Category: books received

late September mail bag

It feels like the end of summer here in Montclair, with the hop cones turning, and the tables at the farmers’ market asprawl with the last of the bulbous heirloom tomatoes and an abundance of pawpaws. And some interesting books in the the mail recently :

— Peter Bell. Two Weird Tales. Zagava, 2024. Collects “On the Apparitions at Gray’s Court”, a ghost story and haunted house in York, and “Labyrinth”, an uncanny tale set in one of the northern dales.

— John Crowley. Le Parlement des Fées. Traduit de l’américain par Doug Headline. 2 vols., Paris : Rivages / Fantasy, [1994, 1995]. The French edition of Little, Big (the pseudonym of the translator is a jest, for he is the son of crime novelist J. P. Manchette, hard-boiled trail blazer in the Gallimard Série noire, whose surname translates as : headline).

— Mark Valentine. 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.

— David R. Gillham. Shadows of Berlin. Sourcebooks Landmark, [2022].

 

forthcoming: Christopher Brown. A Natural History of Empty Lots

in today’s mail

— Christopher Brown. A Natural History of Empty Lots. Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places.
Forthcoming from Timber Press, September, 2024.

So excited to have this to read, from an excellent writer (and friend!) whose explorations forming the core of this book have been chronicled in his Field Notes, and whose Tropic of Kansas was an Endless Bookshelf Book of the Year, “dark, nimble, hilarious, deeply alarming, truly American”. That’s it for now. There will be more about this book.

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.”

The Story Prize, 2024

— Paul Yoon. The Hive and the Honey. Stories. Marysue Rucci Books, [2024].
Just back from the twentieth annual Story Prize award ceremony honoring the author of a short story collection published in the U.S. in the receding year.  It was an excellent literary evening of readings by the three finalists with interviews by director Larry Dark. The winner of the Story Prize this year is Paul Yoon, for The Hive and the Honey. Stories (Marysue Rucci Books, 2023). The other two finalists were Yiyun Li, for Wednesday’s Child. Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023); and Bennett Sims, for Other Minds and Other Stories (Two Dollar Radio, 2023).

The Book Blinders by John Clute

Millions More Missing
— John Clute. The Book Blinders. Annals of Vandalism at the British Library: A Necrology. Illustrated throughout. 499, [1, errata] pp. Norstrilia Press, [2024].
There has been a steady production of scholarship on the history of the publisher’s dust jacket in the past fifty years. These ephemeral pieces of paper encode all manner of information about the moment in time and both how publishers perceived their wares and how they wanted the reading and book-buying public to receive the newly published books. Much emphasis has been on nineteenth-century jackets in recent research, including in G. Thomas Tanselle’s Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use (2011), which updates work he first published in 1971, and Mark Godburn’s Nineteenth-Century Dust-Jackets (2016). And yet it is really in the early twentieth century that jackets proliferate and assume the form and function we now understand. Vast conceptual leaps in design and presentation of information occur in the interval between The Wind in the Willows (1908) and What Not (1918/1919) or In Our Time and The Great Gatsby (both 1925). And yet this is not solely the province of literary high spots. Across all types of literature, the dust jacket functions as the outer face of the book.  Clute’s title, The Book Blinders, is descriptive of the practical effect for the reader of a long-standing institutional policy of discarding dust jackets or separating the jacket from the book and storing them elsewhere, uncatalogued. This policy prevailed at the British Museum (later British Library) and at other depository libraries from the emergence of the dust jacket and continued for most of the twentieth century. With more than 100 examples of dust jackets not in BL (from the years of the first world war through 1990), John Clute documents the importance of the dust jacket and considers the implications of this vandalism from within. How about these three or four: Rose Macaulay, What Not (1918), a tale of eugenics and privilege, suppression of a libellous passage delaying actual publication until 1919 (Clute’s copy is Michael Sadleir’s own, saved from the memory hole); C. E. M. Joad, Priscilla and Charybdis (1924), “undeterred by the gruelling wordplay of the title, [I] took a look, and found found this this on pages 206-207; a seductive Joad-like protagonist is addressing a young woman on a train ride they are sharing: ‘Darling [he purrs], have you ever travelled without a ticket?’” (this one alone is worth the price of admission); or Ezra Pound, Make It New (1934):

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 :

Comicosmics : Dragonstairs Press

— Michael Swanwick. Comicosmics. Philadelphia: [Forthcoming from] Dragonstairs Press, 2024. Edition of 50, signed by the author. Stitched in gilt celestial decorative wrappers.

