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It's the new year, and perhaps, like Pepys, one of your resolutions is to begin a diary or a journal. I'm content to take a peek into the diaries of others, particularly when they are as beautiful as the ones in the new book, Beyond Words: 200 Years of Illustrated Diaries, published late last fall by Heyday Books in association with the University of California at Berkeley's Bancroft Library.

One reason I look forward to Christmas is that I'll stock up on winter reading. Every year for the past few years, my mother-in-law graciously buys my "want list" of current fiction and non-fiction, wraps them beautifully, and presents them in a gorgeous bag (this year, a designer fabric bag by Stephanie Barnes). This is an amazing gift, because while I do buy "new" books throughout the year (binge at the Harvard Bookstore for my birthday in the spring), and I receive about two dozen books from publishers for review, I don't often splurge the time or money on bedside reading. So I've taken to keeping a list of books I know I want to read but can wait until Christmas to get.

This year, I asked for ten titles, and ten I did receive. As you'll see, books about books and literary fiction are my main genres. Some were recommended by others, some I learned about through reviews, and some are part of "collections" within my library.

Every year FB&C publishes a holiday gift guide in its fall issue brimming with interesting book-related art, decor, and jewelry. There is always at least one book on the list, and this year, there were five! But that doesn't cover the great selection of bookish gift books out there this season (which means there are either more being published, or we're just paying closer attention). So here are eight more to entice you on, Cyber Monday and beyond.

A fabulous new book is out this week, and I can't stop talking about it. It's innovative, fun, perfect for lovers of history, literature, and illustrated novels. Here's the gist: author Caroline Preston has put together a "scrapbook novel" with text set against full-color pages of historical ephemera, both of which combine to tell the story of Frankie Pratt, a smart young woman who graduates high school in 1920 and goes on to college, Paris, and the writing life.

It's such a fresh idea, and each page is vivid and welcoming. You dive right into Frankie's story, told in typewritten snippets, and page through reading both the text and the images. The tone is smart and sassy. It's like reading an entire book of Anne Taintor.

The Twelfth Enchantment, the newest novel by David Liss, author of A Conspiracy of Paper and others, could inspire an amazing collection. That was the thought that kept occurring to me throughout this enjoyable but flimsy story.

The setting and the premise are interesting. It's England in 1812, and young Lucy Derrick is almost without a friend in the world, and she's being forced into marriage. That is until she learns how to cast magic spells from a neighbor who is--not to spoil the story--an otherworldly being. The Luddites are just beginning their uprising against industrialization, and Lucy gets swept up into an implausible good versus evil narrative in which she must save England from Luddites and the Undead by finding a magical book--"There is no book on earth so dangerous as the Mutus Liber. It secrets are devastating." All the while Lucy, a strong heroine, must preserve her heart and her virtue from the rakish Lord Byron. He plays a major role in the novel, which at first seems promising, but rather quickly dissolves into thin fantasy. William Blake also pops into the narrative a few times.

There is surely enough overlap between the book collecting world and the antiques world to make Maureen Stanton's new book, Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: Seeking History and Hidden Gems in Flea-Market America, a worthy read. Having "embedded" herself with a mid-ranking antiques dealer for several years, Stanton travels to fairs big and little--from Brimfield to second-rate yard sales--seeing both the exciting and the darker sides of antiquing.

The dealer Stanton shadows, Curt Avery (a pseudonym) is a brash character, extraordinarily impressive, if a little rough around the edges. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of antiques, learned in the trenches. Stanton picked well; Avery is great fun to listen to, and viewing the business through his eyes keeps the pace of the book brisk.

Take a look at the beautiful cover of John Piper in the Watkinson: An Illustrated Checklist -- it is letterpress printed and features a stylized representation of the baptistry window of Coventry Cathedral, designed by Piper.

This slim catalogue was just published in an edition of five hundred to honor the gift of William J. McGill, who donated his collection of books and ephemera related to the British artist John Piper to the Watkinson Library at Trinity College. McGill's essay about Piper and the collection explains why he--"I am not an art collector, but a book collector"--should be so interested in a British artist. By way of example, he discusses Brighton Aquatints, a folio of twelve etchings and aquatints, as well as Piper's collaborations with poet John Betjeman. An annotated checklist of some two hundred items follows.

