I have known Brendan Byrne for some year. We first encountered each other in digital mode on an obsolete platform*, but soon became friends IRL. His first two books had a select readership among whom I am lucky to count myself. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction points to some of the topics in his work. He has a new collection of short fiction, Another World Isn’t Possible, just out from Wanton Sun and available from bookshop.org or Barnes & Noble.
Henry Wessells : From a taxonomic point of view, your birthdate places you right at the edge of the digital abyss. Can recall a moment when you became aware of the changes occurring around you ?
Brendan C. Byrne : My microgeneration (born in the early 1980s, just missed being Gen X, didn’t know we were millennials until we were well into our 30s) is a bridge. As Joanne McNeil [author of Lurking and Wrong Way] has discussed, we can remember before the internet was available to consumers, but we came of age with it. I wasn’t too aware of technological change until I was 10 or so, which would make it 1992, but after that it seemed constant and at an unvarying speed. The internet seemed less an aberration than part of a natural progression, and I assumed that’s how things had always worked. Even cellphones didn’t seem like such a big leap, partially because they weren’t really all that useful at first. Most of my attention was focused after 2001 on the political situation, which seemed changing at a far more exponential rate than I ever could have imagined. I was also a college drop-out with very little money, so I was on the blunt edge of the technological curve, barely using the internet. At some point, I walked into my grandparents’ living room and saw my cousin watching a movie on a laptop, which deeply disturbed me. I hadn’t known such a thing was possible, and I didn’t understand why you would want it to be. Mid-summer 2007 sealed the deal, when I met a friend at the Blind Tiger in the West Village, and she’d just purchased the first iPhone. Again, I wondered why someone would want that. It took me just over a decade to finally acquiesce and purchase a smartphone, and I still don’t know the answer to that question.
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*For the record, on that obsolete platform Brendan first expressed the useful summer observation, The hammock always wins. [HWW]
Readers of the ’shelf will recall Michael Swaine as one of the impresarios of the Weedwalk : Book Walk in its two iterations in 2007 and 2009 . Only here will you read about the skill of bookshoeing :
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Your correspondent will be in London for the Firsts Book Fair, from 15 to 18 May, in the Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York’s Square, King’s Road, London SW3 4RY (at the Cummins booth C21). Come say hello.
This means that, for the first time in many years, your correspondent will not be on hand for that glorious annual manifestation of impermanence, Rhododendron Day, which will occur earlier this year. Here is a snap of the work in progress, earlier today : the blooms opened further during the warm day
— Winsor McCay. The Complete Little Nemo 1905-1927. / Alexander Braun. Winsor McCay A Life of Imaginative Genius [2014]. Taschen, [2022].
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— Raphael Cormack. Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age. A Forgotten History of the Occult. W. W. Norton, [2025].
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26 March / homeward bound
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Your correspondent will be far away, and farther, and off line for the next couple of weeks, and will report upon re-entry. [Image above, Zocotora insula, detail from Turcicum imperium, in a Blaeu atlas at the Beinecke.]
Looking ahead to April, the Brontë Society and Tartarus Press will be publishing A Book of Ryhmes by Charlotte Brontë, the manuscript book from 1829 now at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, in a fully illustrated edition with an introduction by Patti Smith, a scholarly essay by Barbara Heritage, and an afterword by Henry Wessells. Publication is scheduled for 21 April (birthday of Charlotte Brontë) and further details will be available at http://tartaruspress.com/bronte-a-book-of-ryhmes.html.
Also in April, the New York Antiquarian Book Fair will be held 3-6 April at the Park Avenue Armory. Come say hello (Cummins booth A3).
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recent reading :
— John Crowley. Little, Big [1981]. Harper Perennial paperback.
Just felt like re-reading it, again.
[added note : an old and trusted friend, carried to the end of the world and back ; always something new arises from the experience of reading Little, Big]
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William Morris on the shelves at Chenati
The library of Donald Judd at at La Mansana de Chinati/The Block in Marfa, Texas, has been catalogued in a neat interactive (and searchable) display. When we visited back in May 2015, I remember being struck by the extent of Judd’s holdings of another artist polymath, William Morris ; the detail above shows most of those holdings. [Thanks to CB for the link.]