Michael Swanwick is the trickiest and most prolific of writers, egged on by the binder and publisher of Dragonstairs Press; and I am the luckiest of readers, regularly granted an earliest glimpse of the productions of Dragonstairs Press. Discerning readers of the Endless Bookshelf will have noticed the sly hommagio to Italo Calvino in this title. The book is an entire intergalactic philosophical novel within the compass of near infinity, and six printed pages. It is one of the several things that Michael Swanwick does best. You saw it here first.

recent reading : february 2024

Surtees at the End of the World

— White, T. H. Gone to Ground Or The Sporting Decameron [Cover title]. London: Collins, 1935. A remarkable book in a stylish pictorial dust jacket by J. Z. Atkinson.

Nominally a sequel to White’s Earth Stopped (1934), this collection of linked stories is indeed a Sporting Decameron as the dust jacket announces above a graceful line drawing of a fox descending. There are further allusions to the book as a Sporting Decameron throughout the text, but the title page reads simply : Gone to Ground. A Novel.

White briskly and offhandedly charts a descent into global war. Just like that! A small party of foxhunters (with a gardener and an old Etonian tramp) takes refuge in a well-appointed bomb shelter, built by the suspicioously wealthy and long-lived Soapy Sponge and Facey Romford, who had absquatulated to Australia and formed a bank. Members of the party tell a succession of fantastical tales of foxhunting and fishing, channelling Surtees and Norman Douglas and M. R. James, with nods to Buchan and Dunsany and jeers at Kenneth Grahame. Gone to Ground voices many of the predilections and literary preoccupations that would occupy White throughout his career (from The Sword in Stone to The Book of Merlyn). The world outside the storytelling party is left behind.

— — —

— Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire [1962]. Vintage pbk.

— John Clute. The Book Blinders. Annals of Vandalism at the British Library: A Necrology. Illustrated throughout. Norstrilia Press, [forthcoming 2024]. [Seen in proof state].

— Kingsley Amis. Every Day Drinking. Illustrated by Merrily Harpur. Hutchinson, [1983]. Collected columns from the Daily Express, by a past master and a fun chronicler of his thirsts.
— Mark Tewfik. Gelatine Joe. Privately Printed, Lantern Rouge Press, 2024. Vignette of combat in Afghanistan, a “tissue culture” from a longer work in progress.
— Howard Waldrop. Flying Saucer Rock and Roll. Cheap Street, [2002].
— Angela Slatter. The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings. [Brain Jar Press, 2023, but POD 8 January 2024].
— Ron Weighell. The White Road. Illustrations by Nick Maloret. Ghost Story Press, 1997.
— Gary Phillips. Perdition, U.S.A. John Brown Books, [1996]. Intense, hard boiled L.A. novel, a close third person narrative of the adventures of Ivan Monk, Black businessman and private eye.

— Rex Stout. Three Men Out [1954]. A Nero Wolfe Mystery. Bantam pbk., 9th ptg.
——. A Family Affair [1975]. Introduction by Thomas Gifford. Bantam pbk., 4th ptg.
— Dorothy Sayers. Murder Must Advertise [1933]. A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery. Harper pbk.

recent reading : end of december 2023

current reading :

— Samantha Harvey. Orbital. A Novel. Grove, [December 2023].

recent reading :

— Michael Swanwick and Sean Swanwick. Father Winter. Dragonstairs Press, 2023. Edition of 120.
Five short shorts on snowy topics, including “My Dad Is an Astronaut” by Sean Swanwick.

— Arthur Machen. The House of Souls [1906]. Tartarus Press, [2021].

— Michael Cisco. Weird Fiction. A Genre Study [2021]. Palgrave Macmillan, [POD: 19 July 2023].
“The beauty and tranquillity of a place are no sign at all of safety, as might once have been true in pastoral literature.”

— Moncure Biddle. A Christmas Letter. Charles Lamb. December 25, 1938. Moncure Biddle & Co., 1938.
An old favorite, partly adapted from Hazlitt.

— Ernest Hilbert. Storm Swimmer. Winner 2022 Vasser Miller Prize in Poetry. University of North Texas Press, [2023].

a pair of Swanwicks

— Michael Swanwick. Red Fox, Blue Moon. [16] pp. Dragonstairs Press, 2023. Edition of 69 copies. Stitched in blue wrappers with a photo on front wrapper.
Another world in miniature from the deft and prolific Mr. Swanwick, a history of the Roxborough neighborhood of Philadelphia, replete with fox lore and subversive whimsy from what archy would call the “under side”.
[Swanwick is a master of the short short story and more than fifty of these have appeared in the ephemeral Dragonstairs books (the tally of fiction is more than 30 titles to date).]

