Temporary Culture – The Endless Bookshelf

Readercon 34 (July 2025)

Readercon 34 Schedule
at the Boston Marriott Burlington in Burlington, Mass.
https://readercon.org

Saturday 19 July
10:00 a.m., at the autographer’s table
Autograph Session : Henry Wessells

Sunday 20 July
10:00 to 11:00 a.m., in : Create / Collaborate
The Art of the SF Book Cover
John Clute & Henry Wessells
Panel description : Since its inception, the British Library, the national library of the UK, has stripped dust jackets off books in its holding and discarded the unwanted wrappers, losing an essential piece of their cultural and artistic significance. In The Book Blinders, science fiction historian and theorist John Clute details the “annals of vandalism” at the British Library, with a focus on works lost (and found). John Clute and antiquarian bookseller Henry Wessells give a joint presentation on this subject, with extra time for Q&A.

11:00 to 11:30 a.m., in : Empower / Embrace
Reading : Henry Wessells
Henry Wessells reads from The Elfland Prepositions and from Another Green World (both newly published in 2025).

I should arrive at Readercon by early afternoon on Friday. There are a number of panels I am keen to attend, but there is always plenty of time for conversation. If you see me, come say hello !

Copies of A Conversation larger than the Universe, The Private Life of Books, The Elfland Prepositions, and Another Green World (advance copies of the Zagava paperback), and some of the publications of the Avram Davidson Society will be available for sale (cash, cheque, or paypal).

commonplace book : february 2025

The Elfland Prepositions, published 27 February

advance copies of The Elfland Prepositions, at the Post Office

advance presentation copies, at the post office ready for mailing [26 February]

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in production

— Henry Wessells. The Elfland Prepositions. Temporary Culture, 2025.
Printed on Mohawk superfine white eggshell. Pictorial wrappers. 26 copies, lettered A to Z, were reserved for presentation ; there were also 100 copies numbered 1 to 100.

Proof copy above (received 12 February 2025) ; proofs corrected & in production (14 February 2025), published 27 February 2025.

Copies now offered for sale, click on link or photo to order.
ISBN13 978-0-9764660-0-0 ISBN 0-9764660-0-1

Collection of four previously unpublished short stories.

Elfland is not a nice place, but it’s important to know how it works.

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seen in the imagination, and at the Grolier Club :

two entries from the recent Grolier Club exhibition, Imaginary Books. Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books, from the collection of Reid Byers.

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current reading

— Charles Robert Maturin. Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale [1820]. With introduction and notes by Victor Sage. Penguin Books, [2000].
/ into the labyrinth, again

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recent reading

— Len Deighton. Hope. HarperCollins, [1995].
— — Charity. HarperCollins, [1996].
— — Winter. A Novel of a Berlin Family. Knopf, 1987.
Germany in the world, 1899-1945 ; back story or bedrock for the Bernard Samson novels.

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‘away from the clank of the world’

— Walt Whitman. In Paths Untrodden. Printed in brown ink, blockprint illustrations in green and blue. [16] pp. [The Letterpress at Oberlin, January 2025]. Edition of 217.
Calamus 1, from the 1860 Leaves of Grass, with blue herons and green marsh plants. [Gift of VH].

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Hard Rain
by Janwillem van de Wetering

A short note now up (in English) on the excellent and informative Dutch site

https://janwillemvandewetering.nl/favoriete-boek/

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“not relics of the past, but pockets of the future arriving ahead of schedule”

— Christopher Brown, over at The Clearing (the blog of Little Toller Books)

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“When I look at that obscure but gorgeous prose-composition, the Urn-burial, I seem to myself to look into a deep abyss, at the bottom of which are hid pearls and rich treasure ; or it is like a stately labyrinth of doubt and withering speculation, and I would invoke the spirit of the author to lead me through it.”

— Charles Lamb on Sir Thomas Browne, quoted by Hazlitt, in “Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen” (1826)

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A Melville Census. John Marr & Timoleon

A Melville Census. John Marr & Timoleon. With a note by Henry Wessells.

Edition of 52 copies, designed and printed by hand by Jerry Kelly.

Published 8 January 2025. Sold out (updated 6 March 2025).

This is just what it sounds like : a report on the location of all known copies of Herman Melville’s John Marr (1888) and Timoleon (1891), the two last books of poems (each printed in editions of 25 copies), with a note about Maurice Sendak, Bill Reese, and others. Of the 52 copies printed, 26 lettered copies were reserved for presentation (one copy for the author, printed on blue paper, can be glimpsed at left above). Bibliographical details here.

SEXUAL STEALING by WENDY WALKER

Temporary Culture announces new editions of Wendy Walker’s beautiful and dangerous book SEXUAL STEALING, now also available as a full color paperback, printed digitally to the highest standard with all the original illustrations (distributed by Levellers Press), and in a DRM-free e-book (pdf) that retains all the power and beauty of Jerry Kelly’s design for the print editions (distributed by Weightless Books).

https://temporary-culture.com/sexual-stealing-2023/

I have been a champion of the work of Wendy Walker work since Temporary Culture was a photocopy ’zine and I reviewed The Secret Service; in 2011 I published her book My Man and other Critical Fictions. SEXUAL STEALING is the most important book that Temporary Culture has published. The new editions are available for immediate fulfilment. Please have a look. [HWW]

Readercon 32, July 2023

It’s July, so that means Readercon! Once again!

