Category: recent reading

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

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— 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.

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— 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).

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— 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.

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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

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— 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.”

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— 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).

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— 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.

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— (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

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

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— 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’.

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— 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.

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— 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.

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— 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.

recent reading : april 2024

‘among the dust and shadows’
— Mark Valentine. Qx and other pieces. Zagava, 2024.
Collection of 21 fugitive short works at the boundaries of fiction and memoir (3 unpublished). The Blue Mean One — “entirely autobiographical” — is a very tricky (and funny) pub variation on the vanishing magic shop. An elegant and pleasing book to hold in the hand, and in which to read one’s way to unexpected places.

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— Anthony Powell. The Valley of Bones [1964]. The Soldier’s Art [1966]. The Military Philiosophers [1968].
Re-reading The Military Philosophers, in a new light:
The Military Philosophers quotes and riffs on Proust, explicitly and by imitation ; and in the autumn of 1944 Jenkins passes through the decayed Cabourg, the original of Proust’s seaside resort town Balbec. It is, also, hilarious in its descriptions of rank and hierarchy and bureaucratic machination ; allusions range from Wagner to The Prisoner of Zenda by way of hymns and sixteenth or seventeenth century poets ; and yes, a bit dry. But the way the sentences start off in one direction and swerve, wobble, undermine, and mock, to arrive at a thought almost the polar opposite of where it began.
And now, having read Proust, I understand this note (first encountered in May 2011) rather more clearly  :

“I’m reading Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, an hilarious and very good work. The only book I know that takes Proust’s habitual narrative gestures, Anglicizes them, and succeeds in the effort. In fact, Powell is the best critical study of Proust.”
— Guy Davenport. “Fragments from a Correspondence”, ed. Nicholas Kilmer. Arion (Third Series) 13:3 (2006), p. 106.

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— Dwyer Murphy. An Honest Living [2022]. Penguin Books, [2023].
A good New York book and a pretty good rare book McGuffin to send the young lawyer on his chase (just enough to be interesting without getting too detailed or wrong).

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— Zito Madu. The Minotaur at Calle Lanza. Belt Publishing, [2024].
Memoir of Madu’s experiences in Venice during the first months of the pandemic. The chronicle of isolation draws upon his childhood in a Nigerian immigrant family in Detroit, and is painfully honest in his reflections upon his anger towards his father, compounded and complicated by love. And then one evening in Venice a shocking literalization of the metaphor. Concise and wrenching.

À la recherche du temps perdu

at a forest crossroads where paths converge
— Marcel Proust. À la recherche du temps perdu.  Édition publiée sous la direction de Jean-Yves Tadié. 4 vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, [2019].
I. Du côté de chez Swann [1913]. À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (Première partie) [1918].
II. À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (Deuxième partie) [1918]. Le Côté de Guermantes. [1920-1].
III. Sodome et Gomorrhe [1921-2]. La Prisonnière [1923].
IV. Albertine disparue [1925]. Le Temps retrouvé [1927].
[The picture below is the first page of the text of the second edition of Du côté de chez Swann.]
Yesterday 23 March 2024 at 21h07 I finished reading À la recherche du temps perdu, with a mixture of awe and admiration, glee and sadness, exasperation and wonder. And no regrets whatsoever : these characters will kick around in my head for years, and I now see traces and hear echoes of Proust in many books read earlier. I began reading Du côté de chez Swann on 30 October 2021 and at first made steady progress, even writing a preliminary essay, “Monocles, Hawthorn, and Memory, or, A Short Despatch on a Long Book”, for the final issue of Wormwood in the spring of 2022. The third volume was slow going for me at times, as the narrator’s spinning thoughts and whining self-involvement were sometimes too much. Part of the pattern, of course, and often leavened with flashes of humor. The fourth volume is a page-turner, and wrenching. The last 75 pages of Albertine disparue are filled with travel, diplomacy, weddings, deaths, deceptions : a whirl of exterior incident after the cycles of involution of the first two chapters ; and the movement across time, narrative time and historical time, when (for example)  the narrator suddenly glimpses Albertine’s Fortuny coat in a painting by Carpaccio in Venice. And then in Le temps retrouvé, the slow motion urgency is compelling. Proust runs up and down the scale from micro to macro, not quite Rudy Rucker transrealism but busy, and even veering toward cosmic materialism. The concluding metaphor of the forest crossroads  is a delight, and the transversales connecting all the rides, all the persons of the novel, are a glimpse of Borges’ garden of forking paths decades before that story. There are so many things to say about À la recherche du temps perdu, and I am sure that most of them have already been said elegantly by distinguished scholars. I would re-read this book endlessly if had no other obligations or were a tenured professor, But I am not, and I do have books to write and, like Proust’s narrator, I wonder if there is time or sufficient competence to complete them.
And yet there is one observation I have that might be worthy of relating.  In the descriptions of the air raids over Paris and the aeroplanes rising to the skies, Proust assimilates Wagner and the Walkyries into military aviation : « c’était à demander si c’était bien des aviateurs et pas plutôt des Walkyries qui montaient » [one might well ask if it were aviators or in fact the Walkyries who took off]. The book was published in 1927, years after his death, but those passages seem to have been composed close to the time of the events in 1916. Earlier in the passage, the doomed marquis de Saint-Loup talks to the narrator of the beauty of the planes flying in fixed formation (‘faire constellation’ in French), and the greater beauty when the engagements begin, “the moment when they ‘make apocalypse’ and even the stars no longer keep their place”. There was something in the air, certainly : in Images of War (1919), Richard Aldington, who was an early English reader of Proust, has a poem entitled “Barrage”, which begins : “Thunder / The gallop of innumerable Walkyrie impetuous for battle”. My observation is that Proust is the true antecedent of the helicopter cowboys blasting Wagner in Apocalypse Now! And that smell of napalm on the morning is a dark, diabolical, ironic madeleine.
I had better stop there.

