Gothic – The Endless Bookshelf

November commonplace book

recent reading :

— Mark Valentine. The Prospero Machine and other stories. Tartarus Press, [2026].

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pictures from an exhibition :

Original autograph manuscript of Histoire d’O, from the Ludlow Santo Domingo Library

Paris Lynx, photographer. Pauline Réage masquée, prix Deux Magots à Maxim’s, 1955

— 50 Shades of Modern. Exhibition at the Houghton Library, Harvard, through 8 January 2027 (weekdays). Curated by Leslie Morris.

From the curator’s statement :

Seeking to provoke both “wow, what an amazing object” and “wow, I didn’t know Houghton collected stuff like that,” 50 Shades of Modern showcases just a few of the thousands of acquisitions Houghton’s Modern Books and Manuscripts Department has made over the past 20 years. Dating from 1800 to the present, these items show the continuities of institutional collecting ; initiatives supporting new directions in teaching and research ; and the generosity of the many donors who have helped make the collection what it is.

This is a good small exhibition, eight display cases of considerable density, and wall mounts of some choice visuals (original and reproductions). The range of materials is fascinating (and provocative as intended), from the Gothic mode of fiction and the creole poetry of Mauritius (Les essais d’un bobre africain. Petit recueil de poésies, 1822) and the first novels by African Americans to the archives of Gore Vidal and Elizabeth Wurtzel (author of Prozac Nation) and the original autograph manuscript of Histoire d’O (!) and Kampfreime (1968), a sharp artefact of the German counterculture. The exhibition labels are succinct and well written and suggest connections across time and space.

If you are in the Boston area, this exhibition will reward a visit.

Gimme Danger : Unspeakable Things by Elizabeth Hand

Gimme Danger

— Elizabeth Hand. Unspeakable Things. A Novel. Little Brown, [2026].

Unspeakable Things is a brisk, perilous walk along one of those unstable cliffs in Cornwall where the events of the novel unfold. Olivia is just eighteen and something of a tomboy living in a decaying manor where her exiled, widowed father plans a return to the West End with a production of The Tempest. She feels the first storms of her appetite for life and artistic creation ; and also the first promptings of desire when she meets a girl from the neighboring village out on the moor. Liz Hand plays with the tropes of the Gothic mode at all stages from the eighteenth-century origins to the Brontës to Rebecca and the mass-market paperback Modern Gothic. I suspect that Hand has read the essay by Joanna Russ, “Someone’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband : The Modern Gothic”.

The world of the Twenties is deftly invoked: the social upheaval and glamor, the music and fashions, the contrasts of wealth and poverty. Some boundaries have blurred in the aftermath of the War, but there is an awareness that the privileged class still operates according to laws of its own. In her Author’s Note, Hand indicates some of the histories of the interwar period she mined for the novel, which has a great epigram from Lytton Strachey : “I saw these marvelous people, they were utterly beautiful, but they had feathers where brains should be.” The long house party at Ledges, hosted by the fabulously wealthy Gabriel William Vincent (“Rex”) De Voil, is well choreographed and well catered, and all the feather-brained members of society display their multicolored plumage. The name dropping is fun.

In several novels (The Last Houseparty, A Summer in the Twenties, and Hindsight), Peter Dickinson summons dark aspects of that Jazz Age world just before he was born. In Death’s Darkest Face, Julian Symons wrote of the life and disappearance of a poet in the Thirties ; the life of his schoolboy protagonist is altered by those events. These excellent novels, however, are retrospective narrations. The hurtling, kinetic energy and atmosphere of menace of Unspeakable Things are experienced in real time. Olivia learns how the world works. She learns quickly and well.

Unspeakable Things is an excellent, transgressive book. Go read it.

How I spent my summer vacation / 2026

I. A few postcards from my recent trip to Geneva with the A.I.B.

— H.B. de Saussure, Cyanomètre, ca. 1788. Bibliothèque de Genève.

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A glimpse of the Villa Diodati, on the other side of the fence from the Parc Byron, Cologny (Geneva in the distance).

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Gérard de Nerval. Autograph manuscript poem, [Fantaisie], after 1842. The last quatrain. [Private collection.]

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The approach to the Château d’Oron.

