— R. B. Russell. Bibliomancy and Other Essays. Illustrated. [xii], 369 pp. Tartarus Press, [2026].
Collection of essays and reminiscences about books and writers and collecting, including Arthur Machen, Robert Aickman, the Sarban papers, on publishing the first edition of a work by Charlotte Brontë, and Barry Humphries.
recent reading :
— Larry McMurtry. Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Reflections at Sixty and Beyond. Simon and Schuster, [1999].
But the problem with reading lists, even one as intelligent as Cyril Connolly’s The Modern Movement, is that they are all in a sense dead letters, guides for the unadventurous, those without the time or the ambition to hunt around and make discoveries for themselves. The great readers will always know about books that neither the marketplace nor the academy has got around to.
McMurtry, novelist and screenwriter whose writing career was sustained by his other life as book scout and antiquarian bookman, here expresses ever so clearly the unvoiced contempt some booksellers have for their customers. In 1999, McMurtry opened Booked Up in Archer City, Texas. It was his book town, a contrarian and rearguard enterprise in defiance of the internet that endured for several years. I have few regrets, but one of them is that I never made it to Archer City, or to the auction when the books were dispersed. This is the punchiest of his memoirs.
——. Books. A Memoir. Simon and Schuster, [2008].
——. Literary Life. A Second Memoir. Simon and Schuster, [2009].
——. Hollywood. A Third Memoir. Simon and Schuster, [2010].
These three entertaining memoirs cover some of the same ground as the earlier book, in chapters short enough to be aphorisms, and there is some inevitable tangling when the lines of his life refuse to conform with categories (and some repetition). McMurtry’s forebears were cattle ranchers ; his clear-eyed recognition of himself as a rancher of words and books is an excellent metaphor.
— George Sims. The Terrible Door. The Bodley Head, [1964].
An engaging novel of death and the antiquarian bookseller, with plot devices suggestive of the trade in Baron Corvo. The death is an antiquarian bookseller run down by a motorcycle in suspicious circumstances ; his inventory (some letters he once owned) is, for a time, the plot engine. Sims was a very good writer.
current reading :
— Marcel Proust. Albertine disparue (1925) & Le temps retrouvé (1927). À la recherche du temps perdu IV. Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
— M. John Harrison. Wish I Was Here. An Anti-Memoir. [Serpent’s Tail, 2023]. Signed by the author 23 May 2023. [Gift of MLV].
— — —
recent reading :
— S. Barkworth. The Nijmegen Proof. Holmes Publishing Co., 1988.
— George Sims. The Terrible Door. The Bodley Head, [1964].
— —. The Last Best Friend [1967]. Carroll & Graf pbk., [1988].
— —. Hunters Point. Gollancz, 1973.
— —. The End of the Web. Gollancz, 1976.
— —. The Keys of Death. Macmillan, [1982].
George Sims (1923-1999) was an antiquarian bookseller, specialist in literature and literary manuscripts, and author of The Rare Book Game (1985), a memoir in the form of essays, and its several sequels. His crime novels are full of the most granular detail of the byways of London in the early 1960s, and Hunters Point is partly set in a San Francisco observed with similar care. Sims was a long-time friend of Julian Symons (I have his Death’s Darkest Face inscribed to Sims), which sparked my interest. H. R. F. Keating included The Last Best Friend in his Crime & Mystery The 100 Best Books and noted that the “exactitude of the poet” and “peripheral elaborations” are “simultaneously his triumph and something like his downfall” and mark him as an amateur writer. Sometimes the digressions are the voyage.
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— Robert Sheckley. The Game of X [1965]. Jonathan Cape, [1966]. Excellent send-up of the espionage genre and a love letter to the city of Venice, with Sheckley’s characteristic wit bubbling up at odd moments and with perfect timing.
— —. Crompton Divided. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, [1978]. Scent and memory and an interplanetary question for personal integration made literal. Expanded from an early novella, “Join Now” or “The Humors”, with a cock-eyed nod to Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”.
— — —
— Julian Symons. The Man Who Killed Himself. The Crime Club, Collins, 1967.
— —. The Man Who Lost His Wife. The Crime Club, Collins, 1970.
— —. The Players and the Game. The Crime Club, Collins, 1972
— —. The Detling Murders. Collins, 1982. The Detling Secret. Viking. 1983.
— —. Something like a Love Affair. Macmillan, 1992.
I have long enjoyed the crime novels of Julian Symons which also serve as examinations of middle-class British life. I had read one or two of these a long time ago, and re-reading them was as interesting as charting new territory.
— — —
Dorothy L. Sayers. Clouds of Witness [1927]. Bourbon Street Books paperback.
— —. Strong Poison [1930]. Bourbon Street Books paperback.
— —. Gaudy Night. Gollancz, [1936].
— —. Busman’s Honeymoon [1937]. Bourbon Street Books paperback.
— James Clarke. Sanderson’s Isle. Serpent’s Tail, [2023].
— — —
— Arthur Machen. Far Off Things. Martin Secker, [1922].
— —. The London Adventure. Martin Secker, [1924].
— Iain Sinclair. Agents of Oblivion. Swan River Press, 2023.
Four short stories on Blackwood, Machen, Ballard, Lovecraft.
— Paul McAuley. Fairyland [1995]. Gollancz SF Masterworks paperback.
— Avram Davidson. AD100. 100 years of Avram Davidson. 100 Unpublished or Uncollected Stories. Volume I [II]. [xii], 635, [9]; [xii], 548, [8] pp. [Or All the Seas With Oysters, 2023].
A monumental collection of tales, for the Avram Davidson centenary!
— Nicola Upson. Nine Lessons [2017]. Faber pbk., [2021]. Crime story rooted in adolescent privilege, with reference to the ghost stories of M. R. James.
— Mark Valentine. The Peacock Escritoire with At Dusk. Tartarus Press, [2023].
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— Herman Melville. Moby-Dick ; or, The Whale. University of California Press, [1981]. Illustrations by Barry Moser. California edition, reproduced from the Arion Press edition.
— Ling Ma. Bliss Montage. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [2022]. Winner of the Story Prize.
— Janwillem van de Wetering. The Japanese Corpse [1977]. Soho paperback, [1996].
— Michael Swanwick. Transits of Venus. Dragonstairs, 2023.
— — —
— Lord Dunsany. Lost Tales Volume VI. Illustrations by S. H. Sime. [Foreword by Randall, baron Dunsany]. Pegana Press, 2022 [i.e., 2023].
Finely printed collection of 7 stories, including an unpublished Jorkens yarn! Concluding a decade-long project, the first volume of which was the Endless Bookshelf book of the year in 2012.
— John Crowley. Little, Big or, The Fairies’ Parliament. Art by Peter Milton. Afterword by Harold Bloom. Incunabula, 2021 [i.e., 2022].
— Joanna Russ. The Adventures of Alyx. Timescape | Pocket Books, [August, 1983].
Tales from Gavagan’s Bar. Frontispiece by Tim Kirk
— L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt. Tales from Gavagan’s Bar (Expanded Edition). Owlswick, 1978.
“rhymes with ‘pagan’”
— Peter Kafer. Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. Univ. of Penna Press, [2004, i.e., POD 26 Dec. 2022].
— Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Mexican Gothic. Del Rey [pbk, 7th ptg, 2021].
