Michael Swanwick – The Endless Bookshelf

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

— — —

— 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.

— — —

— 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).

— — —

— 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.

— — —

recent reading : may to july 2024

— Mark Valentine. Lost Estates. Swan River Press, 2024. [From the author].
Collection of a dozen stories, four unpublished, including the excellent title story

— — —

— John O’Donoghue. The Servants and other strange stories. Tartarus Press, [2024]. Edition of 300.
Collection of nine stories and novellas ; including “The Irish Short Story That Never Ends” : though its title reveals how it must end, this is pitch perfect and evocative and finely executed. Michael Swanwick —himself a master of concise, brilliant short stories — notes, “John O’Donoghue knocks it out of the park . . . I’m Irish, so this goes to the heart of a lifetime of reading for me.”

— — —

— John Buchan. The Three Hostages. Houghton Mifflin, 1924.
Re-read this for the first time in more than forty years, for an essay appearing in Wormwoodiana on the centenary (1 August).

— — —

— Anthony Powell. A Question of Upbringing (1951) ; A Buyer’s Market (1952) ; The Acceptance World (1955) ; At Lady Molly’s (1957) ; Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1960) ; The Kindly Ones (1962) ; The Valley of Bones (1964) ; The Soldier’s Art (1966) ; The Military Philosophers (1968) ; Books Do Furnish a Room (1971) ; Temporary Kings (1973) ; Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975).

I have been working at the ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ over the past several months, mostly reading the dozen novels out of sequence, which seems a reasonable enough approach, since the narratives flit and somersault across time and the parade of characters is intermittent and recurring by design. The humor is dry and Powell’s principal strategy, “the discipline of infinite obliquity”, will not be to every reader’s taste, but things do happen, often as sudden surprises punctuating a circumspect, even evasive, chronicle. And of course the sentences and paragraphs sometimes turn in midstream to undermine or contradict the initial idea or perspective expressed. Or how about this : “She had the gift of making silence as vindictive as speech.”
Powell’s cycle was described by several of his contemporaries as an English Proust but that now seems to me to be a reductive statement : there is attention to art, music, and aesthetics, and a complex, intertwined cast of artists, hacks, critics, businessmen, elegant and not-so-elegant family members, and even Venice makes an appearance, but Nicholas Jenkins is, by temperament, energy, and accomplishment, about as far from the “Marcel” narrator as can be and so is the overall tone. I like The Military Philosophers (which does have a direct nod to Proust) and At Lady Molly’s most of all, but this is maybe saying “poached” or “over easy”. Certainly the outcomes of Hearing Secret Harmonies are a long way from the schoolboy memories of 1921 in the first volume.

— — —

— (MELVILLE, HERMAN). Melville’s Billy Budd at 100. A Centennial Exhibition at 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. Edition of 375 copies printed by Bradley Hutchinson in Austin, Texas. [Gift of the author].
Advance copy of this concise, elegant catalogue for the show (12 September to 9 November in NYC) : 49 entries, 1843-2024, including some legendary Melville rarities and new work by an American master. A symposium on Billy Budd will be held at the Club on 9 October in connection with the exhibition.
The catalogue is distributed by the University of Chicago Press.

— (MELVILLE, HERMAN) Bound to Vary. A Guild of Book Workers exhibition of unique fine bindings on the Married Mettle Press limited edition of Billy Budd, Sailor. New York: Guild of Book Workers, 1988.
A superb copy of this edition of Billy Budd (one of the unique bindings) will be on view at the Grolier.
/ file under : chronicle of an obsession

— — —

— Michael Swanwick. The War with the Zylv. Cover illustration by Ariel Cinii. Dragonstairs Press, 2024. Edition of 100.

— — —

— Anuj Bahri and Aanchal Malhotra. Bahrisons. Chronicle of a Bookshop. [New Delhi :] Tara India Research Press, [2024].
Seventieth anniversary memoir and keepsake from this New Delhi bookshop established by an enterprising young refugee couple displaced during Partition : ‘we were not just in the business of selling books, but rather, building relationships’.

— — —

— Bob Rosenthal. Fifth Avenue Overhead. Edge Books, [May, 2024].
“Stories of Poetic Survival” by the author of Cleaning Up New York. This is a fun book!

— Arthur Machen. A Reader of Curious Books. [Edited by Christopher Tompkins]. Darkly Bright Press, [2024].
Expanded second edition (originally issued in 2020) of this annotated compendium of early work by Machen, reviews and literary miscellanies from the pages of Walford’s Antiquarian in 1887 [cf. Goldstone & Sweetser, pp. 141-3], some using the pseudonym Leolinus, and often containing in miniature some of the author’s later interests and motifs.

