Category: John Clute

ROUND-UP OF BOOKS FROM 2024 WORTH LOOKING FOR

— Christopher Brown. A Natural History of Empty Lots. Timber Press, [September 2024].
This was one of the most interesting books I read this year.  Chris has written three novels of near future  dystopias where characters are finding their way through an America  reshaped by climate change (and political turmoil). The first of them, Tropic of Kansas, was the best book I read in 2015. In A Natural History of Empty Lots, Chris looked at the world around him and questioned his own assumptions and prejudices (as Thoreau suggests in Walden), and tries to see how we humans might find a way to live in the world that does not involve devouring it. The fact they that I appear in the book and our friendship of many years, obliged me to exclude Empty Lots from the running for the book of the year. This is a book that traces its origins to the excellent Field Notes Chris has been publishing online ; he has entirely transformed them and has written a beautiful and thoughtful book. https://endlessbookshelf.net/2024/09/03/singular-interview-christopher-brown/
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— Mark Valentine. Lost Estates. Swan River Press, 2024.
Collection of a dozen stories, four unpublished, including the excellent title story.
——. The Thunderstorm Collectors. Tartarus Press, [2024].
Collection of twenty-nine essays and vignettes, including pieces on Arthur Machen, A. J. A. Symons, M. R. James, and lesser known figures from the “curious alleys and byways” of literature and folklore. Fifth volume in his series of collected essays.
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On afternoons my heart / feels like an out-of-season hotel
— Adrian Dannatt. Capacity for Loss. [Opium Books, 2024]. Edition of 300.  Yellow cloth, dust jacket with illustration, Gaia, from the painting by Danny Moynihan.
Collection of poems.
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— John Clute. The Book Blinders. Annals of Vandalism at the British Library : A Necrology. Illustrated. Norstrilia Press, [2024].
I wrote a notice, here :
https://endlessbookshelf.net/2024/03/24/the-book-blinders-by-john-clute/

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— This Is Only Earth, My Dear. Images by Trillian Stars & Kyle Cassidy with poems by Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal. Laurel Tree Press, [2024].
Selection of poems by artist Lizzie Siddal (1829-1862) and photographs in and around east London by Kyle Cassidy, with a smouldering Victorian palette. A delightful pre-Raphaelite counterfactual : what fun !
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— Ray Russell. The Woman Who Fell to Earth. Tartarus Press, [2024].

A wild short novel of doublings, tricks of memory, serious ontological ambiguities, and the perils of close involvement in the life and writings of a neglected author. Tanya and Caroline were friends from university days, though Caroline had become reclusive after her husband’s death. Caroline, literary executor of one hit wonder and horror novelist Cyril Heldman, had resurrected his name and formed an online community of readers (we see a bit too much of the hostile behavior that such small stakes games can provoke).  Caroline gets back in Tanya’s life when she lands on Tanya’s roof: a corpse fallen from the empty sky. At the heart of the novel is and a house in Wales where time stands still, and the the Sixtystone, the object from Arthur Machen’s “Novel of the Black Seal”, which confers dangerous powers upon those in proximity. The resolution is deeply shocking, sudden and unexpected and seamlessly integrated into the narrative, even if some of the interesting implications are not fully explored. The ending is restorative and curiously cozy, almost pastoral.

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(MELVILLE, HERMAN). Melville’s Billy Budd at 100. A Centennial Exhibitionat the Grolier Club and Oberlin College Libraries. Introduction and Descriptions by William Palmer Johnston. Frontispiece portrait of Melville by Barry Moser, color plates. The Grolier Club, 2024.
— Herman Melville. Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces. Constable, 1924.
——. John Marr and other Sailors with some Sea Pieces. DeVinne Press, 1888.

2024 is the centenary of Melville’s Billy Budd, and there have been many phases in the year-long celebration. The catalogue of the Grolier Club show is well worth looking for. I was delighted to be a panelist on the symposium organized in connection with the exhibition. These events prompted me to publish A Melville Census, a bibliographical work looking at the last two books published in Melville’s lifetime : https://temporary-culture.com/product/henry-wessells-melville-census/#310899

It also prompted me to go back to primary sources, and and so on a recent visit to the Lilly Library I re-read John Marr, a book of ghosts and roll-call of the dead. The whole book speaks to Billy Budd, especially the quip of Captain Turret, “submission is enough”. De Vere was not so sensible an officer. There are other things I noticed which will require more time to contemplate ; these thoughts will show up in an essay sometime.

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 :

The Darkening Garden (review)

The Darkening Garden.  A Short Lexicon of Horror by John Clute.
Cauheegan; Seattle: Payseur & Schmidt, [2006].
Illustrated. [xii], 162, [4] pp. $45.00
reviewed by Henry Wessells
[First published in The New York Review of Science Fiction 19:7, no. 223 (March 2007). All rights reserved.]

The Knowledge at the Heart of the Labyrinth

The Darkening Garden is a brilliant, irritating book, a dark little jewel of a grenade tossed into the cocktail party of genre criticism.  Its subtitle, A Short Lexicon of Horror, is Clutean misdirection deftly understated. What we have here is a philosophical engine, an encyclopedia in miniature (assuming a certain degree of knowledge on the reader, author entries can be found elsewhere or simply imagined) and, most importantly, a record of how John Clute thinks. This last is no small matter.

FUSTIAN by Jason van Hollander

The Darkening Garden is a collection of thirty short essays on topics relevant to the horror sort of fantastic literature. No particular affinity for horror literature is required. The terms that Clute defines will be of interest to all readers, just as the critical approach these terms articulate bears upon all sorts of fantastic literature. (I use the neutral term sort — less charged than flavor or variety — here, precisely, in place of genre or mode because definition of genre is one of the concerns of the book at hand.) 

[ To read the review essay, click here : https://endlessbookshelf.net/DarkeningGarden.html ]

The illustration at top is Jason van Hollander’s FUSTIAN portrait of John Clute. The complete text of The Darkening Garden is available in Clute’s Stay (Beccon, 2014).