— Walter Abish. 99 : The New Meaning. With photographs by Cecile Abish. Burning Deck, [1990].
The few books I have published, however, won me no fame. I do not complain of this, anymore than I brag of it, for I feel the same distaste for the “popular author” genre as for that of the “neglected poet” (from “What Else”)
— Philip K. Dick. Radio Free Albemuth [1985]. Mariner pbk. [printed 29 Jan. 2025].
/ re-reading, though I have been thinking about “the tyranny of Ferris F. Fremont” for some time, indeed for much of the past decade
— Peter Straub and Anthony Discenza. “Beyond the Veil of Vision : Reinhold von Kreitz and the Das Beben Movement” [in:] Conjunctions 65, 2015.
— Mark D. Tomasko. Wish You Were Here. Guidebooks, Viewbooks, Photobooks, and Maps of New York City, 1807-1940, from the collection of Mark D. Tomasko. Grolier Club, 2025.
Illustrated catalogue for an exhibition on view through 10 May 2025. The Viele Topographical Map (1865) displays all the watercourses and terrain of Manhattan before the city became part of the built environment.
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commonplace book :
“Elfland as implacable as ever, but now ruthlessly enmeshed in contemporary mortal affairs.” — Mark Valentine, at Wormwoodiana
— Michael Swanwick. A Fantasist’s Guide to Venice. Dragonstairs Press, 2025. Edition of 79.
Collection of nine anecdotes about Venice, life and death, and writing, by the author of “The Mask” (collected in Tales of Old Earth).
— Marjan Beijering. Op zoek naar het ongerijmde. Leven en werk van Janwillem van de Wetering (1931-2008). Asoka, [2021].
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‘we are a verb, not a noun’
— Mark Valentine. Fairy Chess [cover title]. 2025. Edition of 100.
Collects five poems written in response to words or phrases in the work of Veronica Forrest-Thompson, with allusions to Wittgenstein, Gauloises, libraries, and bicycles.
— —. Fire Signs. [cover title]. 2025. Edition of 100.
Visual record of found poetry from Sunny Bank Mill, Farsley near Leeds.
— 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].
— 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 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 :
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
— Francis Spufford. Cahokia Jazz [2023]. Scribners, [February 2024].
Cahokia Jazz is a Prohibition novel, a jazz novel, a detective novel, and an excellent science fiction novel set in an alternate America, and the best new book I read in 2024 (it was published in England last autumn but I did not see a copy).
The novel opens with the investigation of a gruesome crime by two Cahokia police detectives. Joe Barrow is a deracinated veteran of the an Indian orphanage school and the first world war. It’s a toss-up which was the harder school. Phin Drummond, is also a veteran of the trenches, a poor white opportunist and a joker in the face of death. Barrow plays piano in speakeasies and hotel nightclubs, and Cahokia Jazz rolls out to the plink and rumble of piano music from ragtime to Satie to Jelly Roll Morton.
How many ways can the dominant Anglo-Norman colonial history of North America be subverted ? It’s one thing to invoke a distinguished name, as Spufford does with the novel’s sly dedication ; it’s another to deliver the goods. The narrative of Cahokia Jazz is not rote or formulaic but organically rooted in language and anthropology and invented historical documents. To get technical for a moment, the Jonbar Point is a milder Columbian exchange and the introduction of a less virulent strain of smallpox to the Americas, so that indigenous populations survive in larger numbers and the political and cultural shape of the continental United States is altered. St. Louis remains a small rural trading post ; on the east back of the Mississippi, Cahokia is the industrial powerhouse and nexus of commerce and transportation. This is another America, but certain characteristics persist and Spufford plays the tensions well : the polity of Cahokia is a syncretic multi-ethnic Catholic commonwealth with an indigenous American aristocracy whose matriarchal line of succession contrasts with the Protestant merchant-industrialist capitalists slavering at the opportunities they seek to create by fomenting unrest and playing the Red Menace card. An investor says, “One hopes that when the, ah, obstacles of the present arrangements have been cleared away, the place will still preserve its character. As much as possible, anyhow.”