— John Masefield. Sard Harker. Heinemann, 1924.
For a forthcoming essay.

— Matthew Needle, Bookscout. An Appreciation by His Friends. Cambridge, Mass.: Charles Wood, Bookseller, 2012.
Reminiscences by Gregory Gibson, Adrian Harrington, Robert Rubin, Marcus McCorison, Roger Stoddard, Charles Wood, Stephen Weissman.

— — —

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Yellow Wall-Paper. Afterword by Alice Walker. Illustrations by Chris Daunt. Suntup Editions, 2024. Edition of 376 copies, signed by Walker and Daunt.

— — —

— Francis Spufford. Cahokia Jazz [2023]. Scribners, [2024].
A Prohibition novel, a jazz novel, and an excellent novel of an alternate America, a narrative organically rooted in language and anthropology. I really liked this one.

Comicosmics : Dragonstairs Press

— Michael Swanwick. Comicosmics. Philadelphia: [Forthcoming from] Dragonstairs Press, 2024. Edition of 50, signed by the author. Stitched in gilt celestial decorative wrappers.

Michael Swanwick is the trickiest and most prolific of writers, egged on by the binder and publisher of Dragonstairs Press; and I am the luckiest of readers, regularly granted an earliest glimpse of the productions of Dragonstairs Press. Discerning readers of the Endless Bookshelf will have noticed the sly hommagio to Italo Calvino in this title. The book is an entire intergalactic philosophical novel within the compass of near infinity, and six printed pages. It is one of the several things that Michael Swanwick does best. You saw it here first.

commonplace book : January 2024

In Memoriam : Howard Waldrop

Howard Waldrop (1946-2024) was an American national treasure, author of many memorable stories and novellas, among them “Winter Quarters”, “Heart of Whitenesse”, and The Ugly Chickens. If you don’t know his work, you have some strange delights ahead. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is always a good place to start:
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/waldrop_howard

Lawrence Person wrote a brief and oddly touching memorial note, here.

— — —

— Dylan Thomas, from “In my craft or sullen art”, in Twenty-Six Poems :

[. . .]
Not for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

— — —

Sidney Sime Exhibition

A major exhibition of the work of Sidney Sime, (from the artist’s collection and archive at the Memorial Hall in Worplesdon, Surrey) is being held at the Chris Beetles Gallery in London, with an excellent digital simulacrum for those of us who won’t be in London before 27 January

(via Mark Valentine’s Wormwoodiana)

— — —

In Memoriam : Tom Purdom

Michael Swanwick wrote a heartfelt farewell to his friend “Tom Purdom, Heart of Philadelphia”, here.

— — —

from the latest number of the Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. LXXX, no. 1 (Autumn- Winter 2023) :

— Stephen Ferguson, “Rare Books at Princeton, 1873-1941”

It was not self-evident that the American colleges of the nineteenth century would become collectors of book rarities, any more than it was self-evident that they would become universities, build football stadiums, and create an education eagerly sought worldwide. But the various decisions that resulted in these choices have much to do with one another — even when each leads down a path that appears to diverge widely from the others.

— Alfred L. Bush, “How Empty Shelves in Firestone Ultimately Revealed America’s Earliest Book”

“But with the determination of the ignorant . . .”

— — —

In Memoriam : Terry Bisson

Even now, in remembering Terry Bisson (1942-2024), I can’t help but smile. It’s a sad smile today, but Terry was one whom I always remember with a smile on his face. I encountered his work with Talking Man, one of the great short American novels of a fantastical, mysterious South; and then I started reading some of his fine short stories. He and Alice Turner founded the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series now conducted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel. Terry Bisson also founded the PM Press Outspoken Authors series of interviews. Trickster Michael Swanwick recalls “Three Things You Must Know about Terry Bisson”.

— — —

“The Black Lands”, published in Exacting Clam 10 (Autumn 2023), will be reprinted in the issue of the Book Collector for summer 2024.

— — —

I came across a beautiful literary ’zine from the Last Press, Quire, issue 19 (2023) of which is a separate edition of a Mark Valentine story, “Qx”, as a finely printed trifold sheet. Quire 13(2022) is The Mark of Andreas Germer by Ron Weighell, a special Christmas ghost story edition about the perils of reading. It’s a twelve-page chapbook with an engraving by Ladislav Hanks. No. 15 (2023) is The Visit, a story by Maureen Aitken (below). Production values are very high, and print runs small, so have a look, here.

