Category: Time
30 years of the Avram Davidson website, and other news
late september : more Innes, book fair, etc
It’s late September, and preparations are afoot for the Empire State book fair (Friday to Sunday (26-28 September) at Vanderbilt Hall near Grand Central Terminal. I continue to read my way through the box of Michael Innes, always with pleasure. If you come to the fair, come say hello, I’ll be there (at the Cummins booth). Copies of The Critical Mess by Michael Zinman will be available, as well as copies of my own books.
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recent reading :
— Michael Innes. Christmas at Candleshoe [1953]. Penguin Books, [1961].
— —. A Connoisseur’s Case [1962]. Penguin Books, [1966].
— —. A Family Affair [1969]. Penguin Books, [1972].
— —. Death at the Chase [1970]. Penguin Books, [1971].
— —. An Awkward Lie [1971]. Penguin Books, [1974].
— —. Appleby’s Answer [1973]. Penguin Books, [1978].
— —. Appleby’s Other Story [1974]. Penguin Books, [1978].
— —. Appleby and Honeybath [1983]. Penguin Books, [1984].
And with two additions to the titles in the box :
— Michael Innes. Appleby’s End. Gollancz, 1945. File copy in the (slightly faded) yellow dust jacket.
This is the best of them all, (though The Secret Vanguard runs a close second).
— Michael Innes. From London Far. Gollancz, 1946. File copy in the (slightly faded) yellow dust jacket.
Hilarious, madcap conspiracy of international art smuggling in a background of the end of the second world war, impeccably choreographed (with knowing aside to John Buchan), and a crazed mastermind whose secret lair is the wildest ever, and with a suitable catastrophe ending.
/ file under : Fleming (or : Bond) and his precursors
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how I spent my summer vacation, part ii
the first part in Copenhagen (see : here) and the second bit near the seashore :
(this is the etc. in the title)
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end of summer mailbag :
— Michael Swanwick. Life : a User’s Manual. [Dragonstairs Press, 2025]. Edition of 40.
Seven miniature essays, including The Abyss, which begins : “This is a test.”
— Michael Swanwick, with Marianne Porter. Under a Harvest Moon [2023]. [Dragonstairs Press, 2025]. Edition of 80.
Printed record of a work of landscape art, “written on leaves in and near cemeteries in Philadelphia” in the autumn of 2023.
september : Copenhagen, recent reading, &c
It’s September again, and the annual congress of the Association internationale de bibliophile (A.I.B.) will be held in Copenhagen 7-14 September. I am looking forward to the gathering, in particular the chance to see the Arnamagnæan manuscripts at the university of Copenhagen. And the surprises to be encountered in a city I’ve never before visited.
Watercolor scenes of Greenland, ca. 1860, from an album presented to Danish King Frederik VII [in the King’s Reference Library].
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On the island near the Opera House, Copenhagen.
View of the Opera House from the Amalienborg Palace.
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The House of the Future. [Copenhagen, 1929]. Drawing by Arne Jacobsen and Flemming Lassen, at the Royal Library in the Skatte / Treasures exhibition.
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The view from the hill, at Louisiana (Sweden on the distant shore).
/ file under : easy nature
Alexander Calder at Louisiana.
Richard Serra at Louisiana.
A.I.B. Copenhagen : book fair in Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek this morning
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current reading :
— 66 [Sixty-six] Manuscripts from the Arnamagnæan Collection. Edited by Matthew James Driscoll [and] Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir. Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, [2015].
Illustrated commentary and discussion of selected manuscripts collected by Icelander Árni Magnússon in the late seventeenth and earliest eighteenth century : the wellspring of Icelandic literature, and of mediaeval Danish and Icelandic history and culture.
— Christopher Moore. Anima Rising. A Novel. William Morrow, [2025].
recent reading :
— Michael Innes. Appleby on Ararat (1941). Penguin Books, [1961].
— Michael Innes. Appleby at Allington [1968]. Penguin Books, [1970].
It was, Appleby reflected uncharitably, the successful Englishman’s chosen route to going soft.
A Chapin Centenary, Michael Innes, & others : recent reading mid-august 2025
recent reading :
— 100 Years 100 Voices. The Chapin Library. [Edited by Anne Peale.] Williams College, [2025].
