The Endless Bookshelf – Page 2 – simply messing about in books

recent reading : october 2024

— Richard Powers. The Future Is behind You. Oberlin Commencement Address 2023. The Letterpress at Oberlin, 2023. One of 14 copies, specially bound (edition of 105, all signed by the author). [Gift of VH].
“It may feel like a catastrophe. And yet it may also be the most clarifying thing, if you can step back and read it as part of a story that is much more than yours.”

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‘stealthy book killers’
— Craig Graham. At Night the Silverfish Move. Vagabond Books, 2023.
Snappy collection of three poems by bookseller Craig Graham: the title poem, “At Night the Silverfish Move (For Raymond Carver In Memoriam)”, dark, lethal, and funny; the predatory “Waiting for You”; and ending on the wistful optimism of “Juneteenth”. Graham is also author of Phantom Pain (2014). [Gift of the author].

— Henry James. The Turn of the Screw [1898]. Edited with an introduction and notes by David Bromwich. Penguin Books pbk.
The original serial publication, in Collier’s Weekly, had illustrations by John La Farge :

John La Farge for Collier’s, via Beinecke Library

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— Walter Klinefelter. The Fortsas Bibliohoax [1941]. Revised and Newly Annotated. Press of Ward Schori, 1986.
Anatomy of a celebrated and supremely successful hoax, a book auction catalogue from Belgium, 1840 : the collector, the books, the auction, entirely fictitious ; the original catalogue is now itself a rare book.

Billy Budd Symposium : 9 October 2024

In conjunction with the Grolier Club exhibition “Melville’s Billy Budd at 100”, a symposium will be held on Wednesday evening 9 October, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., at the Grolier Club, 47 east 60th street, in New York City. RSVP required (hybrid event with separate registration for virtual attendance, see link).

A panel of prominent Melvillians will address Melville’s masterpiece, each of them commenting on the centennial exhibition and its implications. This will be followed by a discussion on such topics as textual history, biographical context during Melville’s years of writing his “prose and poem concoction”, the text’s cultural journey in the 20th and 21st centuries, and its adaptations into theater, opera, film, and the visual arts, as well as areas for potential future exploration. The symposium will be moderated by Richard Brodhead, who taught English and American literature at Yale for 32 years before becoming president of Duke University. Brodhead’s writings on Melville include Hawthorne, Melville and the Novel, The School of Hawthorne, and New Essays on Moby Dick. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and chaired the Academy’s 2013 commission on the humanities. The speakers will be John Bryant, David Greven, and Grolier members G. Thomas Tanselle and Henry Wessells.

Dr. Bryant, Professor Emeritus of English at Hofstra University, is a leading Melville scholar. Founding editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies and director of the Melville Electronic Library, he received the Distinguished Editor Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2015. He has contributed several books and numerous essays on Melville, American literature, and scholarly editing, including Melville and Repose (Oxford) and The Fluid Text (Michigan). He is currently working on the last volume of his three-volume biography, Herman Melville: A Half Known Life (Wiley). Dr. Greven is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. His books include All the Devils Are Here: American Romanticism and Literary Influence (The University of Virginia Press, 2024), and a study of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Intimate Violence (Oxford University Press, 2017). Tom Tanselle, a Past President of the Grolier Club, is a bibliographical scholar who for many years was the vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University. He was also one of the three primary editors of the fifteen-volume Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville, and he has published many other books. Henry Wessells is a writer and antiquarian bookseller in New York. He is the author of A Conversation larger than the Universe (2018), a catalogue accompanying his Grolier Club exhibition of the same name, The Private Life of Books (2020), and A Melville Census, John Marr & Timoleon (in press, forthcoming 2025).

The Tom La Farge Award, Friday 11 October

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 :

https://www.thetomlafargeaward.com/

Refreshments will be served and the doors open at 6:30 pm.

The event is free and open to the public but seating is limited so please RSVP to : Wendy Walker, wwalker377@gmail.com

We look forward to sharing an evening of wonderful writing with you!

Wendy Walker
& the Tom La Farge Committee :
Corina Bardoff
Daniel Levin Becker
Sam Goodman
Michael Kowalski
Eliza Martin
Philip Ording

posted on behalf of the Committee by

Henry Wessells

vanishing post

Readers,

I try to post here on the ’shelf first, and sometimes then drop a link in the minuscule social media presence I maintain. I remember the early years of twitter with pleasure, but I scraped and escaped that platform a year ago ; I mothballed instagram at about the same time, abandoned in place and still accessible as there are videos relating to the Magazine of Poetry and readings at 725 Fifth avenue worthy of persistence (catalogue to come). I picked a mastodon iteration in late autumn of 2022 (what a strange couple of years it seems) : @endlessbookshelf@mastodon.iriseden.eu.

