simply messing about in books
— Johannes Buxtorf. Epitome Grammaticæ Hebrææ, Breviter & Methodice [etc.]. Leiden : S. & J. Luchtmans, 1761.
Buxtorf wrote many, many, books. What is interesting about this one is the bookplate : in the library in N.Y.C. from 1826 until today.
— — —
New Yok City, this afternoon
— — —
— Louis Lüthi. On the Self-Reflexive Page II. Illustrated throughout. 298,[4] pp. [Amsterdam: Roma Publications, 2021]. Pictured at right.
I pulled this from a shelf at IRIS, a nice bookstore in Montclair that just celebrated one year as an open shop. I remembered the title from a decade ago and was curious to see what the new iteration would hold. The emphasis is similar, reflections on pages in literature that perform in a different mood than prose text, from Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67) to Walter Benjamin, André Breton, Harry Mathews, Donald Barthelme, and other recent writers. This new edition, with different images of marbled pages from Tristram Shandy for its covers, is much expanded, with more examples of pages : black, blank, drawing, document, photography, and text pages; and the essay is more discursive and takes in a wider scope of material than in the first edition (at left, above), which I had grabbed at a Printed Matter art book fair in the autumn of 2012 and noted here , with a visual nod to the allusions to Tristram Shandy that anchor the book. The 2010 edition is a book of 128 numbered pages, followed by a concise, unpaginated essay of 32 pages (including notes and bibliography).
The first edition included a loose leaf, a Prière d’inserer or “review slip” :
This reminded me of the playful review slip found in the S.P. copies of Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de Style (1947), which prints one of the exercices in the book :
— — —
— Kasper van Ommen. “The Einstein of the sixteenth century”, in : Books That Made History. 26 Books from Leiden That Changed the World. Edited by Kasper van Ommen and Geert Verhoeven. [Translated by Claire and Mike Wilkinson]. Brill, 2022.
Excellent essay on J. J. Scaliger (1540-1609), polyglot scholar of classical and near eastern languages, whose Opus de emendatione temporum (1598) integrated astronomy and history from Jewish, Babylonian, Persian and Egyptian sources as well as Greek and Roman works ; “he also incorporated the latest astronomical understandings of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) and Tycho Brahe (1546-1601)”. Scaliger came to Leiden University with his library in 1593; it soon grew, and has been kept there ever since. Your correspondent is the lowest amateur polyglot in the presence of such erudition; there were some remarkable books on view during a visit last week (including a presentation inscribed from Brahe to Scaliger).
A summary note on Scaliger’s career by van Ommen on the University website (Dutch for ‘grouch’ is brompot), Josephus Scaliger : famous scholar and grouch
— — —
— Janwillem van de Wetering. Hard Rain [1986]. Soho paperback, [1997].
Had to pick this one up again, an old favorite by an old friend, for a re-read now that I have been to Amsterdam, and have walked and bicycled along the canals and into the Amsterdamse Bos. It was a Depression-era landscaping project around the Olympic rowing basin of 1928 and is now a mature city forest and a green lung in the midst of a densely populated zone.
— — —
— Heather Swan. Where the Grass Still Signs. Stories of Insects and Interconnection. Pennsylvania State University Press, [2024].
Memoir and travelogue on insects and landscapes from the rural midwest to Colombia and Ecuador, richly illustrated with works by contemporary artists. Seen in the window of Architectura & Natura, an inviting bookshop on Leliegracht in Amsterdam.
— Christian de Pange. Le Bréviare du Quintivir. Une enquête bibliographique en Franche-Comté. [Lusove: Imprimerie de Bacchus] Pour la Société des Bibliophiles Francois, 2022.
Bibliographical account of a private social club in Vesoul in rural France at the turn of the nineteenth century, and their festive book, printed circa 1813 for the five members. The bibliographer has traced three copies to the present day; a fourth copy was last seen in 1896. Edition of 100 copies, from the author.