This production is an example of the continuing good work of Richard Ring, head curator and librarian of the Watkinson Library at Trinity College and author of The Bibliophile's Lair blog (also a former FB&C book review editor!). In his introduction, Ring says he hopes the publication rallies students, that McGill's collection and donation might be an "inspiring model."

The twenty-four-page paperbound book can be purchased directly from Oak Knoll.

There was news last week that a "lost" Leonardo has been identified in an American collection and will go on exhibit this November at the National Gallery in London. One of only fifteen surviving oil paintings by Da Vinci, the re-discovered Salvator Mundi is a half-length figure of Christ that was painted around 1500. The painting was presumed destroyed, until a buyer with a great eye acquired it from an estate in 2005. It was then brought to New York art historian and dealer Robert Simon, and after a lengthy conservation treatment, several scholars concluded that it is indeed the lost Salvator Mundi.

I found this bit of news wonderfully coincidental, as I have just finished reading The Art Detective: Adventures of an Antiques Roadshow Appraiser by Philip Mould (the paperback came out this past spring). Mould has a thoroughly enjoyable voice, and he wins over his readers time and again with tales of a forged Norman Rockwell, a Rembrandt in disguise, and a long-lost Gainsborough that he found misidentified at a Los Angeles auction. The zeal of collector Earle Newton--who hoarded an immense collection of masters in a Vermont church that Mould was called in to catalogue--is something we all recognize.

I learned much from this book about the process of "overpainting"--in which a later artist actually paints over the piece at hand to hide wear and tear, to remove offensive items, or merely to freshen it up--and how important and effective conservation treatments can be in finding the masterpiece underneath. Not to mention superb research skills, such as those employed by Mould and his colleague Bendor Grosvenor as they pieced together the amazing provenance of a Queen Elizabeth I portrait.

After all--as I myself have learned with my own minor (but thrilling) art "discovery" last year--art collectors aren't so different from book collectors. We're all in it for the chase, and we all love making a discovery. 

Historian Manning Marable's recently published biography of Malcolm X (Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, Viking) is likely to be the definitive account of X's life for some time. Reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, and justly so. The book is impeccably researched and extensively documented. The larger accomplishment, however, is that Marable keeps Malcolm's story, one already famous from X's 1965 autobiography, so fresh and readable while not sacrificing any authority. Much has been made of some of the revelations about both X's sexuality and murder, but these never overshadow the man himself, who despite the flaws and contradictions Marable addresses -- indeed in many ways because of them -- comes off as more deeply human and admirable.

I have a secret admirer. Recently I received a copy of the Folger Library's new exhibition catalogue, Foliomania: Stories Behind Shakespeare's Most Important Book, without a note or any accompanying information. It is an impressive volume -- and what is immediately striking is the fact that its format and layout mirrors the First Folio. The colophon confirms this and describes the type, the design, the paper, and the binding. This is one example of how thoughtful editor Owen Williams has been in creating this catalogue.

The catalogue accompanies the Folger's new exhibit, Fame, Fortune, and Theft: The Shakespeare First Folio (open though Sept. 3 of this year). As Folger Shakespeare Librarian Stephen Enniss writes in the foreword, the exhibit takes up where the 1991 folio exhibit left off and reminds us, "what this iconic book has meant to readers over the years." Eighty-three First Folios are on exhibit (82 owned by the Folger, plus one private copy), "the most ever assembled in one place since their original dispersal from Jaggards' print shop."

Anthony James West, curator of the exhibit, provides a wonderful overview of the exhibit and the catalogue. He explains briefly what each essay covers -- one on the paper by Carter Hailey, one on bindings by Frank Mowery (with great images), one on type by Paul Werstine, one of the Droeshout Portrait of Shakespeare by Erin C. Blake and Kathleen Lynch. Steven Galbraith gives a brief history of the First Folio and the Folger Library -- one of the images that accompanies his essay shows the Folger's First Folio vault, practical and yet amazing to behold. West offers an essay on Constantine Huygens' copy of the FF, Steven Escar Smith covers the Shakespeare collections of William Evans Burton and Edwin Forrest, and Don Weingust looks at the FF as an actors' text. If I had to choose a favorite essay, though, it would be Georgianna Ziegler's essay on "Gentleman, Ladies, and Folios: The Lure of the Chase." It details the relationships between Folio collectors, particularly between Mr. and Mrs. Folger, the Halliwell-Phillipps family, and the Burdett-Coutts family. The catalogue ends with an excellent glossary of early printing and Shakespearean terms (e.g., collation, King's Men, vatman).