A beautiful and richly illustrated celebratory catalogue, presenting selected items from the Chapin Library at Williams College, established with gifts from Alfred C. Chapin in 1923. Chapin had been buying very good and interesting books from the best dealers for nearly a decade before the initial gift, and the collection has grown since, through purchase and donation. The Chapin Library had a dynamic founding librarian, Lucy Eugenia Osborne, and has always functioned as a teaching library for undergraduate instruction. This intention shines through in this anthology. The collection ranges from European incunables and an Eliot Indian Bible (1663) to an Audubon Birds of America purchased from James Drake, from a miniature printing press owned by John Fast to a recent risograph artist book (and four copies of the 1855 Leaves of Grass). The short pieces about the books are by alumni (long gone and recent), past and present curators and librarians, faculty members, and others. The photographs, by Nicole Neenan, are nicely reproduced. This is an important publication, a concise and compelling testimony about why books and libraries are central to education.
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— Timothy d’Arch Smith. The Stammering Librarian. [Strange Attractor, 2024]
I am delighted to have come across this collection of essays by bookseller, novelist, and bibliographer Timothy d’Arch Smith, whose novel Alembic (1992) appears in my Grolier Club exhibition checklist. The title essay and one or two of the other pieces link up directly to the concerns of his excellent memoir of bookselling in London in the 1960s, The Times Deceas’d (2003). There are memoirs of persons real and imaginary, including The Rev. T. Hartington Quince M.A., a Nicholas Jenkins / Anthony Powell pastiche now first published for a wider audience, though the British Library entry for the original appearance (in an edition of 15 copies in 1991, shelfmark YA.1992.b.6526), records Nicholas Jenkins as a “creator” ! Cricket, novelist Julia Frankau, school slang, and Aleister Crowley are other topics.
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Over the next several weeks it will become ever clearer that I have embarked upon reading Michael Innes, whose wordplay and inventiveness are a pleasure. John Clute alerted me to The Secret Vanguard, and Mark Valentine lists Appleby’s End among his short list of Finest Quality Old English Yarns. I am enjoying the variety of this box of mostly tatty paperbacks — after reading a POD edition of The Secret Vanguard I decided that I am happier with a worn paperback — and I will eventually do something than merely extract interesting phrases.
— Michael Innes. Stop Press [1939]. Penguin Books, [1958].
——The Gay Phoenix. A Novel [1976]. Book Club Associates, [1976].
——. Hare sitting up [1959]. Penguin Books, [1964].
Jean turned and faced him. ‘Could you possibly,’ she said, ‘cut the cackle? And tell me what all this is about?’
——. Appleby’s End [1946]. Penguin Books, [1972].
Abbott’s Yatter, King’s Yatter, Drool, Linger Junction, Sleeps Hill, Boxer’s Bottom, Sneak, Snarl, Appleby’s End, Dream
‘Mister,’ he said heavily, ‘did ’ee ever see a saw ?’
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— Michael Zinman. The Critical Mess. [Privately printed], 2025.
Compendium of articles by and about legendary collector of Americana Michael Zinman, whose “critical mess” theory is trickier than a casual glance might suggest :
“If you have enough stuff, good and not so good, you see things that someone collecting only fine copies will miss. This doesn’t in any way cast aspersion on the collector who desires the finest copy of a work, it’s just another way of approaching this world.”
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commonplace book : July 2025
1852 / 2025
“There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.”
— Frederick Douglass. Oration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester [. . .] July 5th, 1852. Published by Request. Rochester : Printed by Lee, Mann & Co, 1852.
The single most persuasive reminder that there is more than one history of America.
James Earl Jones performed the Oration, here :
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/7/4/what_to_the_slave_is_the
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“To live in luxury that does not belong to you is not to live in luxury at all. You realize you are an attribute of the luxury, not meant to luxuriate, meant instead to shine bright and cold like a diamond . . .”
— Corina Bardoff, “Barbara Blue”, in : North Anerican Review 310:2 (Summer 2025)
Bardoff’s story is winner of the Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction prize for 2025.
A nimble, tricky tale, integrating style & content : all the thousand scraps that Aimee has stitched together to craft something new that “Judith” can inhabit for a time before shedding it. There are some excellent tiny brilliants scattered along the way : there is no brother coming to the rescue (explicit from the beginning) ; and Bardoff diagnoses the pathology in calling a girl a girl past a certain age. I love the off-cadence heart / earth / hearth play in the central protective rhyme. This is even more transformative than Angela Carter, very finely done.
