libraries – The Endless Bookshelf

recent reading : november 2024

— Romance in the Library. The Romance Novel in English. Gallery Guide. [Cover title]. Illustrated. [64] pp. The Lilly Library, [2024].
Curated by Rebecca Baumann, this remarkable exhibition, Romance in the Library, likely the first of its kind, charts a revisionist history of English literature, with emphasis on women as readers of novels from the eighteenth century to the present, and claims an oft-scorned modern-day marketing genre construct — the romance novel — as a badge of honor. In the heyday of the gothic, which included the sentimental as well as the historical and supernatural, writing novels was an economic activity open to women even while the reading of them by women (especially young women) was viewed as unsuitable. Baumann’s retrospective claim is an assertion that works pretty well, but one has to abandon one’s preconceptions to find more than superficial kinship between The Wild Irish Girl or Pride and Prejudice and modern formula fiction. The shift from novels aimed at a genteel readership to a vast popular appetite for novels of romantic entertainment is rooted in greater educational opportunities for women at all economic levels and the nineteenth-century achievement of near universal literacy. A welcome and provocative exhibition.
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) is in original boards, untrimmed. The stylish yellow and red dust jacket* for Boy Crazy by Grace Perkins (1931) is spectacular (and it’s inscribed to Upton Sinclair)! I wish I had taken a picture.
[lightly edited for clarity 16 Nov.]
* here’s an image of another copy of the book :

Grace Perkins. Boy Crazy, 1931. Dust jacket by WJH. Courtesy of Long Bros., Seattle.

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— Kasper van Ommen. Joseph Scaliger. His Oriental library, and the meaning of scholarship. [Cover title]. Illustrated. Brill, [n.d.].
——. Josephus Justus Scaliger. Sieerad van de Academie. Ornament of the Academy. [Cover title]. Text in Dutch and English. Illustrated. [Universiteit Leiden, 2020].
Two illustrated monographs on the great sixteenth-century polyglot and polymath Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609).

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— The Dagon Collection. Auction Catalogue of Items Recovered in the Federal Raid on Innsmouth, Mass. Edited by Nate Pedersen. Cataloguing by Rebecca Baumann, with assistance from Jonathan Kearns. Illustrations by Liv Rainey-Smith and Eduardo Valdés-Hevia. Layout and Design by Andrew Leman. [PS Publishing, January 2024].
A catalogue of imaginary objects, rigorously described, with their history in vignettes by a wide variety post-Lovecraftian authors. Lot 13, The Geometry of Nowhere, is a dizzying book ; and lot 33, the Tiffany Lamp, is an unsettling piece.

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— Michael Connelly. City of Bones. Dennis McMillan, 2002.

recent reading : late september 2024

— Kasper van Ommen. “The Einstein of the sixteenth century”, in : Books That Made History. 26 Books from Leiden That Changed the World. Edited by Kasper van Ommen and Geert Verhoeven. [Translated by Claire and Mike Wilkinson]. Brill, 2022.
Excellent essay on J. J. Scaliger (1540-1609), polyglot scholar of classical and near eastern languages, whose Opus de emendatione temporum (1598) integrated astronomy and history from Jewish, Babylonian, Persian and Egyptian sources as well as Greek and Roman works ; “he also incorporated the latest astronomical understandings of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) and Tycho Brahe (1546-1601)”. Scaliger came to Leiden University with his library in 1593; it soon grew, and has been kept there ever since. Your correspondent is the lowest amateur polyglot in the presence of such erudition; there were some remarkable books on view during a visit last week (including a presentation inscribed from Brahe to Scaliger).
A summary note on Scaliger’s career by van Ommen on the University website (Dutch for ‘grouch’ is brompot), Josephus Scaliger : famous scholar and grouch

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— Janwillem van de Wetering. Hard Rain [1986]. Soho paperback, [1997].
Had to pick this one up again, an old favorite by an old friend, for a re-read now that I have been to Amsterdam, and have walked and bicycled along the canals and into the Amsterdamse Bos. It was a Depression-era landscaping project around the Olympic rowing basin of 1928 and is now a mature city forest and a green lung in the midst of a densely populated zone.

