association copy – The Endless Bookshelf

Arthur Machen, Eleusinia, 1881

Arthur Machen’s first book, Eleusinia, by a former member of H. C. S., is a sequence of poems celebrating pre-Christian mysteries in the Athens of the young author’s imagination. The pamphlet was printed in Hereford in 1881, and is known from one copy preserved at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. The copy is from the collection of Charles Parsons (Yale class of 1912), who was one of the lenders to the Harry Marks exhibition in 1923. Eleusinia was not, however, exhibited in 1923, for at the time it was still in the author’s possession. But by 1926 his circumstances had changed, and when it happened that one of the American collectors with whom Machen had been corresponding was visiting London, Machen agreed to receive him and to sell his copy of Eleusinia. The picture above shows the pastedown with the Charles Parsons ’12 gift bookplate, and above it is the signature of Arthur Machen’s father John Edward Jones Machen, M.A., Llanthewy Rectory, 1881. Machen’s father paid for the printing of the book, and in his copy he pasted a clipping, a tactful, encouraging press notice, identified as by “Lewis Sergeant Esqre in Hereford Times”. Lewis Sergeant (1841-1902) was a journalist and author and a close friend of the Machen family ; Machen stayed in his house in Turnham Green when he first came up to London. On the flyleaf opposite is the author the inscription at the time of the sale, “For Charles Parsons from Arthur Machen, Melina Place, London, June 26th 1926”. Parsons saved his correspondence with Machen, and the receipt (shown below) is preserved in the files at Beinecke (Gen MSS 256, Box 1 folder 3).

Eleusinia is fully digitized and available here : https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/10516628

Nearly a hundred years on, the copy at Beinecke is still the only known copy of the book : a typescript at Brigham Young and a manuscript at HRC are fair copies prepared at the behest of Fytton Armstrong ; Princeton and Stanford appear to have photostats or photocopies of the Yale copy. I am very pleased to have been able to examine this book, and acknowledge the courtesies extended to me on my visit.

W is for Wessells

— John Crowley. Little, Big, or The Fairies’ Parliament … Art Peter Milton. Afterword Harold Bloom. Incunabula, 2021 [i.e., 2024]. Anniversary edition, copy W of 26 copies, specially bound, inscribed by John Crowley and signed by all. Violet cloth, brown pictorial dust jacket with illustrations after Peter Milton, and with an essay by Elizabeth Hand on the flaps. Pictorial slipcase.

This book has taken a while to reach my shelves : the edition was announced in 2005 and I subscribed for this lettered copy as an immediate reflex ; for Little, Big is, as Tom Disch wrote : “the best fantasy novel I’ve ever read. Period.”

Deaths of the Poets

— Kit Reed. Deaths of the Poets. Designed and illustrated by Joseph Reed. Text within illustrated borders. [34], [2, blank] pp. [Middletown]: At the Sign of the Piratical Primrose, 1991. Second, revised edition (150 copies, initialled by the author and artist). Gilt leather-grained card wrappers with printed label. This copy was inscribed to Brian and Margaret Aldiss.

A poet’s life is like a breath
After which — you guessed it — Death
[. . .]
Now echoing down hills & valley
Comes our last word, it’s Hey, Finale!
Though taken out by fate’s sharp knife
We leave the verse, to signal: Life!

An abecedarium of dead poets : Aeschylus, Byron, Crane, Donne, Euripides, Fuller, Goethe, Homer, Akhenaton, Johnson, Keats, Lovelace, Molière, Nerval, Ovid, Pope, Quasimodo, Rilke, Sand, Tennyson, Urban, Villon, Wilde, Xenophon, Yeats, and Zoroaster.

Kit Reed was a really nice warm person, and a sharp and funny writer. We read together at the KGB science fiction reading series in 2004, when Another green world had just appeared, and she was skewering many American obsessions with her Thinner than Thou (what could possibly go wrong if . . . ?!?). It was the hundredth anniversary of Bloomsday, 16 June 2004, and to mark the occasion I read “A prayer for James Joyce” by James Blish. A lot of blank looks in the audience, but Kit and a few others knew what it was about. I used see her and Joe at Readercon (she was guest of honor in 2014). As always, the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has some useful things to offer about her stealthy, explosive prose : https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/reed_kit.

Deaths of the Poets was first published in 1978 as a book of etchings in an edition of ten copies (only Yale and the Boston Athenaeum report copies).