— Choosing Vincent. From family collection to Van Gogh Museum. Lisa Smith and Hans Luijten (eds.). Van Gogh Museum / Thoth Publishers, [2023].
— Emile Schriver and Heide Warncke. 18 highlights from Ets Haim, the oldest Jewish library in the world. Walburg Pers, [2016].
Illustrated selection of books and manuscripts from the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam (founded 1616).
— — —
— Avram Davidson and Grania Davis. A Goat for Azazel. [Afterword by Michael Swanwick]. Dragonstairs Press, forthcoming 5 September 2024. Edition of 80 copies, stitched in mourning lacework paper wrappers, signed by Swanwick.
Reproduces the text of a proposal for an Eszterhazy “ghost novel” (circa 1993 or 1994), with a note by Michael Swanwick, whose friendship back then encouraged my researches and the formation of the Avram Davidson website.
— Nancy Isenberg. White Trash. The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. [With a new preface to the paperback edition]. Penguin, [2017].
The persistence of early modern English hierarchies and economic structures from the earliest beginnings of the enterprise. Dispossession, servitude, and the upward concentration of wealth.
— — —
afternoon sun in Amsterdam, Leidseplein
— — —
The Endless Bookshelf will be filing despatches from Amsterdam and environs during the week of the A.I.B congress (words and images dropped in here as found).
— — —
things are symbols of themselves / semiotics of Amsterdam
— — —
vegan potato truffle cappuccino
[surprise innovation offered during the medley of the Daalder experience, vegan mode]
— — —
Vondelpark
— — —
Watcher at the edge of the cow pasture, in the Amsterdamse Bos.
— — —
Herengracht
— — —
‘Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres’
The earliest surviving manuscript of Caesar’s De bello gallico (On the Gallic War), ca. ninth century CE, at the Allard Pierson collection, University of Amsterdam.
At the other end of the table, a stack of more than 80 ‘feuilles volantes’ (1916-28) of Kaváfis (Cavafy), scattered leaves of his self-published Poems.
— — —
Breestraat, Leiden
— — —
color in the Rijksmuseum library
— — —
— H. N. Werkman. Hot Printing. [Groningen, ca. 1936]. One of three known copies of a portfolio of prints and poems.
At the Koninglijke Bibliotheek = KB, nationale bibliotheek :
Onze wereld is gebouwd met woorden en gevormd door mensen
— — —
— Vincent van Gogh. Trois romans.
— — —
At the Ritman Library, Keizersgracht 123, Amsterdam.
— — —
Compagnieszaal, West-Indisch Huis, Amsterdam (this is the room where New Amsterdam was planned)
— — —
rainbow at Schiphol
— — —
A fun trip down to Austin to see old friends, attend Armadillocon, make new friends, eat good vegan food, and, as usual, look at books. (This is one of those postcards that gets mailed after leaving the place.) I hadn’t been to Austin or Armadillocon for several years, so it was good to be back. A curator friend recommended a vegan sushi place Nori. I headed there after our meeting and was impressed by the Katana-ya (deep-fried nori roll with avocado, cucumber, kanpyo, shoga, surimi mix; topped with wasabi mayo, unagi, ponzu green salad, jalapeño, red onion, and cilantro). The convention was in the same hotel as before, an odd, anonymous late 1970s exurban architectural mode that could have been at the edge of Anywhere, USA. Inside, though, it was all Armadillocon, a small friendly convention with a good mix of panels and readings (even sometimes forcing one to make hard choices).
