Henry Wessells – The Endless Bookshelf

Readercon 34 (July 2025)

Readercon 34 Schedule
at the Boston Marriott Burlington in Burlington, Mass.
https://readercon.org

Saturday 19 July
10:00 a.m., at the autographer’s table
Autograph Session : Henry Wessells

Sunday 20 July
10:00 to 11:00 a.m., in : Create / Collaborate
The Art of the SF Book Cover
John Clute & Henry Wessells
Panel description : Since its inception, the British Library, the national library of the UK, has stripped dust jackets off books in its holding and discarded the unwanted wrappers, losing an essential piece of their cultural and artistic significance. In The Book Blinders, science fiction historian and theorist John Clute details the “annals of vandalism” at the British Library, with a focus on works lost (and found). John Clute and antiquarian bookseller Henry Wessells give a joint presentation on this subject, with extra time for Q&A.

11:00 to 11:30 a.m., in : Empower / Embrace
Reading : Henry Wessells
Henry Wessells reads from The Elfland Prepositions and from Another Green World (both newly published in 2025).

I should arrive at Readercon by early afternoon on Friday. There are a number of panels I am keen to attend, but there is always plenty of time for conversation. If you see me, come say hello !

Copies of A Conversation larger than the Universe, The Private Life of Books, The Elfland Prepositions, and Another Green World (advance copies of the Zagava paperback), and some of the publications of the Avram Davidson Society will be available for sale (cash, cheque, or paypal).

Another green world by Henry Wessells, 2025

— Henry Wessells. Another green world. Zagava, 2025. Paperback issue. Pp. 180, [2, blank], [2, imprint]. Sage green wrappers printed in black, lower wrapper with blurbs by Guy Davenport, William Gibson, and Joanne McNeil.
On a very hot evening in late June, your correspondent went to Newark airport to expedite customs clearance and collect the first author copies of Another green world, newly re-issued by Zagava Books with two additional stories. It is a stylish book in a tall narrow format, set by Jan-Marco Schmitz in Minion pro with titles in Roadway.
The paperback is a pleasure to hold and read. The hardcover issue is in production, and a formal announcement of publication is expected. Zagava make nice books. Perhaps you will agree.

The table of contents is as follows (with note of the story‘s first publication) :

From This Swamp. (The Starry Wisdom. A Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft. Ed. D. M. Mitchell. Creation Books, 1994)
Book Becoming Power. (NYRSF, March 2000)
Another Green World. (Nature, 15 June 2000)
The Polynesian History of the Kerguélen Islands. (Exquisite Corpse 45 & 47, 1994)
The Institute of Antarctic Archaeology & Protolinguistics. (Another green world, 2003)
Appraisal at Edgewood (A Critical Fiction). (NYRSF, March 2001)
Hugh O’Neill’s Goose. (Interzone, October 2001)
Virtual Wisdom. (Exquisite Corpse 36, 1992)
Wulkderk; or, Not in Skeat. (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 32, 2015, as “The Beast Unknown to Heraldry”)
Extended Range; or, The Accession Label. (2015, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 35, 2016)
Ten Bears; or, A Journey to the Weterings (A Critical Fiction). (NYRSF, October 2003)

Of the first edition, Guy Davenport wrote,
“If you don’t believe in magic, read Henry Wessells and find out how wrong you are.”

Joanne McNeil (author of Lurking and Wrong Way), writes, “Henry Wessells writes from beyond an ‘unfamiliar void’, where the natural world, dreams, language, myths, research, and rituals converge. The stories collected in Another Green World offer uncanny vitality out of the dark like dandelions sprouting from cracked New Jersey pavement. A delightful and enduring work of literary inquiry.”

A singular interview with Brendan C. Byrne

I have known Brendan Byrne for some year. We first encountered each other in digital mode on an obsolete platform*, but soon became friends IRL. His first two books had a select readership among whom I am lucky to count myself. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction points to some of the topics in his work. He has a new collection of short fiction, Another World Isn’t Possible, just out from Wanton Sun and available from bookshop.org or Barnes & Noble.

