simply messing about in books
On Monday 22 April, I will be reading a couple of poems as part of the Earth Day celebrations at the Elizabeth Street Garden, downtown In NYC. Walk, bike, or take public transportation, and join us there.
https://www.elizabethstreetgarden.com/calendar/2024/4/4/earth-day-celebration
Today marks seventeen years of reports of messing about in books under the sign of the Endless Bookshelf. I’m still at it, and glad to be reading and thinking about books, and occasionally writing or publishing them. What a delight to discover new books and writers or to find that a book published a century ago is fresh and nimble. I have a few essays in the works, either scheduled for publication or due this spring, and other things in progress. To my few readers, it is always a delight to hear from you, keep sending me your news.
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current reading :
— Marcel Proust. Le temps retrouvé [1927].
— Herman Melville. Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces. Constable, 1924. This was Melville’s last book, unpublished at the time of his death and closely connected to his book of verse, John Marr and other sailors (1888). Billy Budd grew out of a note to “Billy in the Darbies”, the poem that concludes the book. The manuscript re-emerged in the early 1920s and first published by Constable as vol. 13 in the Standard Edition of the Works, a landmark in the rediscovery of Melville. There will be an exhibition on Billy Budd and Melville at the Grolier Club in September and I am celebrating the centenary by reading the book. For now:
In this matter of writing, resolve as one may to keep to the main path, some by-paths have an enticement not readily to be withstood. Beckoned by the genius of Nelson I am going to err into such a by-path. If the reader will keep me company I shall be glad.
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[In September 2023, I left Twitter after nearly 15 years of marginal glosses and other ephemeral notes. I don’t miss it for an instant, though I do remember the days when it was a fun mode of quick communication. I post occasional announcements at @endlessbookshelf@mastodon.iriseden.eu and send out semi-annual newsletters.]
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recent reading :
— Marcel Proust. Albertine disparue [1925].
— Michael Swanwick. Phases of the Sun [bound with:] Phases of the Moon. Dragonstairs Press, 2020 [i.e., 2024]. Text printed dos à dos, leporello binding of yellow and blue boards. Edition of 19. Swanwick at his bleakest and most romantic in these two sequences of short short stories about writing and love.
— Howard Waldrop. The Ugly Chickens. [Old Earth Books, 2009].
— Ron Weighell. The Mark of Andreas Germer. Quire 13. The Last Press, 2022. Edition of 100. Original short yarn from the estate of Ron Weighell (1950-2020), moving nimbly from a thoughtful citation of Milton to the tale of a book with a dreadful effect upon its reader.
— Arthur Machen. The Three Impostors or the Transmutations [1895], in The House of Souls. Tartarus Press, [2021].
— Samantha Harvey. Orbital. A Novel. Grove, [December 2023].
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I am looking forward to receiving the Conway Miscellany, a collection of four books by John Crowley from Ninepin Press in varying formats, comprising: The Sixties, A Forged Diary; Seventy-Nine Dreams; Two Talks on Writing; and Two Chapters in a Family Chronicle.
In Memoriam : Howard Waldrop
Howard Waldrop (1946-2024) was an American national treasure, author of many memorable stories and novellas, among them “Winter Quarters”, “Heart of Whitenesse”, and The Ugly Chickens. If you don’t know his work, you have some strange delights ahead. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is always a good place to start:
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/waldrop_howard
Lawrence Person wrote a brief and oddly touching memorial note, here.
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— Dylan Thomas, from “In my craft or sullen art”, in Twenty-Six Poems :
[. . .]
Not for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
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Sidney Sime Exhibition
A major exhibition of the work of Sidney Sime, (from the artist’s collection and archive at the Memorial Hall in Worplesdon, Surrey) is being held at the Chris Beetles Gallery in London, with an excellent digital simulacrum for those of us who won’t be in London before 27 January
(via Mark Valentine’s Wormwoodiana)
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In Memoriam : Tom Purdom
Michael Swanwick wrote a heartfelt farewell to his friend “Tom Purdom, Heart of Philadelphia”, here.
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from the latest number of the Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. LXXX, no. 1 (Autumn- Winter 2023) :
— Stephen Ferguson, “Rare Books at Princeton, 1873-1941”
It was not self-evident that the American colleges of the nineteenth century would become collectors of book rarities, any more than it was self-evident that they would become universities, build football stadiums, and create an education eagerly sought worldwide. But the various decisions that resulted in these choices have much to do with one another — even when each leads down a path that appears to diverge widely from the others.
— Alfred L. Bush, “How Empty Shelves in Firestone Ultimately Revealed America’s Earliest Book”
“But with the determination of the ignorant . . .”
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In Memoriam : Terry Bisson
Even now, in remembering Terry Bisson (1942-2024), I can’t help but smile. It’s a sad smile today, but Terry was one whom I always remember with a smile on his face. I encountered his work with Talking Man, one of the great short American novels of a fantastical, mysterious South; and then I started reading some of his fine short stories. He and Alice Turner founded the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series now conducted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel. Terry Bisson also founded the PM Press Outspoken Authors series of interviews. Trickster Michael Swanwick recalls “Three Things You Must Know about Terry Bisson”.