A small organic following evolved, but in recent months the iteration has been routinely unreliable and inaccessible to me : first I couldn’t upload images, and now I cannot even log on at all. Possibly it is user error, but equally possible, not. So I have established another account at : @endlessbookshelf@mastodon.social

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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Another green world by Henry Wessells

Zagava Books will be publishing Another Green World, a collection of short fiction much expanded from the 2003 work with the same title, and containing several previously unpublished stories. The book will be available in two states, a narrow format paperback and a numbered hardcover. Another Green World goes to press in January 2025 and can be pre-ordered here :

https://zagava.de/shop/another-green-world

The working table of contents includes the following stories :

From This Swamp (1,800 words)
Book Becoming Power (2,200 words)
Another Green World (800 words)
The Polynesian History of the Kerguélen Islands (3,300 words)
The Institute of Antarctic Archaeology & Protolinguistics (3,600 words)
Appraisal at Edgewood (2,000 words)
Hugh O’Neill’s Goose (3,800 words)
Virtual Wisdom (900 words)
Ten Bears (8,400 words)
The Windhill Bequest (3,000 words, outtake from a longer work in progress)
At the Sign of the Fanlight Window; or, H. P. Lovecraft, Bibliopole [with 2 black and white illustrations] [critical fiction] (900 words)
Wulkderk; or, Not in Skeat (1,750 words)
Extended Range; or, The Accession Label (2,000 words)
The Secret Door; or, David Hartwell’s Library (1,000 words)
The Tale of Brown Jenkin. A critical fiction (350 words)
The Black Lands (350 words)
The Elfland Prepositions (unpublished)
Cleaning Up Elfland (2,250 words)
The Barmaid From Elfland (2,250 words)
Dry Cleaner To the Queen of Elfland (2,400 words)
A Detective In Elfland (4,800 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.

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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dateline : Amsterdam

afternoon sun in Amsterdam, Leidseplein

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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.

At the Koninglijke Bibliotheek = KB, nationale bibliotheek :

Onze wereld is gebouwd met woorden en gevormd door mensen

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— Vincent van Gogh. Trois romans.

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At the Ritman Library, Keizersgracht 123, Amsterdam.

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Compagnieszaal, West-Indisch Huis, Amsterdam (this is the room where New Amsterdam was planned)

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rainbow at Schiphol

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In Memoriam : Tony Saunders

Tony Saunders
21 September 1961 – 11 July 2024

My friend Tony Saunders, artist, musician, and social worker, died in New York City earlier this summer. I wrote a note to be read at private memorial gathering :

Tony was my friend from the moment we met in sophomore year, to the tunes of Brian Eno’s Another green world and the Velvet Underground. If we had some similar high school background stuff, he was very much the City Mouse to my Country Mouse. He encouraged me to question myself, and Princeton, about how I was seeking to educate myself. This (and the music) were early, spontaneous gifts to me. If our paths crossed and diverged and crossed again, our friendship was constant, and regularly renewing. He was a brave person who looked at himself and chose sobriety, and his life was enriched by that choice. He kept making his art, in a variety of media, and on his terms, not following some temporary fashion. And he found a way to integrate his art into a later career as a social worker. He was very articulate about the playful presence of his approach. Not long after Tony died, MJ and I saw the Eno documentary, and both of us said, how much T would have appreciated that; but in truth he had already lived many of Eno’s insights into art and process. He was a great friend and we are lucky to know him and to remember him.

In 2016 Tony recorded a statement for his friend Michael Schickele that is worth looking for : https://matthewschickele.bandcamp.com/track/tony

late September mail bag

It feels like the end of summer here in Montclair, with the hop cones turning, and the tables at the farmers’ market asprawl with the last of the bulbous heirloom tomatoes and an abundance of pawpaws. And some interesting books in the the mail recently :

— Peter Bell. Two Weird Tales. Zagava, 2024. Collects “On the Apparitions at Gray’s Court”, a ghost story and haunted house in York, and “Labyrinth”, an uncanny tale set in one of the northern dales.

— John Crowley. Le Parlement des Fées. Traduit de l’américain par Doug Headline. 2 vols., Paris : Rivages / Fantasy, [1994, 1995]. The French edition of Little, Big (the pseudonym of the translator is a jest, for he is the son of crime novelist J. P. Manchette, hard-boiled trail blazer in the Gallimard Série noire, whose surname translates as : headline).

— Mark Valentine. The Thunderstorm Collectors. Tartarus Press, [2024]. Collection of twenty-nine essays and vignettes, including pieces on Arthur Machen, A. J. A. Symons, M. R. James, and lesser known figures from the “curious alleys and byways” of literature and folklore.

— David R. Gillham. Shadows of Berlin. Sourcebooks Landmark, [2022].