One of the reasons I went was to show up at the Howard Waldrop celebration, a panel moderated by Scott A. Cupp and also including Sanford Allen, Robert Taylor, and Don Webb: all friends who knew Howard for decades. I hadn’t been able to attend the Waldrop Memorial in June; I was glad to attend this gathering. Towards the end of the allotted hour (the anecdotes and yarns could have gone on for hours), when the floor was open for comments, I stood up and said something like this:
My name is Henry Wessells and I’m from New Jersey, where we also esteem Howard Waldrop. He excelled at integrating incompatible ideas into improbable fictions that suddenly reveal truths about life, literature, and America; and the stories equally suddenly show themselves to be inevitable and essential parts of American literature. If “The Ugly Chickens” is often mentioned as Howard’s best known story, for me his masterpiece is “Heart of Whitenesse”, where the ambitious conceit is executed with perfect skill. Not a word out of place, and the madcap humor is controlled in the service of the tale.
I have it from a reliable source that as an angler Howard practiced catch and release, and thus understood the impossibility of clinging to things. And so we now mark his departure; the stories, and the ideas, remain.
— Christopher Brown. Field Notes. September 2024. [Austin, 7 September 2024]. Gift of the author, inscribed, one of the first copies out of the box. Two essays, two reading lists, and twelve photos. Newsletter for advance orders to his new book.
——. A Natural History of Empty Lots. Timber Press, [September 2024]. Advance copy, inscribed.
—. Live to Build a Better World. Despair, Survival, and Hope in Science Fiction’s Response to Environmental Change. [Introduction by Jeremy Brett]. Texas A&M University Libraries, 2021. Illustrated catalogue for the exhibition at the Cushing Memorial Library (January to June 2021). An interesting selection of mostly twenty-first century books and films, with the earliest titles being The Lorax (1971), by Dr. Seuss, Brunner’s The Sheep Look up and Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (both 1972), and Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower (1993).
— Avram Davidson. The Avram Davidson Treasury. Tor, [1998]. Book club edition which I hadn’t known existed. The copyright page is altered, the dust jacket carries no price and has a number slug on the back panel, and the black boards are smooth.
— Delilah S. Dawson. Bloom. Titan, [2023].
— Joe R. Lansdale. Things Get Ugly. The Best Crime Stories of Joe R. Lansdale. [Introduction by S. A. Cosby]. Tachyon, [2023].
— Josh Rountree. Death Aesthetic. Underwood, [2024].
——. The Legend of Charlie Fish. Tachyon, [2023].
— John Varley. The Persistence of Vision. [Introduction by Algis Budrys] [1978]. Dell [Quantum Paperback], [1979]. Varley was the first Armadillocon guest of honor.
— Howard Waldrop. Howard Who?. Stories [1986]. Peapod Classics. [Small Beer Press, third printing, 30 March 2024] [replacement copy].
the next book from Temporary Culture is now ready :
A Melville Census. John Marr & Timoleon. With a note by Henry Wessells.
Edition of 52 copies, designed and printed by hand by Jerry Kelly.
To be published 8 January 2025. Subscription details available here.
This is just what it sounds like : a report on the location of all known copies of Herman Melville’s John Marr (1888) and Timoleon (1891), the two last books of poems (each printed in editions of 25 copies), with a note about Maurice Sendak, Bill Reese, and others. Of the 52 copies printed, 26 lettered copies are for presentation (one copy for the author, printed on blue paper, can be glimpsed at left above).
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).
Faber (which is to say Eliot) clearly thought it sagacious to wrap in sheep’s clothing the already notorious Ezra Pound’s new publication with its incendiary title: a ticking bomb that needed no bush. But the underlying message cannot be missed: Pound’s title, a modernist wake-up slogan he’d been using offhandedly since 1928, is manifestly inflammatory, once grasped; a challenge to his various enemies who (he maintains) clog the literature pews: an up-yours bombination clearly audible through the enfant-sauvage mask Pound wore until it was too late. This bomb needed to slip through the gates before exploding.
or Robert Graves, The White Goddess (1948), Tom Eliot again; or Lawrence Leonard, The Horn of Mortal Danger (1980); or London Tales (1983), edited by Julian Evans. Clute’s selections are fascinating testimony to the breadth of his reading and collecting and his critical range; the text sparkles with his crunchy and apt vocabulary. It seems almost a homoeopathic distillation: “I’d reckon that out of every 8,000 or so books to arrive at the British Library complete with dust-jacket, I’ve commented here on a maximum of one”. (Excessive candor moment: John Clute is a friend of more than twenty-five years; I am the source for the images of the only jacket not from his own collection.) This is an important book.
