Peter Straub – The Endless Bookshelf

commonplace book : january 2025

31 January 2025

in today’s mail

— Conjunctions 83. Revenants : The Ghost Issue. Edited by Bradford Morrow and Joyce Carol Oates. Bard College, 2024.
a big issue, with “An Incident in Monte Carlo”, a fragment or outtake from the forthcoming Wreckage by Peter Straub, new work by Elizabeth Hand, James Morrow, Timothy J. Jarvis, Mark Valentine, Reggie Oliver, and many others.

“Fern’s Room” by Liz Hand is pitch perfect, deftly moving from a gentle rom-com American anglophile country house idyll to a very dark endgame, with clues scattered all along the way.

“Plunged in the Years” by Jeffrey Ford, with a few steps off the path in the woods, gets right to the heart of the American ghost story : time and memory (and childhood).

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recent reading

— Len Deighton. Faith [1994]. Grove Press, [2024].

— Margery Allingham. Sweet Danger [1933]. Penguin Books, [1963].

— Nathan Ballingrud. Crypt of the Moon Spider. Nightfire, [2024].

— Avram Davidson. The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy. Owlswick Press, 1990.

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books wait for their readers

All antiquarian booksellers have a shelf of what Bill Reese called ‘intractables’ : things that sit on a shelf and seem unsaleable, or just beyond the grasp of one’s understanding, or, indeed, actively resist the efforts of the cataloguer with what M. R. James called the ‘malice of inanimate objects’. And then, suddenly, one finds a new perspective, or works with someone who has the key, and the door unlocks. I am fortunate to have experienced this a few times in my career. To watch this phenomenon in real time is one of the delights of the profession.

The question of whether or not books wait for their writers is trickiet to answer. This is a questionof a different order. I would say yes, on bakance, but one feels the clock ticking, and the list of books not written is very long.

Books Never Written, label on box from literary archive of george plimpton — Books Never Written, label on a box from the literary archive of George Plimpton.

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‘to escape the straitjacket that had been science fiction’ — Paul Kincaid

an excellent essay by a clear-eyed critic ringing the changes on Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthologies then and now :

http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/who-is-in-danger/

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Eighteen Years of the Endless Bookshelf

Last week marked eighteen years of ‘simply messing around in books’ and reporting the pleasures on this website. It is still fun and so I will continue to note interesting books, curious passages, announcements, occasional snapshots, and digressions.

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an Endless Bookshelf quiz

Who is the Widmerpool ?
— from your year(s) at school or university
— of your chosen field or profession
— observed recurringly elsewhere

/ wrong answers accepted
/ bonus points for naming your favorite book in ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’

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4 January 2025

early in January, and it is already a good year in books, having just received two long-awaited titles in this week’s mailbag

Billy Budd at 100 (continued)

— Herman Melville. Billy Budd. A Centennial Edition with Fourteen Illustrations Cut in Wood by Barry Moser. Pennyroyal Press, 2024. Edition of 50 copies signed by the artist.
A spectacular new large format edition of Billy Budd Sailor (An Inside Narrative) — as the half-title names the book. The text of the novella is set from the Melville Electronic Library, with original woodcuts by American master Barry Moser.

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a Tim Young trifecta

— Timothy Young. Isness & Aboutness. Thoughts on Bibliography. Publication Studio, 2024.
With two single sheet ’zines, printed rectos only :
— 10 Reasons Libraries Matter, 2021.
— 10 Reasons Books Matter, [2015].

Isness & Aboutness is a really great essay on thinking about books and thinking about the world (it is the text of Tim’s Sandars lecture at Cambridge University in November). He cites Donald McKenzie to good effect, on bibliography as

the only discipline which has consistently studied the composition, formal design, and transmission of texts by writers, printers, and publishers; their distribution through different communities by wholesalers, retailers, and teachers; their collection and classification by librarians; their meaning for, and — I must add — their creative regeneration by, readers [. . .] no part of that series of human and institutional interactions is alien to bibliography

His essay moves beyond McKenzie’s assertion to identify new modes of bibliography and to assert the primacy of bibliography as a means of uncovering what books are and what they do in the world. Highly recommended.

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snow day, 11 January 2025

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great blue heron flying low over the silvered mere
alighting on the ice beside a stand of reeds
in the distance, the pulaski skyway

/ from the train window this morning [16 January]

/ file under : extreme commute

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commonplace book : early October 2024

fall feuilleton

fall feuilleton, part two

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“oscillating revisions”
— John Bryant, on certain passages in the fluid text of Melville’s Billy Budd

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the view from the hammock

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“You can’t always count on / things opening up for you / Know when to let go / learn how to fall.”
— “Skydiving”, Ishmael Reed, from Conjure, in a reading with Allen Ginsberg at the Library of Congress 29 April 1974

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“Writing within conventions of language, and of genre, is like swimming in society rather than in a pond under a waterfall.”
— William S. Wilson

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The illusion grew more perfect the closer to the trees he went. Now the needles seemed almost to be suggesting the grain of polished wood. It was the way they alternated colors and shades, darker green above lighter above darker, a random pattern solidifying into the whorls on a slab of monkeywood.
It was the door to his bedroom.

— Peter Straub. Ghost Story [1979]

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in memoriam : Peter Straub (1943-2022)

Peter Straub, with Peter Cannon and S. T. Joshi, New York, June 2018.

Peter Straub, who died on 4 September 2022, was the smartest of writers and a truly fine man. He was one of the few magicians I have ever met: that rare real thing, a writer who starts a tale in a recognizable place and enables the reader to go somewhere unexpected and unsettling. I didn’t know him well, but saw him regularly over the years in New York and at Readercon, and I treasure his work. It was always a pleasure to hear him read from works in progress.

It was a signal honor and delight to moderate the panel discussing his writings when he was guest of honor at Readercon 23 in July 2012. It was a wide-ranging, zigzag conversation between Gary K. Wolfe, Mike Allen, John Langan, and your correspondent, discussing character, place, and story in Straub, as well as a host of other topics. In one exchange we drew attention to connections between minor characters across the decades. Peter was in attendance and we could witness his pleasure at the seriousness (and sly humor) with which we undertook the vivisection of the Works . . . . In my introductory remarks I observed, “What is a book but the record of the struggle of a story to tell itself?” and I had been thinking of Shadow Land in particular, but all of his works grappled with the relationship between story and form. Just take a look at the intensity with which he read Henry James: The Process (Is a Process All Its Own) (2017), contributes an episode in the life of the Master which no other author could have conceived and told. The Dark Matter (2010) is another fascinating work.

In September, his daughter, novelist Emma Straub, wrote a succession of posts on twitter, beginning here , and a very moving memoir of her father, This Time Tomorrow, Today.

That Readercon panel was followed by a convivial dinner gathering — not a table of doom — with many (but not too many) luminaries. Peter inscribed my copy of Shadow Land, which I included in A Conversation larger than the Universe.

The photograph at the top was a rare late public appearance, when Peter attended the birthday celebration organized by Derrick Hussey of Hippocampus Press for critic S. T. Joshi in June 2018.

As my friend Liz Hand (present at that Readercon dinner) remarked after learning of Peter’s death, “count none but sunny hours”. Peter Straub was a Mensch, with a big heart, and I am glad to have known him.

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The Locus obituary here :
https://locusmag.com/2022/09/peter-straub-1943-2022/

The Peter Straub Papers (MSS 185) are held at the Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University. The detailed finding aid is here: http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/fales/mss_185/