I’ll be there in Quincy, Mass., Friday through Sunday 14-16 July, and if you are there you will see me wandering about, and occasionally at fixed locations, according to the following schedule.

Friday 14 July 2023
7:30p.m. (Blue Hills) : Reading (new work)

Saturday 15 July 2023
11:00 a.m. (Salon B) : Arthur Machen’s Legacy in Modern Horror & Fantasy (moderator)
2:00 p.m. (Salon A) : The Enduring Legacy of Jules Verne (moderator)

Sunday 16 July 2023
11:00 a.m. (Salon A) : Speculative Memoir (moderator)

Copies of The Private Life of Books and other publications of Temporary Culture will be on hand. Come say hello if you see me.

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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]

Naples by Avram Davidson

just published : NAPLES by Avram Davidson

NAPLES is a fine press edition of one of Avram Davidson’s darkest tales, originally published in the first Shadows anthology edited by Charles L. Grant. NAPLES won the World Fantasy award for short fiction in 1979, the same year Jorge Luis Borges was named the recipient of the World Fantasy Life Achievement award ; Davidson received that award in 1986.

Publications of the Avram Davidson Society, number six.
Edition of 160 copies, designed by Jerry Kelly and printed by hand at the Kelly-Winterton Press from Hermann Zapf’s Aldus type. Stitched in yellow Hahnemühle wrappers printed in burnt siena. [16] pp. 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches.

Ten copies, numbered i to x, were reserved for presentation; 125 copies for distribution to members of the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie (AIB), on the occasion of the congress in Napoli, September 2022. Twenty-five copies are available for members and friends of the Avram Davidson Society.

Published in Napoli on 11 September 2022.

Details and subscription price at the order page :
https://temporary-culture.com/books/naples-avram-davidson/

readers in real time

readers in real time : in the library at Astrea Academy Sheffield

[photo by Charlie Pogson]

From Charlie Pogson, Head of English at the Astrea Academy Sheffield, last March: “I am writing to request your permission to use your poem, The Private Life of Books, as a permanent display in our school library. We would like to have the poem professionally painted or printed and displayed floor to ceiling on the entrance wall of our library space. The library is the heart of our school; it is the space in which we know we can transform the lives of the young people who we work with by showing them the world/s around them in books. Your poem perfectly encapsulates the gift that we want to give to our young people; a life-long, two-way relationship with books and stories.
“I heard your poem being read as the concluding voiceover on The Booksellers and was very moved by how it distilled the almost-indefinable magic of a book into words.”

And now that the installation is complete: “The children really love the poem – I see them being captured by it daily, and I think they revisit the library shelves having been invigorated by its reminder of how special their relationships with books are. [. . .] You’ll see a close up of your wonderful poem as well as a few of our scholars reading their own texts around it. You might also be able to see some glimpses of Sheffield in through the windows – it’s a city that’s both very green and very dilapidated in parts; a city where great stories are sorely needed.
“On behalf of all of us here at Astrea Academy Sheffield, we would like to thank you for gifting us your poem to accompany our reading experiences.”

[photo by Charlie Pogson]

Sexual Stealing by Wendy Walker

Sexual Stealing, a beautiful and dangerous book by Wendy Walker, with a preface by Daniel Levin Becker.
Published 1 September 2021 by Temporary Culture.

Sexual Stealing - binding detail Sexual Stealing - title page

Sexual Stealing is a formally innovative interrogation of the Gothic, slavery, and sexual exploitation, written using a simple constraint to extract a secondary, heretofore hidden text from Anne Radcliffe’s 1794 novel The Mysteries of Udolpho. Walker probes the obsessions and anxieties underlying the early Gothic novels, and dramatizes a tale of forcible taking, the brutal exercise of wealth and power, and the revolution that follows. She notes, “Sexual Stealing is poetic in that its form reflects its subject; it searches for a way to write the voices that are buried in full view, and subverts available genres to talk about something widely felt and intuited but not discussed.”

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WALKER, Wendy. Sexual Stealing. [With a preface by Daniel Levin Becker]. With color and black and white illustrations throughout, pictorial endsheets. Book design by Jerry Kelly. 192 pages, 7 x 10 inches. [Upper Montclair, New Jersey:] Temporary Culture, 1 September 2021. Edition of 125 copies signed by the author. Red brillianta cloth with letterpress spine label.
ISBN 09961359-5-2 ISBN13 978-0-9961359-5-5.
Price: $200.00
ORDER FROM TEMPORARY CULTURE

Wendy Walker is author of eight books, including The Secret Service (Sun & Moon, 1992) and My Man and Other Critical Fictions (Temporary Culture, 2011).

Sexual Stealing by Wendy Walker

Forthcoming from Temporary Culture : Sexual Stealing by Wendy Walker

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WALKER, Wendy. Sexual Stealing. [With a preface by Daniel Levin Becker]. With color and black and white illustrations throughout, pictorial endsheets. Book design by Jerry Kelly. 192 pages, 7 x 10 inches. Temporary Culture, 1 September 2021. Edition of 125 copies signed by the author. Red cloth with printed labels.
ISBN 09961359-5-2 ISBN13 978-0-9961359-5-5.
Price upon publication: $200.00

Wendy Walker is author of eight books, including The Secret Service (Sun & Moon, 1992) and My Man and Other Critical Fictions (Temporary Culture, 2011).