— — —

This time next week (Monday 22 February), your correspondent will be at the ABAA Bibliography Week Showcase, a small book fair held at the Alliance Française on east 60th street in New York City, details here :
https://www.abaa.org/events/details/bibliography-week-showcase
(free & open to the public, come say hello at the Cummins table)

And not long after that, in San Francisco at the California International Antiquarian Book Fair, 9-11 February. Come say hello (Cummins booth 105).

recent reading : end of december 2023

current reading :

— Samantha Harvey. Orbital. A Novel. Grove, [December 2023].

recent reading :

— Michael Swanwick and Sean Swanwick. Father Winter. Dragonstairs Press, 2023. Edition of 120.
Five short shorts on snowy topics, including “My Dad Is an Astronaut” by Sean Swanwick.

— Arthur Machen. The House of Souls [1906]. Tartarus Press, [2021].

— Michael Cisco. Weird Fiction. A Genre Study [2021]. Palgrave Macmillan, [POD: 19 July 2023].
“The beauty and tranquillity of a place are no sign at all of safety, as might once have been true in pastoral literature.”

— Moncure Biddle. A Christmas Letter. Charles Lamb. December 25, 1938. Moncure Biddle & Co., 1938.
An old favorite, partly adapted from Hazlitt.

— Ernest Hilbert. Storm Swimmer. Winner 2022 Vasser Miller Prize in Poetry. University of North Texas Press, [2023].

a pair of Swanwicks

— Michael Swanwick. Red Fox, Blue Moon. [16] pp. Dragonstairs Press, 2023. Edition of 69 copies. Stitched in blue wrappers with a photo on front wrapper.
Another world in miniature from the deft and prolific Mr. Swanwick, a history of the Roxborough neighborhood of Philadelphia, replete with fox lore and subversive whimsy from what archy would call the “under side”.
[Swanwick is a master of the short short story and more than fifty of these have appeared in the ephemeral Dragonstairs books (the tally of fiction is more than 30 titles to date).]

— Michael Swanwick. The Best of Michael Swanwick. Volume Two. 530 pp. Subterranean Press, 2023. Edition of 1,000 copies, signed by the author. Evergreen cloth and pictorial dust jacket by Lee Moyer.
Includes the beautiful and devastating “For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again”, the oh-so-tricky homage of “The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin”, “The Beast of Tara” (“a story idea I came up with in the mid-seventies and finally wrote last year. So if you’re wondering how long it takes to write one of these things and many other fine tales”), and many more. “Libertarian Russia” is filled with a sense of wonder and loss and deep nostalgia and reads like a despatch from another lifetime though it dates from 2010.
[The Best of Michael Swanwick, “predecessor to the current volume” (as the jacket panel notes), was published by Subterranean in 2008 in an edition of 150 signed copies.]

Temporary Culture at 35

TEMPORARY CULTURE started with a photocopy ’zine at the end of June 1988, The Newsletter of Temporary Culture, the title from a dream-memory, and the form and content being a confluence of available technology and literary urges in the post-industrial not-quite-gentrified Hudson river littoral in Paulus Hoek (five minutes’ walk from downtown Jersey City). With the fifth issue the word newsletter fell away from the title and the seventh issue introduced the sumac logo and marked an end to a rainbow of ’zines (the eighth issue never made it to the copy machine).

And then the world changed.

Temporary Culture evolved with the newly available technology just as my interest in Avram Davidson ripened to the point of publication, and a friend said, you don’t really want a database, let’s make a website. An electronic newsletter followed, but the itch to produce printed things resurfaced before long, first with the publications of the Avram Davidson Society, and then from 2003 a steady series of books, including Another green world, When They Came by Don Webb, Hope-in-the-Mist by Michael Swanwick, and the specially bound copies of A Conversation larger than the Universe. (In retrospect, it would have been cool to accept the hand press and founts of type offered to me in late 1992 or early 1993, but at the time I had nowhere to house them and so a different path was chosen.) The most important book published by Temporary Culture is without a doubt Sexual Stealing by Wendy Walker; the most elegant is the hand printed edition of Naples by Avram Davidson. Of each one of these (and of each of the books of Temporary Culture) I can assert that without my energies these books would not have come into being. A checklist of the publications of Temporary Culture is in preparation. There will probably be a few more books before it’s over. [HWW]

commonplace book — late spring 2023

“happy as always in the faculty of finding infinity round the corner of any street, within five minutes of anywhere”

— Arthur Machen, The London Adventure (1924)

— — —

On Defining Genre

The problem with defining a genre — science fiction, for example, or fantasy — is that once you’ve declared what it is, you’ve also declared what it can’t be. And if it can’t be anything but what it has already been, it’s of no interest to any serious artist.