All together, this seems less like an exhibition catalogue than a 72-page, well-illustrated book of essays about the First Folio by the foremost experts in the field. The price is $24.95 at the Folger shop; I say take money out of thy purse for this one. 

On sale today is Paul Collins' newest book, Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked The Tabloid Wars. How do you know Paul Collins? FB&C readers may recall that he wrote for the magazine once or twice, that he is NPR's "literary detective," and that he is the author of such bookish titles as Sixpence House, a memoir of life in Hay-on-Wye, and The Book of William, a sleuthing history of the first folio.

This new book is an account of a grisly New York murder at the tail end of the nineteenth century. A human torso is found floating in the East River, severed limbs in Harlem, and a mysterious bloody pool in Long Island -- and who's piecing it all together but the newspapermen employed by Joseph Pulitzer (for the World) and William Randolph Hearst (for the Journal). The vile details of this murder mystery created the perfect storm for tabloid journalists, who, in many cases, worked harder and better at locating evidence and suspects than the police. Of course, they also plotted against each other, fighting for higher circulation.

Though a different case, Collins' true crime tale is reminiscent of Patricia Cline Cohen's The Murder of Helen Jewett. His publisher also makes an apt comparison to Larson's Devil in the White City. Which is to say that this is a book that has been thoroughly researched and has solid history within, and yet it is far from a dry, scholarly tome. The rich cast of characters -- a married midwife murderess among them -- is better than one finds in fiction. Collins is a skillful writer, and his narrative zips the reader from beginning to end.

Murder of the Century will keep you up at night, borrowing time from tomorrow to read ten more pages. Look no further for a summer read that will entertain and educate in the way that only the best books can.

There may be some stalwart bibliophiles who cringe at the thought of altered books, but carefully practiced, it's an art that produces stunning book objects. In her new book, The Repurposed Library: 33 Craft Projects That Give Old Books New Life, Lisa Occhipinti takes "orphaned books" and turns them into such household items as a chandelier, a lampshade, and a "narrative vase." The "story time clock" is one of my favorites, and the "lettered wreath" made up of sculpted paper rosettes would be wonderfully welcoming on any book lover's door.

The decoupage "biographical bracelet" would be a great project for girls, and the "kindle keeper" (complete with library pocket) perfect for the bibliophile who enjoys his e-reader as well as old books. The illuminated switch plate looks simple enough for anyone to attempt and would make a neat accent to bookish decor.

Occhipinti is responsible about discussing the types of books she uses--bookstore remainders and unwanted ex-library books--and gives a brief overview of collectible books and how to avoid using a valuable book for an art project in chapter one, "Books, Tools & Techniques." She acknowledges that "spotting rare and collectible books is an art form in and of itself, replete with loopholes and expert-only savvy," and she offers some basic instruction. I have one minor criticism here. She suggests that, when in doubt, you consult your local librarian. No offense to any local librarian, but that's a terrible idea; with very few exceptions, local public librarians have absolutely no training in rare books (and are far too busy with summer reading programs and reference queries). If you don't have a knowledgeable bookseller nearby, a few good searches on Abebooks or Biblio might be preferable.

Occhipinti's "repurposed" books are truly beautiful art objects, and whether or not you're crafty enough to give them a try yourself, her book is thoroughly enjoyable.

To read more about Occhipinti, take a look at this Q&A from the New York Times.

I sit in my living room and watch the Corps of Engineers open the Morganza Floodway releasing the swollen Mississippi River into the Atchafalaya Basin inside Louisiana's Cajun Country. The Basin is the largest river basin swamp in the country and just a month ago I spent a weekend there with my sister and brother-in-law, Misha and Ed Guirard, when Ed's uncle, Greg Guirard, stopped by to give me his book Atchafalaya Autumn II published last October. 