recent reading : late march 2024

— Anne Varichon. Color Charts. A History. Translated by Kate Deimling.  Princeton University Press, [2024].
The French title of this beautifully illustrated book is Nuanciers [2023], a subtle and elegant term. After a brief nod to medieval knowledge with an illustration from a fifteenth-century manuscript Hortus Sanitatis (BnF Ms. Lat. 11229), the historical range of the book is from the late seventeenth century to the present. Fascinating, gorgeous and interesting. One very curious editoral decision was to give the titles of the sources of the illustrations in English translation, usually omitting the original title, which would make it next to impossible to cite or consult these works. A shame and a disservice to the reader.
The illustration above is from the second edition of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, with additions . . . by Patrick Syme (London, 1821).

— Sylvia Townsend Warner. T H White [1967]. With an introduction by Gill Davies. Handheld Classics 31. Handheld Press, [2023].
An exemplary biography (and great notes by Kate Macdonald in the Handheld press edition). Here she is suggesting the appeal of flying in the mid-1930s: “You went faster than in any car, you rose more dangerously than over any fence, and the people who flew, who had machines of their own, who arrived for lunch removing furred helmets and unbuckling quantities of little straps, spoke of it with phlegm, as though it were nothing to them to have come down from heaven.”
N.B. It is reported that Handheld Press will cease trading later this year. As of the present writing, the books are readily available in the U.S. from bookshop.org .

— Jonatham Lethem. The Collapsing Frontier plus Calvino’s “Lightness” and the Feral Child of History plus In Mugwump Four and much more. PM Press, 2024.
Funny tricky tricky funny stuff, and a great interview by Terry Bisson. Outspoken Authors series, no. 30. Just out!

— Michael Z. Lewin. The Enemies Within [1974]. Harper & Row, Perennial Library pbk., [1984].
——. The Silent Salesman [1978]. Berkley pbk., [1981]
——. Out of Season [1984]. Mysterious Press pbk., [1991].

— Michael Connelly. The Black Box. A Novel [2012]. Grand Central pbk., [2013].
——. The Dark Hours [2021]. Grand Central pbk., [2022].

— Bill Griffith. Three Rocks. The Story of Ernie Bushmiller the Man Who Created Nancy. Abrams ComicArts, [2023].