— Michael Swanwick, Brief Essays on Genre (2023)

— — —

“de la doctrine des hommes comme de l’eau, qui n’est iamais plus belle, plus claire & plus nette qu’à sa source”

— Gabriel Naudé, Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (1627)

— — —

“But I knew that I always enjoyed looking back on things more than actually doing them.”

— George Sims, The Terrible Door (1964)

— — —

Hazelnut cake for the Avram Davidson Centenary Garden Party

Brief Essays on Genre by Michael Swanwick

— Michael Swanwick. Brief Essays on Genre. [Dragonstairs Press, 2023]. [16] pp. Stitched in wrappers. Edition of 75 signed copies.

Michael Swanwick is a trickster and a master of concision. In “A User’s Guide to the Postmoderns” (1986)*, he danced his way through a discussion of contemporary science fiction and the apparent divide between the cyberpunks and the humanists, exhibiting familiarity with the work and the writers, all without ever quite planting a foot on either side of the fence. He was a skeptic of movements and manifestos back then; and when Farah Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008) seemed to chart a structure and laws, Swanwick set out to write a work that violated all of them and yet was unmistakably fantasy. So he has a playful side. He performed several rigorous, extended virtuoso sequences of short short stories, with Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary for The New York Review of Science Fiction (2000), The Periodic Table of the Elements for Ellen Datlow’s Sci Fiction (2000-2003, collected in 2005), and The Sleep of Reason, riffs on Goya’s Los Caprichos for The Infinite Matrix (2002-2003). His Christmas cards are a blast, short shorts that sometimes wrench your heart.

And now Swanwick has returned to nonfiction, with Brief Essays on Genre, which collects 25 sharp observations on writing and the literature of the fantastic. He knows how to get right to the heart of the matter. There is not a word of excess. The conclusion of the Brief Essay upon literary movements reaffirms his earlier position. “By the time you’ve heard of somebody else’s, it’s over.” If this approaches aphorism, nonetheless it rings true. Of course the difficulty in writing about these essays is that one find oneself in the situation of Avram Davidson writing his editor about “The Last Wizard”, in a letter of explanation as long as the story. I can’t, however, help citing this essay:

On Defining Genre
The problem with defining a genre — science fiction, for example, or fantasy — is that once you’ve declared what it is, you’ve also declared what it can’t be. And if it can’t be anything but what it has already been, it’s of no interest to any serious artist.

This approaches, from a different angle, William S. Wilson’s observation, “Writing within conventions of language, and of genre, is like swimming in society rather than in a pond under a waterfall.” It is often at the edges or boundaries where interesting things happen.

Don’t be fooled by the brevity or levity of Swanwick’s essays, this is a notable book.

Brief Essays on Genre sold out upon publication but you may read the essays as they appeared serially on Flogging Babel, beginning here.

—
* collected, with “In The Tradition” (1994), a cruise through the disputed waters of Fantasy, in The Postmodern Archipelago (1997).

A singular interview with Henry Wessells, by Michael Swanwick

Singular Interviews, by Michael Swanwick. Tenth in an Occasional Series

Henry Wessells is not only a writer of fiction, criticism, and critical fictions but a bookman as well — a professional dealer in rare books and related materials. It is in this latter capacity that this question was posed.

Michael Swanwick: If you could own one essentially unobtainable rare genre book, what would it be?

Henry Wessells: I would like to own Erasmus’ own copy of Utopia (Louvain, 1516); or, failing that, More’s own.
But you know me very well, Michael, to ask such a question, for I (or a character calling himself “I”) have answered your question twenty years ago in the pages of NYRSF, when I summoned into being an imaginary book “I” needed to know in order to write about the work of Don Webb. That book is Irimari, ou, la reine zombie de la Guiane (Brussels: Auguste Poulet-Malassis, 1866) by Gérard de Kernec, and its English translation by Swinburne, Eurydice in Guiana, published anonymously in 1871 by John Camden Hotten. In “Book becoming power” (NYRSF, March 2000), D. owned Lester Dent’s copy of that book, and even now I wouldn’t mind owning a copy of either edition myself.
That was easy; there was no hesitation, for I have been thinking about the literature of the fantastic ever since I was seven years old. Not that I read Utopia at that age. I have seen the copy of Frankenstein which Mary Shelley inscribed to Lord Byron (one genius to another), but I never felt I needed to possess it.
I did, of course, answer your singular question in a concrete sense, by thinking about a book which did once exist, for a key aspect of our mode of literature is the literalization of metaphor.

— — —