniature essays, including The Abyss, which begins : “This is a test.”

— Michael Swanwick, with Marianne Porter. Under a Harvest Moon [2023]. [Dragonstairs Press, 2025]. Edition of 80.
Printed record of a work of landscape art, “written on leaves in and near cemeteries in Philadelphia” in the autumn of 2023.