Dream Fox

— Rosalie Parker. Dream Fox and Other Strange Stories. [vi], 239 pp. Tartarus Press, [2023]. Pictorial boards, dust jacket.
A new collection of 18 stories from this talented author, presenting a variety of modes and settings, plus a fabulous book-within-a-book, “Mary Belgrove’s Book of Unusual Experiences”. The stories also display a remarkable range of voices and a change of register from one story to the next, the oppressive tone of “Home Comforts”is followed by the quiet austerity and sense of the inescapable at the heart of “The Decision”. “Pebble” is a dark fable of modern slavery; it takes a sudden, darker turn that speaks of liberation.

The first story, “Beguiled”, starts as a glimpse of an aristocratic young lady’s privilege and confinement in Imperial Russia, with a flavor of some of the tales of Saki. The narrative moves with concision and perfect pitch to an icy conclusion and a devastating last line. The effect is breathtaking ! and all in eight pages of the most lucid prose.

The title story, “Dream Fox”, a variation on the Reynard tales, is deeply subversive of the patriarchy and the county landholding class. It is the rebellious imagination of the adolescent girl that powers the transformation. The outcome is utterly that of “Kitty” by Paul Bowles.

“Mary Belgrove’s Book of Unusual Experiences” is a collection of nine stories of ghosts and uncanny experiences in contemporary Britain, a book “chanced upon in a remainder outlet or a charity shop, rather than a bona fide bookstore”, published by a vanity press for “the crazy old woman who own all those millions in the National Lottery” and who wants to share her belief in the paranormal. The frame story is told in an introduction and the headnotes to each account. It is hilarious (is it a cameo self-portrait of the author?): in “The Dating Game”, Mary Belgrove tells Scott, “Perhaps we need to recognise that in this case ‘Alive’ and ‘Dead’ may be relative terms.” The experiences (each narrated in a distinct voice) are dislocating and defy reductive explanation.

A beautiful book and a notable collection.

Ghosts & Recovered Memories : Tom Disch’s Amnesia

‘You wake up feeling wonderful. But also, in some indefinable way, strange’

The other day Tom Lecky handed me something he found while tidying up his shop, Riverrun, or more precisely tidying up old stuff from its earlier existence when Chris Stephens ran it as a street-level open shop in Hastings on Hudson. Mr. Lecky (whom I call Tom but in a moment you’ll see why the usage remains formal) knew I’d be interested because when he first took over, I had bought the proof copy of On Wings of Song (1979) marked by Thomas M. Disch with corrections for the Gollancz publication of the novel. What Mr. Lecky handed me was a pictorial printed sleeve for Tom Disch’s early interactive fiction, Amnesia, empty except for a printed map of Streetwise Manhattan (copyright date 1984) with a curious gold sticker on it, “compliments of the Sunderland Hotel” (not a hotel I had ever heard of). The sleeve is undated and bears a Harper ISBN 0-06-668006-9, and is signed by Disch with his formal signature.

This a trickier object than it might seem at first glance, for it is a bibliographic ghost: the Harper and Row Amnesia by Tom Disch never existed.

In Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, vol. 4 (Gale Research, 1986), Tom wrote:

I’ve completed a computer-interactive novel, Amnesia, which should appear from Electronic Arts in May of 1986. For a while it was touch-and-go whether Amnesia would ever exist. Harper and Row Software contracted for it in the fall of ’83, and then a year later, when the project was halfway to completion, Harper and Row dissolved their software department before it had put a single product on the market, a decision dictated by considerations of accounting [. . .] and then when Electronic Arts took over Amnesia I returned to work on that. And now that’s done [. . .]

He was indeed a pioneer in this new field and Amnesia is a text of branching paths, beginning when the “player” awakens in a hotel room in the Sunderland Hotel somewhere in Manhattan with, as the Harper sleeve copy says, “no idea of who you are, with no clothes, with no money — and with fifteen minutes until you have to check out of your hotel room.”

The text adventure was published by Electronic Arts in 1986. Interviewed by Larry McCaffery in Across the Wounded Galaxies (1990), Tom observed

When you’re working on this kind of text, you’re operating in an entirely different mode from when you’re writing other forms of literature. [. . .] In a very literal sense, any computer-interactive text deconstructs itself as you write because it’s always stopping and starting and branching off this way and that. You are constantly and overtly manifesting those decisions usually hidden in fiction because, of course, you don’t normally show choices that are ruled out — though in every novel the choices that are not made are really half the work, an invisible presence. With Amnesia, I found myself working with a form that allowed me to display these erasures, these unfollowed paths.