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— Heather Swan. Where the Grass Still Signs. Stories of Insects and Interconnection. Pennsylvania State University Press, [2024].
Memoir and travelogue on insects and landscapes from the rural midwest to Colombia and Ecuador, richly illustrated with works by contemporary artists. Seen in the window of Architectura & Natura, an inviting bookshop on Leliegracht in Amsterdam.

— Christian de Pange. Le Bréviare du Quintivir. Une enquête bibliographique en Franche-Comté. [Lusove: Imprimerie de Bacchus] Pour la Société des Bibliophiles Francois, 2022.
Bibliographical account of a private social club in Vesoul in rural France at the turn of the nineteenth century, and their festive book, printed circa 1813 for the five members. The bibliographer has traced three copies to the present day; a fourth copy was last seen in 1896. Edition of 100 copies, from the author.

— Choosing Vincent. From family collection to Van Gogh Museum. Lisa Smith and Hans Luijten (eds.). Van Gogh Museum / Thoth Publishers, [2023].

— Emile Schriver and Heide Warncke. 18 highlights from Ets Haim, the oldest Jewish library in the world. Walburg Pers, [2016].
Illustrated selection of books and manuscripts from the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam (founded 1616).

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— Avram Davidson and Grania Davis. A Goat for Azazel. [Afterword by Michael Swanwick]. Dragonstairs Press, forthcoming 5 September 2024. Edition of 80 copies, stitched in mourning lacework paper wrappers, signed by Swanwick.
Reproduces the text of a proposal for an Eszterhazy “ghost novel” (circa 1993 or 1994), with a note by Michael Swanwick, whose friendship back then encouraged my researches and the formation of the Avram Davidson website.

— Nancy Isenberg. White Trash. The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. [With a new preface to the paperback edition]. Penguin, [2017].
The persistence of early modern English hierarchies and economic structures from the earliest beginnings of the enterprise. Dispossession, servitude, and the upward concentration of wealth.

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Arthur Machen, Eleusinia, 1881

Arthur Machen’s first book, Eleusinia, by a former member of H. C. S., is a sequence of poems celebrating pre-Christian mysteries in the Athens of the young author’s imagination. The pamphlet was printed in Hereford in 1881, and is known from one copy preserved at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. The copy is from the collection of Charles Parsons (Yale class of 1912), who was one of the lenders to the Harry Marks exhibition in 1923. Eleusinia was not, however, exhibited in 1923, for at the time it was still in the author’s possession. But by 1926 his circumstances had changed, and when it happened that one of the American collectors with whom Machen had been corresponding was visiting London, Machen agreed to receive him and to sell his copy of Eleusinia. The picture above shows the pastedown with the Charles Parsons ’12 gift bookplate, and above it is the signature of Arthur Machen’s father John Edward Jones Machen, M.A., Llanthewy Rectory, 1881. Machen’s father paid for the printing of the book, and in his copy he pasted a clipping, a tactful, encouraging press notice, identified as by “Lewis Sergeant Esqre in Hereford Times”. Lewis Sergeant (1841-1902) was a journalist and author and a close friend of the Machen family ; Machen stayed in his house in Turnham Green when he first came up to London. On the flyleaf opposite is the author the inscription at the time of the sale, “For Charles Parsons from Arthur Machen, Melina Place, London, June 26th 1926”. Parsons saved his correspondence with Machen, and the receipt (shown below) is preserved in the files at Beinecke (Gen MSS 256, Box 1 folder 3).

Eleusinia is fully digitized and available here : https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/10516628

Nearly a hundred years on, the copy at Beinecke is still the only known copy of the book : a typescript at Brigham Young and a manuscript at HRC are fair copies prepared at the behest of Fytton Armstrong ; Princeton and Stanford appear to have photostats or photocopies of the Yale copy. I am very pleased to have been able to examine this book, and acknowledge the courtesies extended to me on my visit.

