current reading :
— 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.
— — —
—Mark Behm. The Eye of the Beholder. The Queen of the Night. The Ice Maiden. Zomba Books, [1983]. A Black Box Thriller.
The Ice Maiden is an inventive twist on the vampire novel, enacting a hilarious collision of Old World tropes (and the Anne Rice novels) with the exigencies of the American economic system. Gangsters, vampires, religious fanatics, history infodumps, and greed ! The Zomba Black Box books were good stuff in the early 1980s revival of American noir : I had several (Jim Thompson, Horace McCoy, Fredric Brown, and Cornell Woolrich), but hadn’t seen the Marc Behm collection until now. The first two novels were published in 1980 and 1977 ; this is the first (and perhaps only) publication of The Ice Maiden. The proofreading and copy editing are sloppy, but the action never lets up.
— — —
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.
—Robert Jackson Bennett. The Tainted Cup. Shadow of the Leviathan : Book 1 [2024]. Del Rey paperback.
An eccentric genius criminal investigator in a fantasy world of Imperial hierarchies and body modifications : the murder has ramifications into the corridors of power.