The Book Blinders by John Clute

Millions More Missing
— John Clute. The Book Blinders. Annals of Vandalism at the British Library: A Necrology. Illustrated throughout. 499, [1, errata] pp. Norstrilia Press, [2024].
There has been a steady production of scholarship on the history of the publisher’s dust jacket in the past fifty years. These ephemeral pieces of paper encode all manner of information about the moment in time and both how publishers perceived their wares and how they wanted the reading and book-buying public to receive the newly published books. Much emphasis has been on nineteenth-century jackets in recent research, including in G. Thomas Tanselle’s Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use (2011), which updates work he first published in 1971, and Mark Godburn’s Nineteenth-Century Dust-Jackets (2016). And yet it is really in the early twentieth century that jackets proliferate and assume the form and function we now understand. Vast conceptual leaps in design and presentation of information occur in the interval between The Wind in the Willows (1908) and What Not (1918/1919) or In Our Time and The Great Gatsby (both 1925). And yet this is not solely the province of literary high spots. Across all types of literature, the dust jacket functions as the outer face of the book.  Clute’s title, The Book Blinders, is descriptive of the practical effect for the reader of a long-standing institutional policy of discarding dust jackets or separating the jacket from the book and storing them elsewhere, uncatalogued. This policy prevailed at the British Museum (later British Library) and at other depository libraries from the emergence of the dust jacket and continued for most of the twentieth century. With more than 100 examples of dust jackets not in BL (from the years of the first world war through 1990), John Clute documents the importance of the dust jacket and considers the implications of this vandalism from within. How about these three or four: Rose Macaulay, What Not (1918), a tale of eugenics and privilege, suppression of a libellous passage delaying actual publication until 1919 (Clute’s copy is Michael Sadleir’s own, saved from the memory hole); C. E. M. Joad, Priscilla and Charybdis (1924), “undeterred by the gruelling wordplay of the title, [I] took a look, and found found this this on pages 206-207; a seductive Joad-like protagonist is addressing a young woman on a train ride they are sharing: ‘Darling [he purrs], have you ever travelled without a ticket?’” (this one alone is worth the price of admission); or Ezra Pound, Make It New (1934):

Faber (which is to say Eliot) clearly thought it sagacious to wrap in sheep’s clothing the already notorious Ezra Pound’s new publication with its incendiary title: a ticking bomb that needed no bush. But the underlying message cannot be missed: Pound’s title, a modernist wake-up slogan he’d been using offhandedly since 1928, is manifestly inflammatory, once grasped; a challenge to his various enemies who (he maintains) clog the literature pews: an up-yours bombination clearly audible through the enfant-sauvage mask Pound wore until it was too late. This bomb needed to slip through the gates before exploding.

or Robert Graves, The White Goddess (1948), Tom Eliot again; or Lawrence Leonard, The Horn of Mortal Danger (1980); or London Tales (1983), edited by Julian Evans. Clute’s selections are fascinating testimony to the breadth of his reading and collecting and his critical range; the text sparkles with his crunchy and apt vocabulary. It seems almost a homoeopathic distillation: “I’d reckon that out of every 8,000 or so books to arrive at the British Library complete with dust-jacket, I’ve commented here on a maximum of one”. (Excessive candor moment: John Clute is a friend of more than twenty-five years; I am the source for the images of the only jacket not from his own collection.) This is an important book.

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Addendum (3 May): I wrote the notice above after reading digital proofs of the book. Today I have a copy in hand (a print on demand product manufactured in Tennessee on 19 April), and it is nice to see the book in the wild. In the U.S. the book is available from bookshop.org and elsewhere. Oh, yes : The Book Blinders is issued with a dust jacket (designed by Judith Clute). Here is the back panel :

recent reading : february 2024

Surtees at the End of the World

— White, T. H. Gone to Ground Or The Sporting Decameron [Cover title]. London: Collins, 1935. A remarkable book in a stylish pictorial dust jacket by J. Z. Atkinson.

Nominally a sequel to White’s Earth Stopped (1934), this collection of linked stories is indeed a Sporting Decameron as the dust jacket announces above a graceful line drawing of a fox descending. There are further allusions to the book as a Sporting Decameron throughout the text, but the title page reads simply : Gone to Ground. A Novel.

White briskly and offhandedly charts a descent into global war. Just like that! A small party of foxhunters (with a gardener and an old Etonian tramp) takes refuge in a well-appointed bomb shelter, built by the suspicioously wealthy and long-lived Soapy Sponge and Facey Romford, who had absquatulated to Australia and formed a bank. Members of the party tell a succession of fantastical tales of foxhunting and fishing, channelling Surtees and Norman Douglas and M. R. James, with nods to Buchan and Dunsany and jeers at Kenneth Grahame. Gone to Ground voices many of the predilections and literary preoccupations that would occupy White throughout his career (from The Sword in Stone to The Book of Merlyn). The world outside the storytelling party is left behind.