The history of the Harper ghost is also well known. In the fall of 2008, Stephane Racle, a specialist in computer games bought an example of the Harper sleeve and a typescript of Amnesia, the Script for my U-Dun-It, Disch’s text for the interactive adventure.

More recently, Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Pre-Web Digital Media, volume 1 (2018), from the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University, Vancouver, includes a section on Disch’s Amnesia with a “traversal” or demonstration of the 1986 Amnesia, with a critical essay and links to reviews and earlier articles.

— — —

in memoriam : Peter Straub (1943-2022)

Peter Straub, with Peter Cannon and S. T. Joshi, New York, June 2018.

Peter Straub, who died on 4 September 2022, was the smartest of writers and a truly fine man. He was one of the few magicians I have ever met: that rare real thing, a writer who starts a tale in a recognizable place and enables the reader to go somewhere unexpected and unsettling. I didn’t know him well, but saw him regularly over the years in New York and at Readercon, and I treasure his work. It was always a pleasure to hear him read from works in progress.

It was a signal honor and delight to moderate the panel discussing his writings when he was guest of honor at Readercon 23 in July 2012. It was a wide-ranging, zigzag conversation between Gary K. Wolfe, Mike Allen, John Langan, and your correspondent, discussing character, place, and story in Straub, as well as a host of other topics. In one exchange we drew attention to connections between minor characters across the decades. Peter was in attendance and we could witness his pleasure at the seriousness (and sly humor) with which we undertook the vivisection of the Works . . . . In my introductory remarks I observed, “What is a book but the record of the struggle of a story to tell itself?” and I had been thinking of Shadow Land in particular, but all of his works grappled with the relationship between story and form. Just take a look at the intensity with which he read Henry James: The Process (Is a Process All Its Own) (2017), contributes an episode in the life of the Master which no other author could have conceived and told. The Dark Matter (2010) is another fascinating work.

In September, his daughter, novelist Emma Straub, wrote a succession of posts on twitter, beginning here , and a very moving memoir of her father, This Time Tomorrow, Today.

That Readercon panel was followed by a convivial dinner gathering — not a table of doom — with many (but not too many) luminaries. Peter inscribed my copy of Shadow Land, which I included in A Conversation larger than the Universe.

The photograph at the top was a rare late public appearance, when Peter attended the birthday celebration organized by Derrick Hussey of Hippocampus Press for critic S. T. Joshi in June 2018.

As my friend Liz Hand (present at that Readercon dinner) remarked after learning of Peter’s death, “count none but sunny hours”. Peter Straub was a Mensch, with a big heart, and I am glad to have known him.

— — —

The Locus obituary here :
https://locusmag.com/2022/09/peter-straub-1943-2022/

The Peter Straub Papers (MSS 185) are held at the Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University. The detailed finding aid is here: http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/fales/mss_185/

The Dead of the House by Hannah Green

The Endless Bookshelf is many things, but it is above all a series of notes on reading and thinking about books, as texts and as objects. More than a decade ago, a friend gave me a copy of the paperback reprint of The Dead of the House by Hannah Green, deeming rightly that I would appreciate. I read it with pleasure and gave a copy to friend with an affinity for books and for the wood, and he enjoyed it, too. It was Green’s only novel (technically, in science fiction terms, a fixup composed of several linked stories), all the more remarkable for that, perhaps.

I often thought about the book over the years, and then not long ago I saw an inscribed copy of the original edition, published by Doubleday in 1972, and, as one does, thought about it some more. I began re-reading the book, and then turned up a more interesting copy.

custom dust jacket for The Dead of the House by John Wesley, is it the only one to survive?

— Hannah Green. The Dead of the House. Doubleday, 1972. Inscribed by the author, “For Dieter With my Love Hannah New York, April 1972”. With printed pictorial dust jacket by John Wesley, inscribed on the blank front flap, “Cover for Dieter John Wesley 1972”, and retaining original publisher’s dust jacket with text front panel and author portrait on back panel.

Hannah Green (1927-1996) married painter John Wesley in 1971. His jacket images are closely linked to the text and the look is not dissimilar to his other graphic work at the time (especially some early works, such as Alice or the Radcliffe Tennis team) and a little more somber than the pop art motifs for which he is best known. Was it a trial proof for a design rejected by Doubleday ? And, of course, one wonders about the identity of the Dieter to whom the book is inscribed.* To be continued, perhaps.

