commonplace book – The Endless Bookshelf

commonplace book : december 2025

— Raymond Chandler. Killer in the Rain. With an introduction by Philip Durham. [1964]. Ballantine Books, [1972].
This book collects eight early pulp stories Chandler which had refused to reprint in his lifetime, because he had “cannibalized” them and transformed the raw material into the substance of three novels : The Big Sleep ; Farewell, My Lovely ; and The Lady in the Lake. Reading it was an education and single dose corrective to prose excesses rooted in obsessive teenage readings of H. P. Lovecraft. This copy, bought for 50 cents at the State Street Book Mart, a paper back exchange shop in New Orleans, has stuck with me for many years.

After re-reading parts of MacShane’s Life of Chandler, I pulled down Killer in the Rain to look at some of the stories, and it will not survive this reading. I will save the browned flyleaf and title page for a bookmark in a copy of the original Houghton Mifflin printing I bought last month : so I still havea copy of Killer in the Rain ; and I will wait for a stormy day to say farewell to Killer in the Rain in the rain ; but the small gap on the paperback shelf will stay open for a time.

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from the Epigrammata of Martialis (Epigrams of Martial)

Lucanus
Sint quidam qui me dicunt non esse poetam :
Sed qui me vendit bibliopola putat.

Lucan
[Some say I am no poet : but the bibliopole* sells me as one]

* – bookseller, for you moderns, sez Old ‘Pole

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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- and late november 2025

recent reading :

Mélissa Bonin, Un jardin après la mousson, 2011

journey into metaphor
— Mélissa Bonin. Lorsque les Bayous Parlent. When Bayous Speak. Poésies et Peintures. [2023]. Bilingual illustrated collection of evocative « voyages» into the bayou as “métaphore de la vie et du féminin”.

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— Thomas Pynchon. Shadow Ticket. Penguin Press, 2025.

‘an outward and visible expression of paths not taken, personal and historical’

The first hundred so pages are dazzling paranoid fun set in end of Prohibition Milwaukee, with zany incidents and songs and gross-out confections and drinks. After Hicks McTaggart is encouraged to leave town for New York City and then fed a Mickey Finn and loaded aboard a transatlantic steamer, the pyrotechnics continue. The transition from Tangier to a Budapest-bound train is abrupt and, a bit cheesy at times, the book wobbles for a few a pages before returning to the deftly choreographed espionage play of language and fashion and color along the Danube. Plus a Moto Guzzi with a side-car, vacuum tubes, a theremin sextet, paranormal incidents, philately, Versailles-compliant golems, atrocious acronyms, and more.

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— Frank Macshane. The Life of Raymond Chandler [1976]. Hamish Hamilton, [1986].
Excellent and sympathetic chronicle of Chandler and his struggle to get his novels written to his satisfaction. Plucked off the shelf to look up a date, gripped immediately and anew by the way MacShane allows Chandler’s own words (letters, essays, etc.) to tell the story. Chandler on style is not that far removed from Ruskin.

— 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.

— — —

— 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].

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commonplace book :

from The Deep Blue Good-By (1964) by John D. MacDonald, a list poem, with attitude (line breaks added) :

And I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary of them. And I am wary
of a lot of other things,
such as
plastic credit cards,
payroll deductions,
insurance programs,
retirement benefits,
savings accounts,
Green Stamps,
time clocks,
newspapers,
mortgages,
sermons,
miracle fabrics,
deodorants,
check lists,
time payments,
political parties,
lending libraries,
television,
actresses,
junior chambers of commerce,
pageants,
progress,
and manifest destiny.
I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.

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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.

— — —

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

— — —

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

— — —

“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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”

september : Copenhagen, recent reading, &c

It’s September again, and the annual congress of the Association internationale de bibliophile (A.I.B.) will be held in Copenhagen 7-14 September. I am looking forward to the gathering, in particular the chance to see the Arnamagnæan manuscripts at the university of Copenhagen. And the surprises to be encountered in a city I’ve never before visited.

Watercolor of Greenland winter scene, ca. 1860, from an album presented to Danish King Frederik VII

Watercolor scenes of Greenland, ca. 1860, from an album presented to Danish King Frederik VII [in the King’s Reference Library].

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On the island near the Opera House, Copenhagen.

view of the Opera House from the Amaliaborg Palace

View of the Opera House from the Amalienborg Palace.

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Arne Jacobsen and Flemming Lassen. The House of the Future. [Copenhagen, 1929]. Drawing at the Royal Library in the Skatte / Treasures exhibition

The House of the Future. [Copenhagen, 1929]. Drawing by Arne Jacobsen and Flemming Lassen, at the Royal Library in the Skatte / Treasures exhibition.