While we're led to believe any job is better than no job, young twenty-something Laura Dodd, a New Orleans native, had a different opinion. She sent an email to her contacts asking about their "career" experience. The message went viral and the emails began to mount with people confessing frustrations in their careers. Dodd decided to bring together what she called, "honest, candid, over-a-beer style conversations about what work is really like." And how to tackle finding a meaningful career in a lackluster job market. Her book is titled Dig This Gig. Find Your Dream Job--or Invent It. 

The New Orleans Tennessee Williams Literary Festival was a huge success staying true to  Williams' relentless drive for perfection. One of my favorite sessions are the master classes where experts from around the country offer their expertise in various literary genres. Jane Ciabattari, president of the National Book Critics Circle, award-winning fiction writer, prolific book reviewer, widely published journalist and occasional literary blogger has watched the transformation of book review mediums from a front row seat. Inside the Historic New Orleans Collection on Royal Street, lovers of the written word gathered for a lesson on how to cut through the clutter and keep abreast on new books hitting the literary market.

    

Once in a while a serious literary novel comes along that appeals to the very bookish among us, even if it doesn't focus on academic manuscript sleuths (for example, Possession) or book dealers (The Cookbook Collector), or medieval scribes (The Name of the Rose). The recently published debut novel, Mr. Chartwell, by Rebecca Hunt is one such book.

The premise of the book is, at first, hard to swallow. It's England, 1964, and Esther Hammerhans, a young library clerk at the House of Commons, has advertised for a boarder. What shows up on her doorstep is a big black dog who calls himself Mr. Chartwell. He walks, he talks, he drinks gin; little by little, Esther lets him in.

Winston Churchill enthusiasts will understand the 'black dog' reference, as the great man once characterized his depression as such. Indeed the 89-year-old Churchill plays a prominent role in the novel, and it is in portraying the struggle and desperation of these two characters--Winston and Esther--that Hunt is at her best. She certainly takes risks with this novel, which she pulls off for the most part. Her agility with language is impressive, and Mr. Chartwell can be a very satisfying read for those willing to play along.

Published first in the UK, Mr. Chartwell was praised as "daring," "quirky," "original, tender, and funny," by the national papers. Here, reviews seemed mixed. Publishers Weekly found it "very original" and "clever," while Tadzio Koelb for the New York Times Book Review thought it "strained."

Judge for yourself. To read an excerpt published by the New York Times earlier this month, go here.

I've always been a big fan of Stephanie Bruno's weekly newspaper column the "StreetWalker." An architectural historian and preservation consultant, R. Stephanie Bruno is a contributing writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. In her recent guidebook titled New Orleans Streets: A Walker's Guide to Neighborhood Architecture, she assembles her best work and explores the true culture of the Big Easy. Imagine a memoir for a city so full of life that it can only be told through its architecture and the people who live there. Bruno has a whimsical appetite for the city she loves, and her prose will delight both locals and tourists alike. From vivid descriptions of the storied streetscapes to chatting with curious neighbors...beyond the obvious...beyond the iron-laced balconies, it's an intimate look inside our sacred neighborhoods.

It's difficult to believe that it's been nearly four years since Jasper Fforde's last Thursday Next book, but the sixth installment in the series, One of Our Thursdays is Missing has arrived at last (from Hodder & Stoughton in the UK and Viking in the US).

The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books is a book of interest to we bibliophiles, published this month by Soft Skull Press. Co-editors C. Max Magee (of The Millions) and Jeff Martin, call it a collection of "inventive, thoughtful, and funny pieces in which Jonathan Lethem, Rivka Galchen, Benjamin Kunkel, Joe Meno, Deb Olin Unferth, and many others consider the landscape as the literary world faces a revolution, a sudden change in the way we buy, produce, and read books." They continue in their introduction, "With the advent of e-readers, near infinite data storage capability, and a shift to a more sustainable and digitized culture, a sea change is upon us. Will books survive? And in what form? Can you really say you're reading a book without holding one in your hands? These and other similar questions are guiding the current and sometimes heated conversations going on in bookstores, universities, libraries and living room book clubs." City Arts has a short review, and this one-minute book trailer is fun to watch.