Moby-Dick and American Literature of the Fantastic ; or, Bound for the South Seas

Moby-Dick and American Literature of the Fantastic ; or, Bound for the South Seas

Prologue

This is a crackpot theory with a kernel of truth. It requires some minimal familiarity with the works of H. P. Lovecraft and Herman Melville. It took shape as I re-read Moby-Dick for the first time in decades in January 2016, and I expounded it at the California Antiquarian Book Fair in February 2016, to my friend Bill Reese, a supreme Melville collector and the greatest Americana dealer of his generation. Great reader though Bill was, he had never read any H. P. Lovecraft and so he greeted my geste with a glazed look that means, as any performer will attest, you have lost your audience. On another occasion, an eminent Melville scholar responded with a Jupiterian frostiness. So you have been warned. I performed early versions of it with impromptu embellishments a few times in the interim in bar-rooms and one evening on the patio at Readercon in Quincy, Mass., for Jim Morrow and a few others, in July 2017. This final text was read at Readercon in July 2023. As you will see later, it is necessary to give this chronology.

[All citations from Moby-Dick are to the University of California paperback with the illustrations from the Barry Moser Arion Press edition.]

Moby-Dick and American Literature of the Fantastic ; or, Bound for the South Seas

Ernest Hemingway was only half-right : American literature springs from one book, but that book is Moby-Dick (1851).

Melville gives for the first time voices to the voiceless, to those who had heretofore been mere furniture of narrative. It is Tashtego, the “unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of Martha’s Vineyard” (122), who first names the object of the Pequod’s quest :

“Captain Ahab,” said Tashtego, “that white whale must be the same that some call Moby Dick.” (166)

The cabin boy Pip dances at midnight in the forecastle until a squall arrives and the “jollies” are sent aloft to reef the topsails. “It’s worse than being in the whirled woods, the last day of the year! Who’d go climbing after chestnuts now? But there they go, all cursing, and here I don’t.” (179)

Stubbs berates the elderly Fleece for overcooking his whale-steak and bids him preach to the sharks worrying the carcass alongside the ship. Fleece concludes with a mutter, “I’m bressed if he aint more shark than Massa Shark himself.” (306)

Moby-Dick also marks the point where English poetry becomes American literature. To take three examples, here is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” transformed :

An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea. (320)

Melville had earlier named Coleridge and the albatross to assert Nature’s precedence over the English poet. (191)

Chapter 93, the episode of Pip’s loss overboard, takes its title from William Cowper’s poem of madness, “The Cast-away”, and its substance from these verses : “We perish’d, each alone: / But I beneath a rougher sea, / And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.”

By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him [. . .] Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. (424)

And, of course, it is the “Sea-change / Into Something Rich and Strange” from Ariel’s song in The Tempest, that echoes in Ahab’s words :

This is a pine tree. My father, in old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver ring in it [. . .] when they come to fish up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! (445)

So far so good, nothing extraordinary or particularly new about these citations. They are excellent passages. Moby-Dick is also a great and influential novel of cosmic horror.

III

To go ahead for a moment. The revival of interest in Melville during the 1920s is well documented, including a standard edition of his works, and the discovery of the manuscript of Billy Budd (first published in 1924). In France, Jean Giono read Melville and began a translation of Moby-Dick into French, eventually issued in 1939. When the translation was to be reprinted by Gallimard, Giono declined to write the biography his publishers wanted and instead produced a remarkable fantasia, Pour saluer Melville (Paris: Gallimard, 1941). It is a fictional interlude during Melville’s visit to England in 1849 that bears directly upon the impulse leading Melville to write Moby-Dick. Giono evokes a continual struggle within Melville :

Depuis quinze mois qu’il est dans le large des eaux, il se bat avec l’ange. Il est dans une grande nuit de Jacob et l’aube ne vient pas. Des ailes terriblement dures le frappent, le soulèvent au-dessus du monde, le précipitent, le resaisissent et l’étouffent. Il n’a pas cessé un seul instant d’être obligé à la bataille [. . .] s’il saute dans la balinière, s’il chevauche des orages de fer [. . .] il se bat avec l’ange. (38)

Melville’s unceasing fight with the angel, in the momentous night of Jacob where dawn does not come, is Ahab’s struggle. Ahab can recall the domestic joys and tenderness of fatherhood, but once the Pequod sails he is intent and unwavering in his quest of the supramundane real, that which is beyond the barrier. He tells Starbuck :

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by striking through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. (168).