One arc of the novel is Joe’s recovery of his takouma (indigenous) heritage through his connections with the Sun and Moon. The Sun is the de facto ruler of Cahokia — Harvard-educated, cosmopolitan descendant of the long line of princes, with a Boston Brahmin drawl, “long hair and earrings and a face the color of old, oiled wood”, and someone deeply attentive to the power of symbols. “The Man” gives Joe his card (like the Provót “ASSIST” in Avram Davidson’s Eszterhazy tale “The Crown Jewels of Jerusalem”) to ensure the cooperation of the takouma population, and brings Joe along to witness the Green Corn Planting ceremony in a rural suburb. Joe meets the Moon — the niece of the Sun, stylish couturière and cultural benefactor of Cahokia. She tells him the tale of Thrown-Away Boy and his brother Lodge Boy, and he accompanies her to a dinner at the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Algonkian Hotel.
At any moment the relationship between the two detectives could edge into Laurel and Hardy — or Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, or the Keystone Kops — but it doesn’t. Cahokia is a gritty, stinking, beautiful city, seething in the build-up to a KKK riot, and as the detectives criss-cross the map in search of the murderer, they meet and interview individuals so distinctive — German gangsters, a tough-talking red-headed newspaper reporter, hicks, takouma crazies and political activists and poets and office workers — that the moments of wit and levity never tumble into slapstick. There are many pleasures throughout the novel, some involving a sense of alternate possibilities. Spufford integrates ritual and mystery into a twentieth-century America : the appearance of the Four Winds Society when Joe joins the detective bureau is a rite of welcome by his colleagues in masks, but the power of that society is revealed when the police are suddenly ushered out of a takouma neighborhood by citizens whose masks no longer seem so benign. Another delight is the long scene in the Algonkian’s Catawba Room, where Joe meets the takouma cultural elite and a visiting professor of Anthropology, sits in at the piano with the band, and dances with the Moon. The week of the novel is packed with incident.
“To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth”, as Conrad wrote : the effect upon the reader, that’s what it all comes down to. Cahokia Jazz makes it happen.
Readers of the ’shelf and friends in the New York area are invited to an event and presentation, this year honoring PEDRO PONCE, the winner of the Second Tom La Farge Award for Innovative Writing, Teaching and Publishing
It will be held on Friday 11 October 2024, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., at the Ground Floor Gallery of the Grolier Club, 47 East 60th St..(between Madison and Park aves.), NYC, NY 10022.
Pedro will be interviewed, discuss the writing of Tom La Farge, and read from his own work.
This annual award in the amount of $10,000 is designed to encourage and foster literary activity that combines serious play, imagination, erudition and innovative practice. To learn more about the Tom La Farge Award :
Zagava Books will be publishing Another Green World, a collection of short fiction expanded from the 2003 work with the same title and adding two previously uncollected stories. The book will be available in two states, a narrow format paperback and a numbered hardcover. Another Green World is in production for spring 2025 (now at the bindery) and can be pre-ordered here :
Extended Range; or, The Accession Label (2,000 words)
Ten Bears (8,400 words)
Of the first edition, Guy Davenport wrote,
“If you don’t believe in magic, read Henry Wessells and find out how wrong you are.”
Mark Valentine writes : “Henry Wessells delights in books and mysteries and writes with a zest for the arcane and a talent for the oblique and surprising.”
Zagava produce beautiful books and I am delighted to join the ranks of their authors.
The Endless Bookshelf will be filing despatches from Amsterdam and environs during the week of the A.I.B congress (words and images dropped in here as found).
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things are symbols of themselves / semiotics of Amsterdam
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vegan potato truffle cappuccino
[surprise innovation offered during the medley of the Daalder experience, vegan mode]
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Vondelpark
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Watcher at the edge of the cow pasture, in the Amsterdamse Bos.
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Herengracht
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‘Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres’
The earliest surviving manuscript of Caesar’s De bello gallico (On the Gallic War), ca. ninth century CE, at the Allard Pierson collection, University of Amsterdam.
At the other end of the table, a stack of more than 80 ‘feuilles volantes’ (1916-28) of Kaváfis (Cavafy), scattered leaves of his self-published Poems.
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Breestraat, Leiden
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color in the Rijksmuseum library
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— H. N. Werkman. Hot Printing. [Groningen, ca. 1936]. One of three known copies of a portfolio of prints and poems.
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