 

One hundred years ago, naturalist John Muir published his most famous work, My First Summer in the Sierra. (Here he is posing for B. Greene, just two years before that). It's one of those books that has become part of the nature/environmental canon, alongside Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Henry Beston, John Burroughs, Aldo Leopold, and Edward Abbey. That is to say, it's one worth reading, and if that's piqued your interest, there's a new illustrated edition out today, with photography by Scot Miller.  

The text, of course, can be had anywhere. What this edition offers is seventy-two gorgeous photographs, taken over the past twelve years. Flora, fauna, landscape -- the same panoramas that Muir himself viewed. What's more, several pages from Muir's "Sierra Journal" manuscript (the original of which is housed at the Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library) are reproduced herein; he had lovely handwriting, certainly neater than Thoreau's scrawl. Several of Muir's sketches are also seen here for the first time in print.

Miller, has been involved in three other photobooks of this nature (no pun intended): Walden: 150th Anniversary Illustrated Edition of the American Classic, Cape Cod: Illustrated Edition of the American Classic, and First Light: Five Photographers Explore Yosemite's Wilderness. He and his wife own and operate Sun to Moon Gallery, a fine arts gallery in Dallas, Texas. He will be doing several book-related presentations and signings, particularly in California and Texas, from now until the book's formal centennial in June.

Visit the book's website to read more, see some of the stunning photography (limited edition prints are also available for sale), and/or watch a book trailer. 

Bring home a taste of New Orleans in dishes created by some of our culinary wizards. We'll start with Poppy Tooker, a New Orleans culinary activist, along with her friends at the Crescent City Farmer's Market. Donald Link will share his magic grown from his culinary roots in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Nationally acclaimed Chef John Besh revisits his childhood hunting and fishing the Southeast Louisiana bayous, while Chef David Guas finishes things off with tasty, tempting desserts reminiscent of old Style New Orleans. Gather family and friends for a supper club taking turns drawing one dish from each book.

    

The Historic New Orleans Collection (THNOC), housed in a complex of historic buildings in the French Quarter, seeks to preserve the history of culture in New Orleans and the entire Gulf Coast. Just blocks from St. Louis Cathedral, the Williams Research Center on Chartres Street, houses more than 30,000 library items including books, pamphlets, periodicals, broadsides, sheet music, and theater programs. Open to the public, students, researchers, authors, and historians have access to more than two miles of documents and manuscripts, a microfilm collection and 400,000 photographs, prints, drawings, and paintings.

And from this massive collection comes one of the most ambitious THNOC projects, Furnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian Furniture, 1735-1835.

 

Inside the graceful pages of Stealing Magnolias: Tales from a New Orleans Courtyard, Debra Shriver shares her love affair for New Orleans and her French Quarter home. The poetic journey captures the city's lusty European flair with the whimsical memories of Mardi Gras, the deep-seated traditions of Southern ambitions, and the grand pursuits of dining and imbibing.

Elena Mauli Shapiro's 13, rue Thérèse (Reagan Arthur, 2011) is a beautifully-designed meta-narrative about an American academic in Paris who "discovers" in his office file cabinet a box containing a small archive of family photos, letters, and personal artifacts from the early decades of the 20th century. As he works his way through the box he finds himself becoming more and more intertwined with the original owners of the items within, and also developing a strange connection with his secretary (whom, we learn very quickly, had in fact planted the box for him to find).

While the threads of the story itself didn't happen to be all that interesting to me, I found Stratton's process of delving into the box and discovering its various component pieces very intriguing, and the way Shapiro has integrated illustrations and typographical decorations into the text is nicely done indeed.

Worth a read just for the design, honestly.

I have decided to start the new year off with a few books that came to my attention a bit too late to make my holiday roundups, but which are eminently worthy of notice all the same. Think of each one as a little present for yourself; you won't be disappointed.

The Horse: From Cave Paintings to Modern Art, by Jean-Louis Gourand, Michel Woronoff, Henri-Paul Franefort, and others; Abbeville Press, 400 pages, with 328 full-color illustrations, boxed, $150.