[* possibly German artist Dieter Roth, whose work was sometimes exhibited with John Wesley’s at about this time.]

Little, Big by John Crowley

special issue on re-reading : part one
Little, Big

When I take up a work that I have read before (the oftener the better) I know what I have to expect. The satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. [. . .] In reading a book which is an old favourite with me (say the first novel I ever read) I not only have the pleasure of imagination and of a critical relish of the work, but the pleasures of memory added to it. It recalls the same feelings and associations which I had in first reading it, and which I can never have again in any other way. Standard productions of this kind are links in the chain of our conscious being. They bind together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity. They are land-marks and guides in our journey through life.

— On Reading Old Books, from the Selected Essays of William Hazlitt 1778 : 1830. Edited by Geoffrey Keynes. Nonesuch, 1930.

John Crowley’s Little, Big is a book which I have read more times than I can count. It is also in that rare category of books which I give away (sometimes even the copy in my hand). Readers of the Endless Bookshelf will have seen allusions to my readings over the years (Appraisal at Edgewood, the summer of 2007, or Chapter XIV in A Conversation larger than the Universe or “Strange Enough to Be Remembered Forever”). Everything which Hazlitt enumerates applies to re-readings of Little, Big. This year, when I picked up the novel, I paid attention to recurrences of words and parallels. I don’t say repetitions or doublings because the words often function — that is to say, carry meaning — in a new way when they return to the surface later in the book.
Contradictions across scale run through the book * : rooms which seem larger than they are, or are smaller than they look — when Smoky is visiting the Woods (88), and Room 001 to which Sylvie delivers the package (331) — and the resonant phrase, the further in you go, the bigger it gets, is recited by Doctor Bramble in his lecture (43), by Hannah Noon at the wedding of Smoky and Alice (63), and by Auberon in the city park (351), with many echoes. “Daily Alice couldn’t tell if she felt huge or small. She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head” (178).
John Drinkwater told Violet, “I proved that every room needed more than two doors, but couldn’t ever prove than any could get along with only three” (50), which is a succinct an organizing principle of periodic recurrence as one could ask for. Take three examples. First: Smoky writes Alice that he has discovered a plaque reading Mouse Drinkwater Stone 1900 on a pillar at the entrance to a park (13) and a generation later Auberon begins brushing new leaving ivy and obscuring dirt from the plaque as Ariel Hawksquill holds a key to the gate (350). And second: the word constellation, invoked when Smoky is on his way to Edgewood (21), in the beautiful passage when Smoky and Alice and Sophie are looking at the stars on the last night of summer (177-8), and as Ariel Hawskquill contemplates the night-time paradox of the Cosmo-Opticon, when “the blackish Zodiac and the constellations could not be read” (343). And in between “Jolly, round, red Mr. Sun” who rises as a schoolboy reads from one of Doc’s fables of the Green Meadow in Smoky’s classroom (128) and the “ghastly red round sun” as it sinks late one afternoon when Mrs. Underhill takes Lilac on a tour of New York and Old Law Farm (312) are the lives of individual characters and the fate of afflicted nation under the Tyrant. In George Mouse’s successive awakenings from the effects of a “new drug he was experimenting with, of astonishing, just unheard-of potency” (500), familiar objects reassemble themselves into another fabric of reality. These recurrences in Little, Big are the Tale itself, inseparable now from the experience of the reader.

Little, Big is a source of great pleasure each time I read it. This pleasure is only increased by reading about the novel, in, for example, John Clute’s review in the Washington Post Book World for 4 October 1981, or Snake’s Hands, edited by Michael Andre-Driussi and Alice Turner (which prints, twenty years later, Tom Disch’s contemporary review of Crowley’s “masterpiece”).

* citations refer to page numbers in the Bantam edition.

— — —

detail from an invitation, 1981

Little, Big was published on 16 September 1981. Above, detail from an invitation to Little, Big Day in August 1981. And below, the author’s inscriptions to Thomas M. Disch in copies of the novel :

The Bantam trade edition (1981) :

Little, Big (1981)

the Gollancz hardcover edition (1982) :

and the recent Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks edition (2015) with a fine, concise introduction by Graham Sleight :

In truth, with certain books, there are any number of reasons to have more than one copy. Little, Big is one of those personal “land-marks” (as Hazlitt calls them). To quote Tom Disch :

It’s readers who make a book a classic by reading it and getting their friend to read it, by treasuring it and making its wisdom part of their own. Little, Big deserves to be that kind of book.
So read it.

[HWW]