Some of the library shelves at the Château d’Oron : a large room filled with late eighteenth-century popular literature and other books, all in impeccable original condition.

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The original book-fool.

Von buechern hab ich grossen hort
Verstand doch drynn gar wenig wort

— Sebastian Brant. Das Narrenschiff. Basel, 1494. Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire, Fribourg.

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Glimpses from the exhibition, Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse. Enquête su un roman-monde, curated by François Rosset [at the Fondation Jan Michalski, Montricher, through mid-February, 2027].

— Jan Potocki. Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse. St. Petersburg, 1805. One of three surviving copies of the first printing (the first decameron of the book).

— Jan Potocki. Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse. Manuscript page (from the version of 1810).

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H.B. de Saussure, Voyages, dans les, Alpes, 1779. Plate VIII, the view from the summit of the glacier. [Private collection.]

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Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire, Lausanne. [The library of the twenty-first century, still under construction.]

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Inscribed

— Ernst Jünger. Auf den Marmorklippen. Inscribed to Martin Bodmer, 25 September 1939. Fondation Martin Bodmer. [Snapshot under minimal light.]

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precocious children

La Musicienne, Musée d’art et d’histoire, Neuchâtel. One of three surviving programmable automata constructed by Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his son between 1768 and 1774. These were exhibited at the Spanish court and elsewhere in Europe as sales tools for the firm’s watches and clocks. The museum curator who maintains and operates stands behind l’Écrivain (the writer). The uncanny valley starts here.

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One the great delights of the trip was to see the original autograph manuscripts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries du promeneur solitaire in the Rosseau archives at the Bibliothèque de Neuchâtel, together with some of his autograph notes written on playing cards. Not one of my pictures, however, is in proper focus. Alas.

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II. The earlier part of my vacation was spent in an undisclosed location, writing, and walking.

the view from the desk

the view from one morning’s walk.

My nearest neighbors were a family of grey foxes : a vixen and at least four kits, and sometimes the dog-fox, too (I could never get everyone into a single frame).

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commonplace book : May 2024

Rhododendron Day

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‘Dosis sola facit venenum’ — Paracelsus

This is the epigraph to K. Groark’s weird and fascinating paper from the Journal of Ethnobiology (1996)

RITUAL AND THERAPEUTIC USE OF “HALLUCINOGENIC” HARVESTER ANTS (POGONOMYRMEX) IN NATIVE SOUTH-CENTRAL CALIFORNIA

This is one time where I am especially happy to read the anthropological record and not be a participant in the events reported. [via Chris Brown’s Field Notes]

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There will be an exhibition at the Grolier Club this fall, celebrating the centenary of Billy Budd (12 September to 9 November). I have just seen an advance copy of the concise, elegant catalogue, Melville’s Billy Budd at 100.

Mark your calendars.

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as Gothic as it gets

something evil flowed into the man to make him bigger : he seemed to dilate and glow with an increase of personality

— John Masefield, Sard Harker, 1924

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‘let me ride on the Wall of Death one more time’

So what does Shakespeare teach us? Nothing. His tragic theater is not a classroom. It is a fairground wall of death in which the characters are being pushed outward by the centrifugal force of the action but held in place by the friction of the language. It sucks us into its dizzying spin.

— Fintan O’Toole, No Comfort, in New York Review, 6 June 2024

recent reading : november 2021

— Roger Luckhurst. Gothic. An Illustrated History. Princeton University Press, [2021].
Massive full color account of the Gothic, as it has evolved “beyond its origins in architecture and the printed page to become fully transmedial”. The discussion of architectural gothic makes clear how utterly transgressive the literary Gothic is, right from the get go. Wendy Walker discusses this in her afterword to Sexual Stealing. In Longsword (1762), the Historical Tale starts with shipwreck, imprisonment, betrayal of trust, and the eponymous earl is reported dead by a scheming rival who seeks to marry the countess. In The Castle of Otranto (December 1764; 2nd ed., April 1765), the giant black iron helmet crashes into Prince Manfred’s orderly world, killing his heir and unfettering his desires.

— Avram Davidson. Beer! Beer! Beer! [Novato, California : Or All the Seas with Oysters Publishing, November 2021]. Pictorial wrappers with a cover drawing by Avi Katz.