And elsewhere :

How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; and standing there in thy spite? (480-1).

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a native-born Rhode Islander, a cosmic materialist by philosophical inclination, and a writer of fantastic fiction. He lived for some years in exile in New York City. In August 1925, Lovecraft wrote down the plot outline for a story based on a dream from years before, and recasting an earlier tale.

In early 1925 Lovecraft dwelt in an apartment house in Brooklyn, and a neighbor was George W. Kirk, whom he had known since 1922. Kirk was a bookseller who later owned the Chelsea Book Shop on West 8th street in Manhattan. Sometime in the middle 1920s, Kirk gave a copy of Moby-Dick to Lovecraft, who recorded the gift on the book’s fly leaf, and signed his name: H. P. Lovecraft, Esq., Providence, Rhode-Island.

I have examined that copy at the American Antiquarian Society. It has Lovecraft’s fine fanlight window bookplate and bears a pencil accession note on the pastedown: Purchase S. Clyde King, Jr. Aug 8 ’41. (Lovecraft’s Library was dispersed after his death; King was a Providence bookseller). Moby-Dick was rediscovered at A.A.S. in November 2017 (note that date) during a shelf read in the stacks. The book is otherwise unmarked. And yet, and yet.

“Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons.” (483). In this passage from chapter 109 of Moby-Dick, I hear the origins of a phrase in a later story of Lovecraft’s describing terrible events in rural Massachusetts, “The Dunwich Horror” (written 1928 and published 1929): “some day yew folks’ll hear a child o’ Lavinny’s a-calling its father’s name on the top of Sentinel Hill” (in Tales. New York: Library of America, 2005, page 375).

The horror in question is one of a pair of twins conceived by Lavinia Whateley in congress with Yog-Sothoth, an interdimensional being. Wilbur Whateley, uncouth and stinking, took after his human parent. The other twin did not.

After his return to Providence in April 1926, Lovecraft eventually completed the story he outlined a year earlier. “The Call of Cthulhu” was published in Weird Tales in early 1928. It is a globe-spanning tale of malign influences, primitive cults, and the resurgence of an ancient extraterrestrial being, Cthulhu (pronounced “khlul’-hloo”). In the subsequent decades, Cthulhu has stepped out of the pages of Lovecraft’s story and, like Mary Shelley’s monster, taken on a life of its own.

And so to the next step, the ambiguity of pronouns: “There she blows!” Invariably, throughout Moby-Dick. Elsewhere whales are “he”, grammatically male by default, as buttressed by Melville’s cetology and lore of the sperm whale fishery. And yet.

Moby-Dick is the intrusion of these terrible interdimensional forces into the ordinary. So ordinary cetology does not apply, and the white whale is a she-whale. In his last speech, Ahab proclaims, “Toward thee I roll [. . .] still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale!” (574-5).

The fated rendez-vous is a hot date in the South Seas : Cthulhu is the spawn of Ahab and Moby-Dick.

Q.E.D.

Author’s Note:

I had written an early version of this essay in the summer of 2017; and then in December 2017, I learned that the American Antiquarian Society holds H. P. Lovecraft’s copy of Moby-Dick (an edition published in Boston after Melville’s death: the copyright notice is in his widow’s name).

Moby Dick or The White Whale / by Herman Melville author of “Typee,” “Omoo,” “White Jacket,” etc.
Boston : Dana Estes & Company publishers, [1892]. American Antiquarian Society copy has bookplate of H.P. Lovecraft. Inscribed: From George Willard Kirk, Esq. H.P. Lovecraft, Esq., Providence, Rhode-Island. Catalog Record #144128.
https://catalog.mwa.org/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=144128

They wrote about the discovery:

14 November 2017

Fun fact: AAS has a copy of Moby Dick once owned by H. P. Lovecraft! A source of inspiration for him, perhaps?