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the view from the hill, easy nature at Louisiana, Denmark

The view from the hill, at Louisiana (Sweden on the distant shore).
/ file under : easy nature

Alexander Calder at Louisiana, Denmark

Alexander Calder at Louisiana.

Richard Serra at Louisiana, Denmark

Richard Serra at Louisiana.

A.I.B. Copenhagen : book fair in Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek

A.I.B. Copenhagen : book fair in Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek this morning

A.I.B. Copenhagen : book fair in Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotheket

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current reading :

— 66 [Sixty-six] Manuscripts from the Arnamagnæan Collection. Edited by Matthew James Driscoll [and] Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir. Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, [2015].
Illustrated commentary and discussion of selected manuscripts collected by Icelander Árni Magnússon in the late seventeenth and earliest eighteenth century : the wellspring of Icelandic literature, and of mediaeval Danish and Icelandic history and culture.

— Christopher Moore. Anima Rising. A Novel. William Morrow, [2025].

recent reading :

— Michael Innes. Appleby on Ararat (1941). Penguin Books, [1961].

— Michael Innes. Appleby at Allington [1968]. Penguin Books, [1970].
It was, Appleby reflected uncharitably, the successful Englishman’s chosen route to going soft.

A Chapin Centenary, Michael Innes, & others : recent reading mid-august 2025

recent reading :

— 100 Years 100 Voices. The Chapin Library. [Edited by Anne Peale.] Williams College, [2025].
A beautiful and richly illustrated celebratory catalogue, presenting selected items from the Chapin Library at Williams College, established with gifts from Alfred C. Chapin in 1923. Chapin had been buying very good and interesting books from the best dealers for nearly a decade before the initial gift, and the collection has grown since, through purchase and donation. The Chapin Library had a dynamic founding librarian, Lucy Eugenia Osborne, and has always functioned as a teaching library for undergraduate instruction. This intention shines through in this anthology. The collection ranges from European incunables and an Eliot Indian Bible (1663) to an Audubon Birds of America purchased from James Drake, from a miniature printing press owned by John Fast to a recent risograph artist book (and four copies of the 1855 Leaves of Grass). The short pieces about the books are by alumni (long gone and recent), past and present curators and librarians, faculty members, and others. The photographs, by Nicole Neenan, are nicely reproduced. This is an important publication, a concise and compelling testimony about why books and libraries are central to education.

— — —

— Timothy d’Arch Smith. The Stammering Librarian. [Strange Attractor, 2024]
I am delighted to have come across this collection of essays by bookseller, novelist, and bibliographer Timothy d’Arch Smith, whose novel Alembic (1992) appears in my Grolier Club exhibition checklist. The title essay and one or two of the other pieces link up directly to the concerns of his excellent memoir of bookselling in London in the 1960s, The Times Deceas’d (2003). There are memoirs of persons real and imaginary, including The Rev. T. Hartington Quince M.A., a Nicholas Jenkins / Anthony Powell pastiche now first published for a wider audience, though the British Library entry for the original appearance (in an edition of 15 copies in 1991, shelfmark YA.1992.b.6526), records Nicholas Jenkins as a “creator” ! Cricket, novelist Julia Frankau, school slang, and Aleister Crowley are other topics.

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Over the next several weeks it will become ever clearer that I have embarked upon reading Michael Innes, whose wordplay and inventiveness are a pleasure. John Clute alerted me to The Secret Vanguard, and Mark Valentine lists Appleby’s End among his short list of Finest Quality Old English Yarns. I am enjoying the variety of this box of mostly tatty paperbacks — after reading a POD edition of The Secret Vanguard I decided that I am happier with a worn paperback — and I will eventually do something than merely extract interesting phrases.

— Michael Innes. Stop Press [1939]. Penguin Books, [1958].

——The Gay Phoenix. A Novel [1976]. Book Club Associates, [1976].

——. Hare sitting up [1959]. Penguin Books, [1964].

Jean turned and faced him. ‘Could you possibly,’ she said, ‘cut the cackle? And tell me what all this is about?’

——. Appleby’s End [1946]. Penguin Books, [1972].

Abbott’s Yatter, King’s Yatter, Drool, Linger Junction, Sleeps Hill, Boxer’s Bottom, Sneak, Snarl, Appleby’s End, Dream

‘Mister,’ he said heavily, ‘did ’ee ever see a saw ?’

