commonplace book – Page 3 – The Endless Bookshelf

Little, Bigs

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 !

commonplace book : fall 2023

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?

commonplace book : how I spent my summer vacation

a few snapshots of Paris and a very, very restrained selection of objects seen

Allée Arthur Rimbaud (13e), near the BnF François Mitterand

garden beside the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal (4e)

in the Salle Clemenceau, where the Treaty of Versailles was signed (1919)

self-portrait of Baudelaire, in Poulet-Malassis’ extra-illustrated copy of Souvenirs (1872), Bibl. de l’Institut, ms. Lov. D 655 bis

Padeloup binding (before 1727), Petit Palais, coll. Dutuit, LDUT 544

reader’s chair, in the library of the duc d’Aumale at Chantilly

dateline : Paris

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

the reader

[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]

mail bag : late summer 2023

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

commonplace book — late spring 2023

“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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Hazelnut cake for the Avram Davidson Centenary Garden Party

Rhododendron Day 2023

sixteen years of the Endless Bookshelf

24 January 2023

Today marks sixteen years of the Endless Bookshelf, and the past year was an eventful one to be “simply messing about in books”. To have played a part in the long history of The Book of Ryhmes (1829) by Charlotte Brontë, now at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, was a signal delight. It was a good year to be a reader, too.

The Endless Bookshelf book of the year, The Silverberg Business by Robert Freeman Wexler (Small Beer Press, 2022), is a work that affirms the utility and possibility of fiction, and it’s a weird, fascinating story.

There were plenty of other recent books of note:

— John Crowley. Flint and Mirror. Tor, [2022]. Reviewed here.

— Alice Elliott Dark. Fellowship Point. A Novel. Mary Sue Rucci Books | Scribner, [2022]. Noted here.

— Elizabeth Hand. Hokuloa Road. Mulholland Books. Little, Brown, [2022]. Noted here.

— R. B. Russell. Robert Aickman. An Attempted Biography. Tartarus, [2022].

— R. B. Russell. Fifty Forgotten Books. With numerous illustrations. 255 pp. Sheffield : And Other Stories, 2022. Reviewed here.

— Christelle Téa. Bibliothèques. Dessins 2018-2021. Librarie Métamorphoses, [2022]. Exhibition catalogue.

— Mark Valentine. The Fig Garden and other stories. Tartarus, [2022]. An excellent new collection, with several original stories.

— David R. Whitesell. A Curator’s Wunderkammer. A Decade of Collecting for the University of Virginia. Exhibition Catalog. [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Library], 2022. Reviewed here.

— Eric G. Wilson. Dream Child. A Life of Charles Lamb. Yale University Press, [2022].

— Paul Witcover. Lincolnstein. A Novel. [Hornsea:] PS, [2021]. Reviewed here.

I found one antiquarian title I had been seeking for many years :

— F. & E. Brett Young. Undergrowth [1913]. Cassell, [Popular Edition, 1925].

Reviewed here.

Your correspondent is an optimist by temperament and looks forward to what the year ahead will bring. I’m still working my way through Proust in the Pléiade edition, with pleasure. I lost momentum during the crazy, circling jealousies of La prisonnière, which rewards with flashes of humor (and the short sudden passage on the heat death of the universe); I am currently at the stage of Albertine disparue. A few pieces of writing are forthcoming in the Book Collector and elsewhere, and others are in progress on the desk. 23 April 2023 is the centenary of the birth of Avram Davidson.

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In February, I expect to be at the California International Antiquarian Book Fair in Pasadena, booth 514 (James Cummins Bookseller) at the Oakland Marriott City Center, Friday 10 February through Sunday 12 February. If you are in the vicinity, come by and say hello (and please let me know in advance if you would like a pass). I will have a handful of Temporary Culture publications on the booth.

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commonplace book – autumn 2022

‘beyond realistic description’

Cologne by J.M. W. Turner

“His experiments in watercolour and rapid adoption of the new, glaring pigments of chrome yellow, chrome orange and pale lemon chrome had brightened his palette. He had already given ordinary subjects a sense of the sublime through dramatic lighting — the fishermen cleaning and selling fish in the National Gallery’s ‘Sun Rising Through Vapour’, for example. But from the 1820s, his high key colour and transparent, luminous effects began to push beyond realistic description.”

— Jackie Wullschläger
reviewing an exhibition of J. M.W. Turner in the Financial Times

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‘in a tête-à-tête there is no shuffling’

— from The Charles Lamb Day Book

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‘publishing as the last refuge of the grasshopper mind’ — David R. Godine

David R. Godine in mid-tale, at a celebration of the publisher and his fabulous memoir, Godine at Fifty, in NYC 26 October.

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“What is the Midwest, after all, but a long, straight superhighway to the past, a place where suicidal farmers and homicidal cops and polite fanatics in dad pants are phantasms of the frontier’s original settlers?”

— Caroline Fraser,
on My Three Dads by Jessa Crispin in the New York Review of Books

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“neat, nasty, and natural as breath. They come from all over the country and they write all over the universe, just as if it was their own private subway and the guards had all gone home.”

— Chip Delany
from the jacket copy for the Mirrorshades anthology, 1986

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L’émotion dont je me sentais saisi en apercevant la fille d’un marchand de vins à sa caisse ou une blanchisseuse causant dans la rue était l’émotion qu’on a à reconnaître des Déesses. Depuis que l’Olympe n’existe plus, ses habitants vivent sur la terre.

— Marcel Proust

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“. . . and some things you can only think of in the dark”

— F. & E. Brett Young, Undergrowth

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Workers lose out