Fun fact: AAS has a copy of Moby Dick once owned by H.P. Lovecraft! A source of inspiration for him, perhaps? https://t.co/EvvOFf98mk https://t.co/u0UqBHUJIZ

— American Antiquarian Society (@AmAntiquarian) November 14, 2017

It’s a nice-looking copy too! [with illustrations]

It's a nice-looking copy too! pic.twitter.com/yDbm4xeLmw

— American Antiquarian Society (@AmAntiquarian) November 14, 2017

Jean Giono. Pour saluer Melville. Paris: Gallimard, 1941. The passage cited above is from p. 38:

For the fifteen months since he has been at sea, he has been fighting with the angel. It is for him the momentous night of Jacob and the dawn does not come. Hard terrifying wings strike him, raise him above the world, tumble him, seize him again, and smother him. Not for a single instant has the struggle relinquished him. [. . .] when he jumps in the whale-boat, when he rides iron storms [. . .] he is fighting with the angel.

[This is my own translation; in the fall of 2017 (!) it was issued as a NYRB Classics paperback in an English translation by Paul Eprile.]

For George Kirk, see S. T. Joshi & D. E. Schultz, An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia (Greenwood, 2001; Hippocampus Press, 2004), pp. 137-8.

Moby-Dick was not listed in the first two editions of S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft’s Library (Necronomicon Press, 1980; Hippocampus, 2002), but is recorded as item 651 in the fourth edition (Hippocampus, 2017), “Gift of George Kirk,” with citations to Lovecraft’s letters and essays.

The Book Blinders by John Clute

Millions More Missing

— John Clute. The Book Blinders. Annals of Vandalism at the British Library: A Necrology. Illustrated throughout. 499, [1, errata] pp. Norstrilia Press, [2024].

There has been a steady production of scholarship on the history of the publisher’s dust jacket in the past fifty years. These ephemeral pieces of paper encode all manner of information about the moment in time and both how publishers perceived their wares and how they wanted the reading and book-buying public to receive the newly published books. Much emphasis has been on nineteenth-century jackets in recent research, including in G. Thomas Tanselle’s Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use (2011), which updates work he first published in 1971, and Mark Godburn’s Nineteenth-Century Dust-Jackets (2016). And yet it is really in the early twentieth century that jackets proliferate and assume the form and function we now understand. Vast conceptual leaps in design and presentation of information occur in the interval between The Wind in the Willows (1908) and What Not (1918/1919) or In Our Time and The Great Gatsby (both 1925). And yet this is not solely the province of literary high spots. Across all types of literature, the dust jacket functions as the outer face of the book. Clute’s title, The Book Blinders, is descriptive of the practical effect for the reader of a long-standing institutional policy of discarding dust jackets or separating the jacket from the book and storing them elsewhere, uncatalogued. This policy prevailed at the British Museum (later British Library) and at other depository libraries from the emergence of the dust jacket and continued for most of the twentieth century. With more than 100 examples of dust jackets not in BL (from the years of the first world war through 1990), John Clute documents the importance of the dust jacket and considers the implications of this vandalism from within. How about these three or four: Rose Macaulay, What Not (1918), a tale of eugenics and privilege, suppression of a libellous passage delaying actual publication until 1919 (Clute’s copy is Michael Sadleir’s own, saved from the memory hole); C. E. M. Joad, Priscilla and Charybdis (1924), “undeterred by the gruelling wordplay of the title, [I] took a look, and found found this this on pages 206-207; a seductive Joad-like protagonist is addressing a young woman on a train ride they are sharing: ‘Darling [he purrs], have you ever travelled without a ticket?’” (this one alone is worth the price of admission); or Ezra Pound, Make It New (1934):

Faber (which is to say Eliot) clearly thought it sagacious to wrap in sheep’s clothing the already notorious Ezra Pound’s new publication with its incendiary title: a ticking bomb that needed no bush. But the underlying message cannot be missed: Pound’s title, a modernist wake-up slogan he’d been using offhandedly since 1928, is manifestly inflammatory, once grasped; a challenge to his various enemies who (he maintains) clog the literature pews: an up-yours bombination clearly audible through the enfant-sauvage mask Pound wore until it was too late. This bomb needed to slip through the gates before exploding.

or Robert Graves, The White Goddess (1948), Tom Eliot again; or Lawrence Leonard, The Horn of Mortal Danger (1980); or London Tales (1983), edited by Julian Evans. Clute’s selections are fascinating testimony to the breadth of his reading and collecting and his critical range; the text sparkles with his crunchy and apt vocabulary. It seems almost a homoeopathic distillation: “I’d reckon that out of every 8,000 or so books to arrive at the British Library complete with dust-jacket, I’ve commented here on a maximum of one”. (Excessive candor moment: John Clute is a friend of more than twenty-five years; I am the source for the images of the only jacket not from his own collection.) This is an important book.

