Category: commonplace book

commonplace book : january 2025

early in January, and it is already a good year in books, having just received two long-awaited titles in this week’s mailbag

Billy Budd at 100 (continued)

— Herman Melville. Billy Budd. A Centennial Edition with Fourteen Illustrations Cut in Wood by Barry Moser.  Pennyroyal Press, 2024. Edition of 50 copies signed by the artist.
A spectacular new large format edition of Billy Budd Sailor (An Inside Narrative) — as the half-title names the book. The text of the novella is set from the Melville Electronic Library, with original woodcuts by American master Barry Moser.

 

— — —

a Tim Young trifecta

— Timothy Young. Isness & Aboutness. Thoughts on Bibliography. Publication Studio, 2024.
With two single sheet ’zines, printed rectos only :
— 10 Reasons Libraries Matter, 2021.
— 10 Reasons Books Matter, [2015].

Isness & Aboutness is a really great essay on thinking about books and thinking about the world (it is the text of Tim’s Sandars lecture at Cambridge University in November). He cites Donald McKenzie to good effect, on bibliography as

the only discipline which has consistently studied the composition, formal design, and transmission of texts by writers, printers, and publishers; their distribution through different communities by wholesalers, retailers, and teachers; their collection and classification by librarians; their meaning for, and — I must add — their creative regeneration by, readers [. . .] no part of that series of human and institutional interactions is alien to bibliography

His essay moves beyond McKenzie’s assertion to identify new modes of bibliography and to assert the primacy of bibliography as a means of uncovering what books are and what they do in the world. Highly recommended.

— — —

snow day, 11 January 2025

— — —

 

great blue heron flying low over the silvered mere
alighting on the ice beside a stand of reeds
in the distance, the pulaski skyway

/ from the train window this morning [16 January]

/ file under : extreme commute

— — —

 

man about town

poet Adrian Dannatt gestures after signing a copy of his collection of poetry, Capacity for Loss. It's a pretty good book

— Adrian Dannatt. Capacity for Loss. [Opium Books, 2024]. Edition of 300.  Yellow cloth, dust jacket with illustration, Gaia, from the painting by Danny Moynihan.
Author Adrian Dannatt, debonair man about many towns, is seen in mid-gesture above, just a few minutes ago at the publishing party for the launch of his collection of poems, Capacity for Loss, at Nathalie Karg Gallery, amid an installation of Danny Moynihan’s paintings.
Danny Moynihan paintings at Nathalie Karg Gallery

— — —

‘Sard Harker by John Masefield’ is an essay published for the centenary of this adventure novel set in Santa Barbara, most leeward of the sugar countries of South America, now up on Wormwoodiana. It is set in a South America of abandoned villages and mysterious temples, a land of adventure and visions, a paradise of metaphor and simile.

— — —

Your correspondent will be at the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair, Friday through Sunday 8-10 November, at the Hynes Convention Center (Cummins booth 514). Come say hello. I will have copies of The Private Life of Books and others available.

— — —

wish I were there : in the mission district

‘A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container’

snapshots from a recent Futurefarmers event, on a quiet street in the Mission district in San Francisco, wish I were there

with artist Michael Swaine, well known to readers of the ’shelf as one of the instigators of the Weedwalk in San Francisco, an informal botanizing ramble, which included two memorable Book Walks, in 2007 and 2009.

The Tom La Farge Award, Friday 11 October

Readers of the ’shelf and friends in the New York area are invited to an event and presentation, this year honoring PEDRO PONCE, the winner of the Second Tom La Farge Award for Innovative Writing, Teaching and Publishing

It will be held on Friday 11 October 2024, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., at the Ground Floor Gallery of the Grolier Club, 47 East 60th St..(between Madison and Park aves.), NYC, NY 10022.

Pedro will be interviewed, discuss the writing of Tom La Farge, and read from his own work.

This annual award in the amount of $10,000 is designed to encourage and foster literary activity that combines serious play, imagination, erudition and innovative practice. To learn more about the Tom La Farge Award :

https://www.thetomlafargeaward.com/

Refreshments will be served and the doors open at 6:30 pm. 

The event is free and open to the public but seating is limited so please RSVP to : Wendy Walker, wwalker377@gmail.com 

We look forward to sharing an evening of wonderful writing with you!

Wendy Walker
& the Tom La Farge Committee :
Corina Bardoff
Daniel Levin Becker
Sam Goodman
Michael Kowalski
Eliza Martin
Philip Ording

posted on behalf of the Committee by

Henry Wessells

commonplace book : early October 2024

 

fall feuilleton

fall feuilleton, part two

— — —

“oscillating revisions”
— John Bryant, on certain passages in the fluid text of Melville’s Billy Budd

— — —

the view from the hammock

— — —

“You can’t always count on  / things opening up for you / Know when to let go / learn how to fall.”
— “Skydiving”, Ishmael Reed, from Conjure, in a reading with Allen Ginsberg at the Library of Congress 29 April 1974

— — —

“Writing within conventions of language, and of genre, is like swimming in society rather than in a pond under a waterfall.”
— William S. Wilson

— — —

The illusion grew more perfect the closer to the trees he went. Now the needles seemed almost to be suggesting the grain of polished wood. It was the way they alternated colors and shades, darker green above lighter above darker, a random pattern solidifying into the whorls on a slab of monkeywood.
It was the door to his bedroom.

— Peter Straub. Ghost Story [1979]

— — —

 

dateline : Amsterdam

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

— — —

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].