———
Addendum (3 May): I wrote the notice above after reading digital proofs of the book. Today I have a copy in hand (a print on demand product manufactured in Tennessee on 19 April), and it is nice to see the book in the wild. In the U.S. the book is available from bookshop.org and elsewhere. Oh, yes : The Book Blinders is issued with a dust jacket (designed by Judith Clute). Here is the back panel :
— [Charles Renouvier]. Uchronie (L’Utopie dans l’Histoire). Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, tel qu’il aurait pu être. Paris : Bureau de la Critique philosophique, 1876.
A recent glimpse of a copy of Uchronie prompted me to start reading this landmark of speculative history. It’s a tricky book, a work of ideas that employs several layers of apparent estrangement devices (somewhat like the original Castle Rackrent). I will report further.
I saw Uchronie in a display case not far from a nice copy of Utopia (Louvain, 1516) in La science-fiction à la Sorbonne, an exhibition at the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de la Sorbonne. Truth be told, the BIS copy of Uchronie is a little nicer than the one I’m reading :
The exhibition, which had just opened, is part of an ongoing Année de la science-fiction and is on view in the salle Jacqueline-de-Romilly (BIS, 17 rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris) through 20 December. Non-university folks must register to visit, details here : http://www.bis-sorbonne.fr/biu/spip.php?rubrique537 . There are author events announced through March 2024 and joint initiatives with the scholarly journal ReS Futurae.
The exhibition, which includes books from More’s Utopia through contemporary paperbacks of French science fiction and works in translation, with an interesting visual component. The case of early works contains these:
Also of note was a bibliographical item : Régis Messac. Esquisse d’une chrono-bibliographie des utopies. Lausanne : Club Futopia, 2962 (sic). The title page carries an epigraph from Leconte de Lisle : “Ton coeur est dévoré d’un songe indestructible”.
The checklist of the displays of more recent books in the reading room is available here : https://www.calameo.com/read/005807300bb9b578a61e7
P.S. Glare from the overhead lights meant I couldn’t take a picture of the BIS Utopia, but here is a snapshot of the copy at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal :
TEMPORARY CULTURE started with a photocopy ’zine at the end of June 1988, The Newsletter of Temporary Culture, the title from a dream-memory, and the form and content being a confluence of available technology and literary urges in the post-industrial not-quite-gentrified Hudson river littoral in Paulus Hoek (five minutes’ walk from downtown Jersey City). With the fifth issue the word newsletter fell away from the title and the seventh issue introduced the sumac logo and marked an end to a rainbow of ’zines (the eighth issue never made it to the copy machine).
And then the world changed.
Temporary Culture evolved with the newly available technology just as my interest in Avram Davidson ripened to the point of publication, and a friend said, you don’t really want a database, let’s make a website. An electronic newsletter followed, but the itch to produce printed things resurfaced before long, first with the publications of the Avram Davidson Society, and then from 2003 a steady series of books, including Another green world, When They Came by Don Webb, Hope-in-the-Mist by Michael Swanwick, and the specially bound copies of A Conversation larger than the Universe. (In retrospect, it would have been cool to accept the hand press and founts of type offered to me in late 1992 or early 1993, but at the time I had nowhere to house them and so a different path was chosen.) The most important book published by Temporary Culture is without a doubt Sexual Stealing by Wendy Walker; the most elegant is the hand printed edition of Naples by Avram Davidson. Of each one of these (and of each of the books of Temporary Culture) I can assert that without my energies these books would not have come into being. A checklist of the publications of Temporary Culture is in preparation. There will probably be a few more books before it’s over. [HWW]