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Addendum (3 May): I wrote the notice above after reading digital proofs of the book. Today I have a copy in hand (a print on demand product manufactured in Tennessee on 19 April), and it is nice to see the book in the wild. In the U.S. the book is available from bookshop.org and elsewhere. Oh, yes : The Book Blinders is issued with a dust jacket (designed by Judith Clute). Here is the back panel :

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

Utopia & Uchronia

— [Charles Renouvier]. Uchronie (L’Utopie dans l’Histoire). Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, tel qu’il aurait pu être. Paris : Bureau de la Critique philosophique, 1876.

A recent glimpse of a copy of Uchronie prompted me to start reading this landmark of speculative history. It’s a tricky book, a work of ideas that employs several layers of apparent estrangement devices (somewhat like the original Castle Rackrent). I will report further.

I saw Uchronie in a display case not far from a nice copy of Utopia (Louvain, 1516) in La science-fiction à la Sorbonne, an exhibition at the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de la Sorbonne. Truth be told, the BIS copy of Uchronie is a little nicer than the one I’m reading :

The exhibition, which had just opened, is part of an ongoing Année de la science-fiction and is on view in the salle Jacqueline-de-Romilly (BIS, 17 rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris) through 20 December. Non-university folks must register to visit, details here : http://www.bis-sorbonne.fr/biu/spip.php?rubrique537 . There are author events announced through March 2024 and joint initiatives with the scholarly journal ReS Futurae.

The exhibition, which includes books from More’s Utopia through contemporary paperbacks of French science fiction and works in translation, with an interesting visual component. The case of early works contains these:

Also of note was a bibliographical item : Régis Messac. Esquisse d’une chrono-bibliographie des utopies. Lausanne : Club Futopia, 2962 (sic). The title page carries an epigraph from Leconte de Lisle : “Ton coeur est dévoré d’un songe indestructible”.

The checklist of the displays of more recent books in the reading room is available here : https://www.calameo.com/read/005807300bb9b578a61e7

P.S. Glare from the overhead lights meant I couldn’t take a picture of the BIS Utopia, but here is a snapshot of the copy at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal :

Borges

The work of Jorge Luis Borges has always been a touchstone for me: the concision and entanglement of his fictions and artifices and inquisitions are a source of great pleasure and inspiration. I am pleased to report that James Cummins Bookseller catalogue 145, Jorge Luis Borges, is ready, describing more than 400 items from the private collection of Gary Oleson, proprietor with Franny Ness of Waiting for Godot Books in Hadley, Massachusetts. Waiting for Godot were long- time specialists in twentieth century literature (among many other fields), including Latin American authors, and Oleson began buying Borges material in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The collection includes books owned by Borges, manuscripts of essays and stories, autograph notes, photographs, inscribed books, and a comprehensive group of books, periodical appearances, ephemera, and secondary literature. The cover illustrates a book by Capt. Marryat, signed by Borges at age 11, 25, 33, and 42, and with the ownership signature of his English-born great aunt, who taught him English

As with the writings of Borges, patterns and connections reveal themselves across the pages of the catalogue, which is published on the occasion of a Borges centenary, the hundredth anniversary of the publication of his first book of poems, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923). [HWW]

Catalogue 145, Jorge Luis Borges is in two sections, an illustrated catalogue of 130 items, and a descriptive listing of 275 items. A printed catalogue is available, and many items will be on display at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair 27-30 April at the Park Avenue Armory, in the Cummins booth A1. Your correspondent will be there, come say hello.

how I spent my summer vacation (part two)

view of Vesuvius and the Golfo di Napoli from the walls of Castel del Ovo

Publication day for NAPLES by Avram Davidson, 11 September in Castel del Ovo, Napoli

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the view from the top : Vesuvius at far left horizon, Sorrento uplands, Capri (click for larger image)