Henry Wessells : From a taxonomic point of view, your birthdate places you right at the edge of the digital abyss. Can recall a moment when you became aware of the changes occurring around you ?

Brendan C. Byrne : My microgeneration (born in the early 1980s, just missed being Gen X, didn’t know we were millennials until we were well into our 30s) is a bridge. As Joanne McNeil [author of Lurking and Wrong Way] has discussed, we can remember before the internet was available to consumers, but we came of age with it. I wasn’t too aware of technological change until I was 10 or so, which would make it 1992, but after that it seemed constant and at an unvarying speed. The internet seemed less an aberration than part of a natural progression, and I assumed that’s how things had always worked. Even cellphones didn’t seem like such a big leap, partially because they weren’t really all that useful at first. Most of my attention was focused after 2001 on the political situation, which seemed changing at a far more exponential rate than I ever could have imagined. I was also a college drop-out with very little money, so I was on the blunt edge of the technological curve, barely using the internet. At some point, I walked into my grandparents’ living room and saw my cousin watching a movie on a laptop, which deeply disturbed me. I hadn’t known such a thing was possible, and I didn’t understand why you would want it to be. Mid-summer 2007 sealed the deal, when I met a friend at the Blind Tiger in the West Village, and she’d just purchased the first iPhone. Again, I wondered why someone would want that. It took me just over a decade to finally acquiesce and purchase a smartphone, and I still don’t know the answer to that question.

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Another World Isn't Possible. Stories by Brendan C. Byrne. Cover by Matthew Revert.

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*For the record, on that obsolete platform Brendan first expressed the useful summer observation, The hammock always wins. [HWW]

Acrostic for Eileen Gunn

recent reading : june 2025

recent reading : early june

The Slizz, original drawing by Wendy Walker

— Tom LaFarge. The Crimson Bears. Part I. Sun & Moon Press, [1993].
——. A Hundred Doors. The Crimson Bears. Part II. Sun & Moon Press, [1994, i.e., 1995].
/ I have loved The Crimson Bears ever since I first encountered them, I read read them aloud to the offspring, and wrote about them, and about the early career of Tom La Farge (1947-2020) here : https://endlessbookshelf.net/bargeton.html
Am re-reading these in advance of the re-issue by Tough Poets Press. This is fabulous news !

— Paul McAuley. War of the Maps [2020]. VG [Gollancz], 2021.
/ what a writer ! McAuley makes it happen. Everything is otherwise but there are echoes & riffs of Beckett early on, and I see everywhere threads of Le Guin (The Dispossessed, in particular) ; and now, far out in the world ocean, a glimpse by the lucidor protagonist of world wanderers (an albatross by any other name) conjures up all the ripples of Coleridge ; and the deployment of Chekov’s dictum is deft and sudden. McAuley’s unexpected turns are shocking, deeply satisfying, the work of a magician who sets up his effects with precision and perfect timing.

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this just in

Another World Isn't Possible. Stories by Brendan C. Byrne. Cover by Matthew Revert.

— Brendan C. Byrne. Another World Isn’t Possible. Stories. 226, [4], [6, ads], [3, blank], [1, imprint] pp. [Melbourne :] Wanton Sun, [2025 : POD, Chambersburg, Penna., 5 June]. Cover by Matthew Revert.
/ I know a few of these stories (even published one), but wow ! have I been looking forward to this collection. Stylish design !
/ from the blurbs : “Ruthlessly hip, transreal surreal. Worth your time.” — Rudy Rucker

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various :

— Brian Eno and Bette Adriaanse. What Art Does. An Unfinished Theory [2024]. Faber, [2025].
/ serious, playful thinking about the what and why of art.
/ the Endless Bookshelf reminds readers of the Humument fragment by Tom Phillips, “the reader is the artist” :
https://temporary-culture.com/conversation43e/

— Colin Wilson. Jorge Luis Borges. Cover with portrait drawing by Hugo Manning. London : Village Press, 1974.
/ literary journalism by Colin Wilson, reductive in tone, and in the end more interested in himself than in the writings of Borges

— John Shen Yen Nee and S J Rozan. The Railway Conspiracy. Soho Crime, [2025].

