recent reading :
— John James Audubon. My Style of Drawing Birds. Introduction by Michael Zinman. The Overland Press for the Haydn Foundation, 1979.
Facsimile and transcription of a fascinating manuscript, “Audubon’s definitive statement on the achievement to which he devoted his life”.
— Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman. Anatomy of an Auction. Rare Books at Huxley Lodge, 1919. The Book Collector, 1990.
How books were really sold in Britain, once upon a time. Discussion of the “ring” in action at a country house sale, based on documentary evidence of the “knock out” and “settlement” among participating dealers : a Shakespeare First Folio sold for £100 in the room and £1,550 in the third round (with the surviving participants dividing the difference between them). This sort of arrangement was abolished by law in 1927 but continued illegally into the 1950s.
— Frank Baker. Miss Hargreaves. A Fantasy. Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1940.
Bonkers : a poetry hoax, what can possibly go awry ?
— Pramoedya Ananta Toer. All That Is Gone. Translated from the Indonesian by Willem Samuels. Hyperion East, [2004].
Short stories ranging in time from the colonial period through the Japanese occupation and early independence. The title story is episodic and invokes the transitory nature of things.
— — —
— Othman Wok. A Mosque in the Jungle. Classic Stories . . . . Edited by Ng Yi-Sheng, with translations by M M Basalamah and Tan Poay Lim. Epigram, [2021].
— Clarence Wolf. Fifty Years a Bookseller or, The Wolf at Your Door. Second, expanded edition. Privately printed, 2025.
/ the first edition (2022) vaulted right into the top five bookshop memoirs (joining the ranks of Tim d’Arch Smith’s The Times Deceas’d and Not 84 Charing Cross Road by Driffield, and two others where I will concede there is room for debate) ; the new edition adds more anecdotes and an index. Outstanding and witty !
— — —
‘not our family’s first float trip through an abandoned mine’
— Sarah Kendzior. The Last American Road Trip. Flatiron Books, [2025].
Well written and intensely engaging book, family travels in an uncertain America. Kendzior is direct and unflinching and honest. She has travelled to some remarkable places in what the French would call “l’Amérique profonde”, deep in the heart of the heart of the country. Kendzior is brave and funny and clear-eyed about America in our time.
— Bjørn Berge. Nowherelands. An Atlas of Vanished Countries 1840-1975. [Translated from the original Norwegian by Lucy Moffatt]. Thames & Hudson, [2017].
An excellent travel book to odd corners of the globe, anchored by postage stamps and illuminated by literary citations. I wondered at the omission of one small country until I saw the date of the extinction of Biafra in the original title, Landene som forsvant, 1840-1970 (Countries that vanished ?), which answers the question. Of the fifty, more than a dozen were unknown to me, and another six or seven only as names on a map. This book made me think of The World of Donald Evans ; and Secret Europe by John Howard and Mark Valentine (2012), who re-write the imaginative geography of continental Europe in the interwar years* in a gorgeous book fragrant with “that air of mystery, transgression, and foreboding” identified by Michael Dirda.
——
* and in the perpetual life during wartime all years past now seem interwar years
— — —
— John Scalzi. Old Man’s War [2005]. [With a new introduction]. Tor, [2024].
— Ian Rankin. Midnight and Blue. An Inspector Rebus Novel. Mulholland Books, [2024].