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“The Black Lands”, published in Exacting Clam 10 (Autumn 2023), will be reprinted in the issue of the Book Collector for summer 2024.
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I came across a beautiful literary ’zine from the Last Press, Quire, issue 19 (2023) of which is a separate edition of a Mark Valentine story, “Qx”, as a finely printed trifold sheet. Quire 13(2022) is The Mark of Andreas Germer by Ron Weighell, a special Christmas ghost story edition about the perils of reading. It’s a twelve-page chapbook with an engraving by Ladislav Hanks. No. 15 (2023) is The Visit, a story by Maureen Aitken (below). Production values are very high, and print runs small, so have a look, here.
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This time next week (Monday 22 February), your correspondent will be at the ABAA Bibliography Week Showcase, a small book fair held at the Alliance Française on east 60th street in New York City, details here :
https://www.abaa.org/events/details/bibliography-week-showcase
(free & open to the public, come say hello at the Cummins table)
And not long after that, in San Francisco at the California International Antiquarian Book Fair, 9-11 February. Come say hello (Cummins booth 105).
Four copies of the Incunabula edition of Little, Big by John Crowley, hand bound by an old friend for the author, artist, publisher, and one other. The special binding was commissioned to honor a pledge made long ago, and also as a gesture to mark the many hours of readerly delight that the book has given me (see here, 2001; here, 2007; an entire chapter in my Conversation, 2018; or here, 2021). John Crowley is also a friend of many years, and so it is a pleasure to know that the author’s copy — note the discreet initials at the foot of the spine — had reached him well in advance of today, this his eighty-first birthday.
Happy Birthday and all good wishes to John Crowley !
W. B. Yeats. The Wind among the Reeds, 1903. One of a few copies in a special vellum binding.
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an example of the bookplate of H. P. Lovecraft (designed by Wilfred Talman, 1927).
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Francis Grose. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785. The author’s interleaved copy, with his additions for the second edition. Now at the Lilly Library, Indiana University.
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Charles Baudelaire. Manuscript essay on Edgar Allan Poe, as an introduction to Révélation magnétique, the first story by Poe translated by Baudelaire, 5 pages, Paris, 1848. Now at Firestone Library, Princeton University.
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Cyril Connolly, The Modern Movement (1965), author photo by Otto Karminski. What is going on here?
a few snapshots of Paris and a very, very restrained selection of objects seen
The Endless Bookshelf will be filing occasional despatches from Paris during annual congrès of the Association internationale de bibliophilie (AIB), and may lapse into French on occasion
[from an earlier visit, the mural of the reader, by Ferdinand Humbert, in the Petit Palais]
— Charles Dantzig. Encyclopédie capricieuse du tout et du rien. Grasset, [2009].
And, soon after arriving in a rooftop apartment in the 4e, well, yes, of course I opened this book, to this page (252), in the Listes des personnes [list of persons]
in today’s mail :
— Joanne McNeil. Wrong Way. [x], 272, [3] pp. MCD x FSG Originals [forthcoming, November 2023]. “Preview edition”.
/ so psyched to receive this (long anticipated) book for review ; I loved McNeil’s Lurking (2020) and can’t wait to read this ! Nice cover design (by Abby Kagan?). Review TK
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— An Appointment with the Wicker Man. The 50th Anniversary May Day, 2023. Compiled by Adam Newell. Frontispiece by Sharon Gosling, illustrated throughout. [20] pp. The Avellenau Press, 2023. Edition of 100.
Visual record of a May Day bonfire at Burrow Head in Scotland and the burning of a new Wicker Man created by local artist Amanda Sunderland ; with a beautiful Lallans poem, The Borrowing Days, by Amy Rafferty
‘bold an rowdy as whittericks’
/ file under : British Folk Art
/ learned of this via Mark Valentine’s Wormwoodiana, and acted promptly to order ; it has since sold out
/ let us agree that The Wicker Man is one of those films which may serve as a litmus test . . . of something
“happy as always in the faculty of finding infinity round the corner of any street, within five minutes of anywhere”
— Arthur Machen, The London Adventure (1924)
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On Defining Genre
The problem with defining a genre — science fiction, for example, or fantasy — is that once you’ve declared what it is, you’ve also declared what it can’t be. And if it can’t be anything but what it has already been, it’s of no interest to any serious artist.
— Michael Swanwick, Brief Essays on Genre (2023)
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“de la doctrine des hommes comme de l’eau, qui n’est iamais plus belle, plus claire & plus nette qu’à sa source”
— Gabriel Naudé, Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (1627)
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“But I knew that I always enjoyed looking back on things more than actually doing them.”
— George Sims, The Terrible Door (1964)
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