— William S. Reese. The Best of the West. 250 Classic Works of Western Americana. William Reese Company, 2017.
/ succinct illustrated discussion of books (1555-1941) that chart the exploration and settlement of the American West.

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bundles of traditional hand rolled clove cigarettes, detail from Kretek

— Mark Hanusz. Kretek. The Culture and Heritage of Indonesia’s Clove Cigarettes. [With a foreword by Pramoedya Ananta Toer]. Illustrated in color throughout. [xx], 203 pp. Equinox Publishing, 2000.
/ heard about this from a new acquaintance who grew up in Indonesia and described the sensory rush of memories arising, years later, from finding a discarded packet of clove cigarettes. Never smoked them myself but the olfactory memory is there. Bought two copies, one for a friend interested in the history of smoking and related phenomena.

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— Heiress. Sargent’s American Portraits. 16 May – 5 October 2025 [Cover title]. [Foreword by Richard Ormond]. English Heritage | Kenwood, 2024.
/ Catalogue of an exhibition of 18 portraits by John Singer Sargent, with summery biographies of the American heiresses who married into the British inner circles and aristocracy. An excellent, compact show. Ormond is author of the Sargent catalogue raisonné.

The Elfland Prepositions by Henry Wessells

— Henry Wessells. The Elfland Prepositions. Temporary Culture, 2025.
Printed on Mohawk superfine white eggshell. Pictorial wrappers. 26 copies, lettered A to Z, were reserved for presentation ; there were also 100 copies numbered 1 to 100. Edition of 326 copies.

Collection of four previously unpublished short stories :
Cleaning up Elfland
The Barmaid from Elfland
John Z. Delorean, Dry Cleaner to the Queen of Elfland
A Detective in Elfland

Published 27 February 2025. Click on link or photo to order.
ISBN13 978-0-9961359-0-0 ISBN 0-9961359-0-1

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

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“elegant” — MICHAEL DIRDA, in the Washington Post

“Here is an Elfland as implacable as ever, but now ruthlessly enmeshed in contemporary mortal affairs.” — MARK VALENTINE

“very clever, beautifully dark in implication. [. . .] Wessells is not prolific at all (in fiction) but what he does is outstanding.” — RICH HORTON

”If you don’t believe in magic, read Henry Wessells and find out how wrong you are.” — GUY DAVENPORT

recent reading : may 2025

recent reading :

— John James Audubon. My Style of Drawing Birds. Introduction by Michael Zinman. The Overland Press for the Haydn Foundation, 1979.
Facsimile and transcription of a fascinating manuscript, “Audubon’s definitive statement on the achievement to which he devoted his life”.

— Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman. Anatomy of an Auction. Rare Books at Huxley Lodge, 1919. The Book Collector, 1990.
How books were really sold in Britain, once upon a time. Discussion of the “ring” in action at a country house sale, based on documentary evidence of the “knock out” and “settlement” among participating dealers : a Shakespeare First Folio sold for £100 in the room and £1,550 in the third round (with the surviving participants dividing the difference between them). This sort of arrangement was abolished by law in 1927 but continued illegally into the 1950s.

— Frank Baker. Miss Hargreaves. A Fantasy. Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1940.
Bonkers : a poetry hoax, what can possibly go awry ?

— Pramoedya Ananta Toer. All That Is Gone. Translated from the Indonesian by Willem Samuels. Hyperion East, [2004].
Short stories ranging in time from the colonial period through the Japanese occupation and early independence. The title story is episodic and invokes the transitory nature of things.

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— Othman Wok. A Mosque in the Jungle. Classic Stories . . . . Edited by Ng Yi-Sheng, with translations by M M Basalamah and Tan Poay Lim. Epigram, [2021].