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— Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire [1962]. Vintage pbk.

— John Clute. The Book Blinders. Annals of Vandalism at the British Library: A Necrology. Illustrated throughout. Norstrilia Press, [forthcoming 2024]. [Seen in proof state].

— Kingsley Amis. Every Day Drinking. Illustrated by Merrily Harpur. Hutchinson, [1983]. Collected columns from the Daily Express, by a past master and a fun chronicler of his thirsts.
— Mark Tewfik. Gelatine Joe. Privately Printed, Lantern Rouge Press, 2024. Vignette of combat in Afghanistan, a “tissue culture” from a longer work in progress.
— Howard Waldrop. Flying Saucer Rock and Roll. Cheap Street, [2002].
— Angela Slatter. The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings. [Brain Jar Press, 2023, but POD 8 January 2024].
— Ron Weighell. The White Road. Illustrations by Nick Maloret. Ghost Story Press, 1997.
— Gary Phillips. Perdition, U.S.A. John Brown Books, [1996]. Intense, hard boiled L.A. novel, a close third person narrative of the adventures of Ivan Monk, Black businessman and private eye.

— Rex Stout. Three Men Out [1954]. A Nero Wolfe Mystery. Bantam pbk., 9th ptg.
——. A Family Affair [1975]. Introduction by Thomas Gifford. Bantam pbk., 4th ptg.
— Dorothy Sayers. Murder Must Advertise [1933]. A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery. Harper pbk.

seventeen years of the Endless Bookshelf

Today marks seventeen years of reports of messing about in books under the sign of the Endless Bookshelf. I’m still at it, and glad to be reading and thinking about books, and occasionally writing or publishing them. What a delight to discover new books and writers or to find that a book published a century ago is fresh and nimble. I have a few essays in the works, either scheduled for publication or due this spring, and other things in progress. To my few readers, it is always a delight to hear from you, keep sending me your news.

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current reading :

— Marcel Proust. Le temps retrouvé [1927].

— Herman Melville. Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces. Constable, 1924. This was Melville’s last book, unpublished at the time of his death and closely connected to his book of verse, John Marr and other sailors (1888). Billy Budd grew out of a note to “Billy in the Darbies”, the poem that concludes the book. The manuscript re-emerged in the early 1920s and first published by Constable as vol. 13 in the Standard Edition of the Works, a landmark in the rediscovery of Melville.  There will be an exhibition on Billy Budd and Melville at the Grolier Club in September and I am celebrating the centenary by reading the book. For now:

In this matter of writing, resolve as one may to keep to the main path, some by-paths have an enticement not readily to be withstood. Beckoned by the genius of Nelson I am going to err into such a by-path. If the reader will keep me company I shall be glad.

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[In September 2023, I left Twitter after nearly 15 years of marginal glosses and other ephemeral notes. I don’t miss it for an instant, though I do remember the days when it was a fun mode of quick communication. I post occasional announcements at @endlessbookshelf@mastodon.iriseden.eu and send out semi-annual newsletters.]

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recent reading :

— Marcel Proust. Albertine disparue [1925].
— Michael Swanwick. Phases of the Sun [bound with:] Phases of the Moon. Dragonstairs Press, 2020 [i.e., 2024]. Text printed dos à dos,  leporello binding of yellow and blue boards. Edition of 19. Swanwick at his bleakest and most romantic in these two sequences of short short stories about writing and love.
— Howard Waldrop. The Ugly Chickens. [Old Earth Books, 2009].
— Ron Weighell. The Mark of Andreas Germer. Quire 13. The Last Press, 2022. Edition of 100. Original short yarn from the estate of Ron Weighell (1950-2020), moving nimbly from a thoughtful citation of Milton to the tale of a book with a dreadful effect upon its reader.
— Arthur Machen. The Three Impostors or the Transmutations [1895], in The House of Souls. Tartarus Press, [2021].
— Samantha Harvey. Orbital. A Novel. Grove, [December 2023].