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Mandrakes, in Dioscorides (ca. 590), Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, Ms. Vind. Gr. 1

Dante Alighieri, La Commedia, [Napoli 12 IV 1477], Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli

P. Francesco Lana, La Nave volante, dissertazione, [S.l., s.d., post 1470], Biblioteca dei Girolamini Coll. C F 3 19

Giacomo Leopardi, manuscript poem, L’Infinito, (1819), Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, M.S. C.L. XIII.22

decorative initial (white vine), in Museo Diocesano Salerno MS.9

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throne with mermaids and gryphons, Reggia Caserte

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fascio ti sfascio, graffiti, Salerno

fascio ti sfascio : the writing on the wall, Salerno

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recent reading (march through august 2022)

current reading :

— Marcel Proust. La Prisonnière [1923]. À la recherche du temps perdu III. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. [still climbing the mountain].

— R.B. Russell. Fifty Forgotten Books. Sheffield : And Other Stories, [forthcoming, 13 September 2022].

recent reading :

— Marcel Proust. Sodome et Gomorrhe [1921-2]. À la recherche du temps perdu III. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
This was tough going at times, but there was always a remarkable passage or narrative surprise to quicken interest — and what a crack of the whip at end, rooted in earliest beginnings.

Deep in volume III of the Pléiade edition, an aside points ahead to something I should perhaps have inferred and now the full arc of this whiny wallowing hilarious satiric narration comes clear. Proust is sufficient argument against fleeting worries over “spoilers”. He gives the game away himself a few times (from the outset, in fact); but more importantly, reading Proust affirms that literature is experiential. The dance of words performs itself upon the page and in the reader’s awareness, each time new, or else it’s nothing.

— — —

— Tom Lecky. Quarrying [Cover title]. One story and fifteen photographs. Understory Books, [2021]. Edition of 100 copies.

The story, “A Walk”, is subtle and minimalist, oblique and suggestive of the long consequences of family traumas.

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— Ivy Compton-Burnett. Manservant and Maidservant. Gollancz, [1947]. Late Victorian household drama, in the conversations of a family and their servants, on the surface a very small world but the novel presents, unspoken but apparent, a dispassionate and clear-eyed indictment of the British class system and economic structure. An unexpected pleasure.

— The Herman Melville Collection of William S. Reese. Christie’s, [August 2022]. Illustrated auction catalogue, 100 lots, including many rarities, up at auction on 14 September.

— Ngaio Marsh. Night at the Vulcan [1951]. Pyramid Books, [Second printing, December 1974].

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— Robert Scoble. Raven. The Turbulent World of Baron Corvo. Strange Attractor Press, 2013.
— —. The Corvo Cult. The History of an Obsession. Strange Attractor Press, 2014.
Two well written, engaging, and thoroughly documented overviews of the Frederick Rolfe phenomenon: the people surrounding him and the evolution of the cult of the author.

— Guy Davenport. The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard [1967]. [Jordan Davies, 1982].
. . . and everyone is there, in this kinetic Blakean procession, to be animated from Stanley Spencer’s giant painting .

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— Eileen Gunn. Night Shift plus Usual and the Author plus Promised Land and much more. PM Press, [2022].
A volume in the excellent Outspoken Authors series, with Terry Bisson’s interview of Eileen Gunn, “I Did, and I Didn’t, and I Won’t”, including this observation about an early job as a advertising copywriter :
“They taught me how to understand subjects I’d never studied and how to work with capitalists without becoming one.”

— Julian Symons. The Immaterial Murder Case [1945]. Penguin Books, [1954].

— Corina Bardoff. Food Restrictions. 2020.
Nimble, funny, literate Oulipian explorations of food and words. [Gift of WW].

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— Michael Swanwick and Gardner Dozois. In His Own Words. Dragonstairs, [2022]. Edition of 60 copies.
Legendary editor Gardner Dozois interviewed by his friend.

— — —

— Elizabeth Hand. Hokuloa Road. Mulholland Books. Little, Brown, [2022]. Another unsettling and gripping book, and a new place in our psychic geography (just maybe you can get there from Kamensic). This reader trusts Elizabeth Hand with his life and readerly attention, and is always rewarded Wherever her books lead, the narrative path is fascinating and the destination is beautiful and often frightening : that is to say, the classical elements of the sublime. Also notable for having a decent working class guy as protagonist.