— Clarence Wolf. Fifty Years a Bookseller or, The Wolf at Your Door. Second, expanded edition. Privately printed, 2025.
/ the first edition (2022) vaulted right into the top five bookshop memoirs (joining the ranks of Tim d’Arch Smith’s The Times Deceas’d and Not 84 Charing Cross Road by Driffield, and two others where I will concede there is room for debate) ; the new edition adds more anecdotes and an index. Outstanding and witty !

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‘not our family’s first float trip through an abandoned mine’
— Sarah Kendzior. The Last American Road Trip. Flatiron Books, [2025].
Well written and intensely engaging book, family travels in an uncertain America. Kendzior is direct and unflinching and honest. She has travelled to some remarkable places in what the French would call “l’Amérique profonde”, deep in the heart of the heart of the country. Kendzior is brave and funny and clear-eyed about America in our time.

— Bjørn Berge. Nowherelands. An Atlas of Vanished Countries 1840-1975. [Translated from the original Norwegian by Lucy Moffatt]. Thames & Hudson, [2017].
An excellent travel book to odd corners of the globe, anchored by postage stamps and illuminated by literary citations. I wondered at the omission of one small country until I saw the date of the extinction of Biafra in the original title, Landene som forsvant, 1840-1970 (Countries that vanished ?), which answers the question. Of the fifty, more than a dozen were unknown to me, and another six or seven only as names on a map. This book made me think of The World of Donald Evans ; and Secret Europe by John Howard and Mark Valentine (2012), who re-write the imaginative geography of continental Europe in the interwar years* in a gorgeous book fragrant with “that air of mystery, transgression, and foreboding” identified by Michael Dirda.
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* and in the perpetual life during wartime all years past now seem interwar years

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— John Scalzi. Old Man’s War [2005]. [With a new introduction]. Tor, [2024].

— Ian Rankin. Midnight and Blue. An Inspector Rebus Novel. Mulholland Books, [2024].

commonplace book : may 2025

Michael Swaine at hus sewing machine in the Tenderloin, photo by Daniel Gorrell

Michael Swaine : ‘What I learnt from mending strangers’ clothes’ / in the FT glossy magazine HTSI

https://on.ft.com/3ExYMcP

Readers of the ’shelf will recall Michael Swaine as one of the impresarios of the Weedwalk : Book Walk in its two iterations in 2007 and 2009 . Only here will you read about the skill of bookshoeing :

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Your correspondent will be in London for the Firsts Book Fair, from 15 to 18 May, in the Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York’s Square, King’s Road, London SW3 4RY (at the Cummins booth C21). Come say hello.

This means that, for the first time in many years, your correspondent will not be on hand for that glorious annual manifestation of impermanence, Rhododendron Day, which will occur earlier this year. Here is a snap of the work in progress, earlier today : the blooms opened further during the warm day

a few days before Rhododendron Day

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Hampstead

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above Haworth, shortly after dawn, 21 May

A Book of Ryhmes by Charlotte Brontë

Forthcoming 21 April 2025 from Tartarus Press in association with the Brontë Society :

The first publication of A BOOK OF RYHMES by Charlotte Brontë reproduces her handwritten pages in facsimile at original size, as well as enlarged, alongside a transcription of the poems. The book includes an Introduction by Patti Smith, and essays by Barbara Heritage and Henry Wessells. The book will be available in hardcover and paperback.

Details and advance order information here :

http://tartaruspress.com/bronte-a-book-of-ryhmes.html

The manuscript book of verse was composed by Charlotte Brontë in the autumn of 1829. It was known to her biographer, Mrs. Gaskell, and had last been sighted in 1916. Readers of the Endless Bookshelf will recall the reappearance of the manuscript at the New York Book Fair on 21 April 2022, and its sale to the UK charity, Friends of National Libraries for donation to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. And now everyone can read Charlotte’s Ryhmes.

Note added 5 April : your correspondent is a bit giddy with happiness, pictured here holding the first copy of A BOOK OF RYHMES in New York City.

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

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.