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— Paul Theroux. Facing Ka‘ena Point. Privately printed [by Jesse Marsolais], 2021. 100 copies, signed by the author.

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— William Blake. Songs of Innocence and Experience with other poems. Basil Montagu Pickering, 1866

— Gilbert K. Chesterton. The Man Who Knew Too Much. Harper & Brothers, 1922.

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— Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985. Edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre. PM, [2021].

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— Brendan C. Byrne. Accelerate. [Moonachie, New Jersey : printed by Trilon Graphics for Temporary Culture and the author, 3 November 2021].
A smart, dazzling book, a hurtling cross-country drive — west to east, for a change — powered by language and attitude.

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— [Walpole, Horace]. The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story. The Second Edition. London: Printed for William Bathoe in the Strand, and Thomas Lownds in Fleet-Street, 1765.

the new route

[Walpole, Horace]. The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story. The Second Edition. London: Printed for William Bathoe in the Strand, and Thomas Lownds in Fleet-Street, 1765. ESTC T143237. Summers, A Gothic Bibliography, p. 265. Published 11 April 1765 (500 copies).

title page of the second edition of The Castle of Otranto : the first to call itself A Gothic Story

from the OED :

definition of the Gothic in the OED

Labels and categories are invariably assigned retrospectively, for the authors are walking into new territory. The first of the “Gothic tales”, Thomas Leland’s Longsword (1762), has the subtitle, An Historical Romance. The title page of the first edition of Otranto (published in December 1764) reads: The Castle of Otranto, A Story Translated by William Marshall, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto.

The Gothic was in the air, hence the new subtitle for the second edition, naming the craze which spread across Europe for the next sixty years. The second edition also includes a preface by Walpole discussing some of his aims :

it was an attempt to blend the two kinds of Romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former, all was imagination and improbability : in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes is, copied with success. [. . .] The actions, sentiments, conversations, of the heroes and heroines of ancient days were as unnatural as the machines employed to put them in motion.
The author of the following pages thought it possible to reconcile the two kinds. Desirous of leaving the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the bundles realms of invention, and thence of creating more interesting situations, he wished to conduct the mortal agents in his drama according to the rules of probability ; in short, to make them think, speak and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women might do in extraordinary positions. He had observed, that in all inspired writings, the personages under the dispensation of miracles and witnesses to the most stupendous phenomena, never lose sight of their human character ; whereas in the productions of romantic story, an improbable event never fails to be attended by an absurd dialogue. [. . .] As the public have applauded the attempt, the author must not say he was entirely unequal to the task he had undertaken : yet if the new route he has struck out shall have paved a road for men of brighter talents, he shall own with pleasure and modesty, that he was sensible the plan was capable of receiving greater embellishments than his imagination or the conduct of the passions could bestow on it.

To which one might add: and women of brighter talents, too : for later authors in the Gothic include Anne Radcliffe and Mary Shelley.

commonplace book

‘Pardon this intrusion’

The Richard Manney copy of the first edition of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) in original boards sold at Christie’s last month for more than a million dollars. It is remarkable to see Mary Shelley’s book in original condition. I have seen two others: a beautiful, tragic smoke-stained wreck (since rebound), and a fabulous copy in pink boards (the lottery of the binder’s stock of materials) in the Pforzheimer collection at the New York Public Library, exhibited there in 2012 along with the presentation copy to Lord Byron. When I looked at the Manney copy before the auction, I turned to a certain page (not the first time I have done so). This is the page, deep in the story, where we hear the first words spoken aloud by the monster:

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even the spadgers go back to London when the ’op pickin’s over

a remark from the mouth of Magersfontein Lugg
in Margery Allingham’s Dancers in Mourning

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never one to claim that his goose was his swan

— Robert Aickman

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Getting rid of “Tom Lecky” allowed the work to be free to play and experiment without the burden of attribution.

— Tom Lecky, interviewed by Kim Beil for Bomb

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In a totally unrelated field, one in which the writer had gained some international recognition, he had discovered that through the long years of activity, experimentation and study, the further one progressed from the status of the beginner to that of the “expert” (horrid word!), the less one was able to recall the outlook and needs of the beginner. [. . .] Briefly, he had become a specialist — to his great detriment, in many ways.

— Eugene V. Connett

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