— — —

— Michael Zinman. The Critical Mess. [Privately printed], 2025.
Compendium of articles by and about legendary collector of Americana Michael Zinman, whose “critical mess” theory is trickier than a casual glance might suggest :

“If you have enough stuff, good and not so good, you see things that someone collecting only fine copies will miss. This doesn’t in any way cast aspersion on the collector who desires the finest copy of a work, it’s just another way of approaching this world.”

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recent reading : early august 2025

recent reading :

— Raymond Sokolov. Wayward Reporter. The life of A. J. Liebling. Harper & Row, [1980].

— R. B. Russell. T. Lobsang Rampa and Other Characters of Questionable Faith. Tartarus Press, [2025].

— E. F. Benson. Visible and Invisible. Hutchinson, [1923]. Collection of a dozen uncanny stories. The publisher’s catalogue (dated Autumn 2023) at the back lists this under new fiction : “Between our own and the other world lies a borderland of shadows, which eyes that can pierce the material plane may sometimes see.” Benson’s father (died 1896) was the late Victorian Archbishop of Canterbury ; his siblings were all very talented and eccentric. “Mrs. Amworth” is a nasty village vampire tale, deftly told.
In a centenary essay at Wormwoodiana, Mark Valentine notes Benson’s “sardonic glee in the macabre.” http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2023/10/borderland-shadows-centenary-of-visible.html

— John Kessel. The Presidential Papers plus Imagining the Human Future : Up, Down, or Sideways plus The Last American and much more. PM Press, 2019. Outspoken Authors 31.
Includes “The Franchise” and Terry Bisson’s interview, and other satirical pieces. I saw John briefly at Readercon and he inscribed this “Critical of every president . . .”

— Paul Park. A City Made of Words plus Climate Change plus A Resistance to Theory and much more. PM Press, 2019. Outspoken Authors 23.
“A Conversation with the Author” and “A Resistance to Theory” are profoundly disquieting stories.

— A Soliloquy for Pan. Edited by Mark Beech. 372, [2] pp. Egaeus Press, 2025. Second edition (originally published 2015), with additional illustrations, adding one story, “The Game of the Great God Pan” by Benjamin Tweddell.

— Mark Samuels. Black Altars [2003]. Illustrations by Joseph Dawson. Zagava, 2025. Pictorial cloth. Elegant large format edition (12 x 7-1/2 inches) of this collection of six stories, a delight to hold in the hand and read.

— M. P. Dare. Unholy Relics. Edward Arnold, [1947] .
Collection of ghost stories in the tradition, though the plots are a bit coarser than anything from the pen of M.R. James ; and an exemplary work of literary misogyny couched in chivalrous postures. In that respect, Benson (see above) ain’t bad, neither.

commonplace book : July 2025

1852 / 2025

Frederick Douglass, Oration, 1852

“There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.”

— Frederick Douglass. Oration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester [. . .] July 5th, 1852. Published by Request. Rochester : Printed by Lee, Mann & Co, 1852.
The single most persuasive reminder that there is more than one history of America.

James Earl Jones performed the Oration, here :

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/7/4/what_to_the_slave_is_the

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“To live in luxury that does not belong to you is not to live in luxury at all. You realize you are an attribute of the luxury, not meant to luxuriate, meant instead to shine bright and cold like a diamond . . .”

— Corina Bardoff, “Barbara Blue”, in : North Anerican Review 310:2 (Summer 2025)

Bardoff’s story is winner of the Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction prize for 2025.
A nimble, tricky tale, integrating style & content : all the thousand scraps that Aimee has stitched together to craft something new that “Judith” can inhabit for a time before shedding it. There are some excellent tiny brilliants scattered along the way : there is no brother coming to the rescue (explicit from the beginning) ; and Bardoff diagnoses the pathology in calling a girl a girl past a certain age. I love the off-cadence heart / earth / hearth play in the central protective rhyme. This is even more transformative than Angela Carter, very finely done.

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in today’s mail (5 July)

— Mark Valentine. Borderlands and Otherworlds. Tartarus Press, [2025].
Collection of 32 essays on books and reading, with an emphasis on the fantastic and supernatural in the interwar years and into the 1950s. The original edition has sold out but a paperback is reported in production.

recent reading :

— Michael Innes. The Secret Vanguard [1940]. An Inspector Appleby Mystery. Open Road Integrated Media, [POD 30 June 2025].
“For an artist has a right to work with quotations if they are his medium, and daisies and buttercups which were not these flowers purely but these flowers plus a little Cowper and a little Crabbe . . .”

— Sylvia Townsend Warner. Kingdoms of Elfin [1977]. Foreword by Greer Gilman with an Introduction by Ingrid Hotz-Davies. Handheld Press, [2018].
/ re-read, with delight

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

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.