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in today’s mail (5 July)
— Mark Valentine. Borderlands and Otherworlds. Tartarus Press, [2025].
Colkection of 32 essays on books and reading, with an emphasis on the fantastic and supernatural in the interear years and into the 1950s. The original edition has sold out but a paperback is reported in production.
recent reading :
— Muchael Innes. The Secret Vanguard [1940]. An Inspector Appleby Mystery. Open Road Integrated Media, [POD 30 June 2025].
“For an artist has a right to work with quotations if they are his medium, and daisies and buttercups which were not these flowers purely but these flowers plus a little Cowper and a little Crabbe . . .”
— Sylvia Townsend Warner. Kingdoms of Elfin [1977]. Foreword by Greer Gilman with an Introduction by Ingrid Hotz-Davies. Handheld Press, [2018].
/ re-read, with delight
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 numerous illustrations, and 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).
12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m., in : Create / Collaborate
The Art of the SF Book Cover
John Clute & Michael Dirda
Panel description : The early divergence of American and British science fiction may best be witnessed in the works of UK authors in the 1930s and ’40s that have been called “scientific romances.” Unlike their pulp cousins in the US, these works lack the optimistic outlook of young square-jawed heroes out to conquer the galaxy. Instead, they offer anxiety about rogue scientists armed with Ultimate Weapons out to blackmail the world to either peace or servitude. In this presentation, famed fantastika theorist John Clute and Michael Dirda will discuss this less-recognized strand of SF.
[N.B. I will be running a slide show not dissimilar to the one for dust jackets.]
I should arrive at Readercon by midday on Friday. Temporary Culture will have a table in the book room on Friday and Saturday, and 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), the publications of the Avram Davidson Society, Sexual Stealing by Wendy Walker, and a variety of other books will be available for sale (cash, cheque, or paypal). If you see me, come say hello. There is always plenty of time for conversation.
Another green world by Henry Wessells, 2025

— Henry Wessells. Another green world. Zagava, 2025. Paperback issue. Pp. 180, [2, blank], [2, imprint]. Sage green wrappers printed in black, lower wrapper with blurbs by Guy Davenport, William Gibson, and Joanne McNeil.
On a very hot evening in late June, your correspondent went to Newark airport to expedite customs clearance and collect the first author copies of Another green world, newly re-issued by Zagava Books with two additional stories. It is a stylish book in a tall narrow format, set by Jan-Marco Schmitz in Minion pro with titles in Roadway.
The paperback is a pleasure to hold and read. The hardcover issue is in production, and a formal announcement of publication is expected. Zagava make nice books. Perhaps you will agree.
The table of contents is as follows (with note of the story‘s first publication) :
- From This Swamp. (The Starry Wisdom. A Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft. Ed. D. M. Mitchell. Creation Books, 1994)
- Book Becoming Power. (NYRSF, March 2000)
- Another Green World. (Nature, 15 June 2000)
- The Polynesian History of the Kerguélen Islands. (Exquisite Corpse 45 & 47, 1994)
- The Institute of Antarctic Archaeology & Protolinguistics. (Another green world, 2003)
- Appraisal at Edgewood (A Critical Fiction). (NYRSF, March 2001)
- Hugh O’Neill’s Goose. (Interzone, October 2001)
- Virtual Wisdom. (Exquisite Corpse 36, 1992)
- Wulkderk; or, Not in Skeat. (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 32, 2015, as “The Beast Unknown to Heraldry”)
- Extended Range; or, The Accession Label. (2015, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 35, 2016)
- Ten Bears; or, A Journey to the Weterings (A Critical Fiction). (NYRSF, October 2003)
Of the first edition, Guy Davenport wrote,
“If you don’t believe in magic, read Henry Wessells and find out how wrong you are.”
Joanne McNeil (author of Lurking and Wrong Way), writes, “Henry Wessells writes from beyond an ‘unfamiliar void’, where the natural world, dreams, language, myths, research, and rituals converge. The stories collected in Another Green World offer uncanny vitality out of the dark like dandelions sprouting from cracked New Jersey pavement. A delightful and enduring work of literary inquiry.”
A singular interview with Brendan C. Byrne