— Undefined Boundary. The Journal of Psychick Albion. Volume One / Issue One. Edited by Cormac Pentecost. Temporal Boundary Press, 2022.
Reading this, one has the sense that somehow England will find a way through the present mess.

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— Alice Elliott Dark. Fellowship Point. A Novel. Mary Sue Rucci Books | Scribner, [2022].
Rich, beautiful exploration of friendship, place, and time (the Maine setting is deeply rooted), with turns and surprises worthy of Dickens ; a notable feminist interrogation of privilege and expectations.

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— John Clute. Sticking to the End. Beccon, 2022.

Essays and addresses, with book reviews from Strange Horizons and New York Review of Science Fiction; memorials of Gene Wolfe, David G Hartwell; and more.

— Hervé Le Tellier. L’Anomalie. Roman. NRF Gallimard, [2020].

Science fiction à l’Oulipo, witty and nimble.

— — —

—[Margaret Cavendish,] Duchess of Newcastle. The Description of a New World called the Blazing World. 1666.

— — —

— Mark Valentine. The Fig Garden and other stories. Tartarus, [2022].

Excellent new collection, with several original stories.

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— Nicholas Daly. Ruritania. A Cultural History, from The Prisoner of Zenda to The Princess Diaries. Oxford University Press, [2020].

Interesting fun, with some odd gaps or omissions (such as John Buchan’s The House of the Four Winds and Avram Davidson’s Doctor Eszterhazy stories).

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— Marius Kociejowski. A Factotum in the Book Trade. A Memoir. Biblioasis, [2022].
When the Romanian singer started in on « Un dimanche après la fin du monde » I was engaged ; and then the first pages of Chapter 13, The Man Collecting Names is a remarkable sequence of reflections. [Gift of DS].

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

Read with great interest, Wilson is excellent on Lamb’s connections to the main literary figures of the day (Coleridge, Wordsworth, and others), and on the tragedies of his life.
[Bought in March but misshelved and only found in early June.]

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— Michael Swanwick. The Once and Future Rye. The Whiskey That Was America. [At head of title:] The Proceedings of the American Martini Institute. A Report of the American Martini Laboratory. [Dragonstairs, 21 May 2022]. Edition of 80 copies.

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— Christelle Téa. Bibliothèques. Dessins 2018-2021. Librarie Métamorphoses, [2022]. Exhibition catalogue, with introduction by Michel Scognamillo, “Christelle Téa, ou la stratégie de l’araignée”.
/ above : in the Bibliothèque Mazarine

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— This World and That Other. [Stories by] John Howard [and] Mark Valentine. Sarob Press, 2022.

— Algernon Blackwood. The Lure of the Unknown. Essays on the Strange. [Edited with an introduction by Mike Ashley]. Swan River Press, 2022.
Collection of nearly two dozen essays, talks, and vignettes about the uncanny, spanning almost the entire career of supernatural writer Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). The earliest, “The Psychology of Places” (Westminster Gazette, 30 April 1910), seems almost a gloss on his story “The Willows”; the majority of the pieces are from the late 1940s and were often delivered as radio or television broadcasts. Ashley notes Blackwood’s general reticence about any of his own psychic experiences. The essays “collected here reveal his views on the world and the occult, show his diverse reading and experiences, and his appreciation of the experiences of others.”

— Bruce Barker-Benfield. The Glossed Luke with the Letter A. A manuscript from St. Augustine’s Abbey Canterbury with an essay on the binding by Andrew Honey and an introduction by William Zachs. Blackie House, 2020.
Illustrated history of a notable twelfth-century manuscript Gospel which survives in its original binding.

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— Mark Tewfik. The Pirate King. Illustrated by Josh Grotto. Full color illustrations throughout. [40] pp. Chicago : Lanterne Rouge Press, 2022. Edition of 100 copies.
The text of The Pirate King resembles a children’s bedtime tale, while the collage illustrations suggest a very different story. A remarkable tension arises between the visual and verbal references.