— Michael Swanwick. The Best of Michael Swanwick. Volume Two. 530 pp. Subterranean Press, 2023. Edition of 1,000 copies, signed by the author. Evergreen cloth and pictorial dust jacket by Lee Moyer.
Includes the beautiful and devastating “For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again”, the oh-so-tricky homage of “The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin”, “The Beast of Tara” (“a story idea I came up with in the mid-seventies and finally wrote last year. So if you’re wondering how long it takes to write one of these things  and many other fine tales”), and many more. “Libertarian Russia” is filled with  a sense of wonder and loss and deep nostalgia and reads like a despatch from another lifetime though it dates from 2010.
[The Best of Michael Swanwick, “predecessor to the current volume” (as the jacket panel notes), was published by Subterranean in 2008 in an edition of 150 signed copies.] 

a few pamphlets (new and old)

a few pamphlets that have come across the desk of the Endless Bookshelf in recent months :

Old apple tree, old apple tree
Keep the secrets that you see

— Cardinal Cox. The Folk Show 3 : Fan Mail for a Film [Cover title]. [16] pp.  [Peterborough: Starburker Publication, 2023]. Edition of 100 copies, (to be given away at the 2023 Whittlesea Straw Bear festival*). Self-wrappers.
——. From the Hercynian Forest [Cover title]. [16] pp.  [Peterborough: Starburker Publication, 2019]. Edition of 100 copies. Self-wrappers.
——. London Particular [Cover title]. [16] pp.  [Peterborough: Starburker Publication, 2019]. Edition of 100 copies. Self-wrappers.
These three chapbooks of poems and vignettes of English folklore draw from deep wells, mixing gritty observation of daily life with literary allusion, wit, and punk pop culture tricksters. Cox, who invokes the name of John Clare more than any other living writer, I suspect, was poet-in-residence for the Dracula Society, and seems to share a fascination with The Wicker Man. These resulted in a good old fashioned ’zine exchange (I sent alonga couple of the productions of Temporary Culture).

* Plough Monday in January, “between Christmas and fen-skate party”,  is the traditional date of the Straw Bear festival, one learns from an aside in From the Hercynian Forest. This reminds me of the excellent exhibition of modern British folk art at the Barbican in May 2005, and the accompanying book, Folk Archive. Contemporary Popular Art from the UK, by Jeremy Delter and Alan Kane (Book Works, 2005), which I lent to a friend or otherwise I would do more than wonder if I can bring back some photos from the dark age and a cheap plastic cell phone, such as this label (the photograph of the object described won’t migrate) :

— — —

— [Bernadette Mayer]. Midwinter Marie. [16] pp. [James Walsh, 2023]. Second edition, one of 25 copies. Wrappers.
Selections by James Walsh from Midwinter Day (1982).

— — —

— Meghan Constantinou. The Daniel Press. Pioneer of the Private Press Movement. Illustrated. 26, [2] pp. The Grolier Club, 2021. Card covers, printed grey wrapper. Design by Kerry Kelly.
Catalogue of an exhibition of the Daniel Press, the print shop of  Charles Henry Olive Dance (1836-1919), who printed some 50 books (chiefly poetry) between 1874 and 1906, and revived an early type face (the catalogue is set in the Fell type). Daniel is described by Colin Franklin as “an independent figure, outside fashionable taste and movements”. The books are generally small and handsome, and the press  “has had a rich afterlife in multiple sense of the term”.

— — —

three black cats

— Christopher Barker. Plagiarism & Pederasty : Skeletons in the Jamesian Closet. In which the source for ‘The Ash-tree’ by Montague Rhodes James is identified. By Christopher Barker. Together with The Three Black Cats. By the Rev. A.D. Croke. Illustration of a George Cruikshank plate. Unpaginated, [28] pp. The Haunted River, 2003. Edition of 100 copies. Printed wrappers.

“The Three Black Cats” is a short antiquarian tale of horror published in 1888 in a collection of stories by A.D. Croke. Barker notes very strong similarities between the nucleus of Croke’s tale and “The Ash-tree”, which appeared in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), and takes James to task for plagiarism and hypocrisy and more..

It is sometimes fruitful to knock two ideas together to see if something new arises. Not in this instance, however. I know nothing of Barker, but this little book seethes with such resentment and outrage at the “honeyed images of the man as presented by Jamesian scholars” that a moderately interesting insight drowns under a bubbling hostility.

— — —

— Timothy d’Arch Smith. Montague Summers. A Talk. 25, [2] pp. The Tragara Press, 1984. One of 25 copies (edition of 110).
Talk presented to the Society on Montague Summers as bibliophile and aesthete.