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I am looking forward to receiving the Conway Miscellany, a collection of four books by John Crowley from Ninepin Press in varying formats, comprising: The Sixties, A Forged Diary; Seventy-Nine Dreams; Two Talks on Writing; and Two Chapters in a Family Chronicle.

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].

recent reading : October & November 2023

— Howard Waldrop. H’ard Starts. The Early Waldrop. Edited by George R. R. Martin and Bradley Denton. [Subterranean Press, 2023]. Edition of 750 copies.
Collects nearly two dozen pieces described by Waldrop as “What I Wrote Before I Could Write” which is of course nonsense. “Lunchbox” was his first professional fiction sale, a Mars landing. “Onions, Charles Ives, and the Rock Novel” (an early piece written for Crawdaddy!), extrapolates from the posthumous production of Ives’ Fourth Symphony what would later become known as the “rock opera”. The four-part interview by Bradley Denton is great fun.

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Max Beerbohm, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Back Garden’

— Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner. Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity. New York Public Library, 2023.
This handsome little book presents the exhibition labels for the Beerbohm show drawing on the NYPL collection, Lasner’s collection at the University of Delaware, and other lenders. The book (96 pp.) is rich and instructive, the exhibition is fabulous: Max’s drawing of the Devil proposing the bargain with Enoch Soames; a superb portrait of his wife Florence Kahn in six dancing poses like a Greek frieze; Rossetti’s courtship of Elizabeth Siddal; caricatures of Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, and the red-headed Aubrey Beardsley; and “Mr. Beerbohm reading Mrs. Woolf”, a little sketch of himself falling asleep, in perfect imitation of the Vanessa Bell cover for her sister’s book; and more. The effect is a dense studio style hanging of drawings in a tiny room, and it works.

Max Beerbohm’s ‘improved’ copy of Zuleika Dobson

Go see it : https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/max-beerbohm (through 28 January 2024)
The guide is available online: https://drupal.nypl.org/sites-drupal/default/files/2023-10/MaxBeerbohm_PrintedGuide.pdf

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— Kenneth W. Rendell. Safeguarding History. Trailblazing Adventures inside the Worlds of Collecting and Forging History. Foreword by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Whitman Publishing, [2023].
Memoir by the eminent autograph expert and bookman, from humble origins to international success. The accounts of uncovering forgeries are case studies of self-delusion by those who wanted to believe, and of Rendell’s clear thinking and basic skepticism. To read the book is to hear the author’s cadences and manner of speaking, very nicely done. The chapter on forming the library of Bill and Melinda Gates (and the logistics of its installation) is really something.

— John Howard and Mark Valentine. Possessions and Pursuits. Sarob Press, 2023.
Short novel by Howard, Fallen Sun, and two short stories by Mark Valentine, “Masque and Anti Masque” and “The Prospero Machine”. Third volume of tributes to the metaphysical novels of “Inkling” Charles Williams.

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— Maureen Kincaid Spiller. A Traveller in Time. The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Spiller. Edited and with an introduction by Nina Allan. [Foreword by Paul Kincaid]. Academia Lunare | Luna Press Publishing [i.e., POD printed in U.S.A., 8 September 2023].
An excellent memorial volume assembling essays and reviews from her website Paper Knife and from Strange Horizons (chiefly 2010-2022, with a handful of earlier pieces), arranged thematically. The section on British author Alan Garner is fascinating as it shows her thinking about his work over decades (the earliest is from 1987; and the most recent is the last piece she published, in 2022). From the preface: “It was this notion, I think, this sense that everything we read is part of an ongoing and unending exploration, that convinced her to start reviewing. It was certainly the guiding principle behind the criticism she did write.”

— Jean-Claude Izzo. Chourmo. Une enquête de Fabio Montale [1996]. Gallimard [Folio policier, 2022].
Marseille crime novel.

— Sarban. The Doll Maker and other tales of the uncanny. Peter Davies, [1953].

— Cyril Connolly. The Modern Movement. One Hundred Key Books from England, France and America 1880-1950. André Deutsch / Hamish Hamilton, [1965].

— Charles Renouvier. Uchronie (L’Utopie dans l’histoire). Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, qu’il aurait pu être. Bureau de Critique Philosophique, 1876.

— Alexander Ames and Mark Samuels Lasner. Grolier Club Bookplates Past & Present. With contributions by William E. Butler and Molly Dotson. Illustrated. The Grolier Club, 2023.