So you didn't get a pony for Christmas, too bad, but you can still treat yourself to what is easily the most magnificent art book devoted to the horse that I have ever seen, and the best part is you don't have to feed it or clean out its stall. Arguably the most beautiful animal in nature, the horse has inspired creative expression for many centuries, with magnificent examples in a multitude of media to be found in the prehistoric caves of Lascaux, the sands of Mesopotamia, and depicted over the generations by cultures as varied as Babylonian, Scythian, Chinese, Greek, and Roman. First published in France in 2008, this remarkable book, newly translated and issued in a lovely boxed edition, pays homage to the horse in all its glory, with more than 300 color illustrations and thirteen learned essays to make the case. The horse, John Louis Gourand writes, is "undoubtedly the most frequently represented living being in art after man himself, from the very earliest of times." Abbeville Press lives up to its well-earned reputation for producing art books in the grand tradition; the illustrations are superbly chosen, and vividly reproduced.

George Washington's America: A Biography Through Maps, by Barnet Schecter; Walker, 304 pages, $67.50.

Known most famously, of course, as hero of the Revolution and first President of the United States, George Washington also worked as a surveyor early in his life, and had a lifelong relationship with maps. At his death, many of the charts he had owned and used were bound into an atlas that eventually made its way to the Map Collection of Sterling Library at Yale University, a corpus that provides the framework for this most interesting examination. In addition to the maps he purchased, Washington drew a number of his own that have survived. "These visual images," historian Robert Schecter writes, "place us at the scene of his youthful ambition and his later battles--in the landscapes and on the waterways that were the theater of war in Britain's North American colonies, and that sparked the imagination and desires of the preeminent founder of the United States." Once independence was secured, the maps helped shape Washington's "vision of America as 'a rising empire in the New World.'"

The Encyclopedia of New York City: Second Edition, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson; Yale University Press, 1,561 pages, $65.

First published in 1995, this wonderful, one-volume encyclopedia about the city that never sleeps was one of the most successful books in the long history of the Yale University Press, prompting the preparation of this completely updated effort. The World Trade Center no longer anchors the Manhattan skyline, to cite just one major change, and Bernie Madoff was not a household name back then. The E-Z pass hadn't been invented yet either, and the New York Giants hadn't shocked the New England Patriots in the 2008 Super Bowl. These are just a few of the 800 entries to be added to the mix, bringing the total to 5,000. Each is written by an acknowledged authority, be it in sports, entertainment, finance, architecture, or art, and each is a delightful little essay in its own right about every manner of New York person, place, institution, and curiosity, spanning pre-history to the present, and covering all five boroughs.This is one of my very favorite reference books, all spiffed up, and relevant as ever.

'Tis the season for this collection of mystery stories edited by Otto Penzler, editor, collector, and longtime owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. Christmas at the Mysterious Bookshop contains seventeen zippy tales by the likes of Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) and Mary Higgins Clark. For lovers of mysteries, or just bookshops, this is a top-notch set of stories. Manuscript dealers are murdered, collectors take hostages, and authors kill for a good story. "The Theft of the Rusty Bookmark" by Edward D. Hoch is a fun read in which a murder weapon is lost when the deceased's personal library is sold. "My Object All Sublime" by Anne Perry is full of tingling tension, as a rejected writer confronts Penzler in his private study. "The 74th Tale" by Jonathan Santlofer is a genuinely creepy account of a loner who buys a mystery and uses it as a manual.

For collectors, there is an interesting backstory to the book. Every holiday season since 1993, Penzler has commissioned an original short story from a leading mystery writer. The only directive: some of the action in the story must take place in the Mysterious Bookshop. Penzler printed each story in pamphlet form, limited to 1,000 copies, and mailed them out as gifts to customers. A hot ticket for mystery collectors today! All of these tales are collected in this volume.

And if you are simply dying for a signed edition, there's a holiday party this Thursday (Dec. 9th) at the Mysterious Bookshop (now located downtown at 58 Warren St.) at which Penzler and many of the authors in this anthology will be present to autograph copies. 

My Reading Life, by Pat Conroy; Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 333 pages, $25.

One of America's truly great storytellers, the incomparable Pat Conroy, is also a determined bibliophile--indeed one of the first signings of this delightful paean to reading was held last week at the Captain's Bookshelf in Asheville, NC--so it is no big surprise that he has written a number of essays over the years about his particular passion for books and authors. The fifteen pieces gathered here form a whole of Conroy's reading life thus far, and are a joy to pick up at any point. "Books are living things, and their task lies in their vows of silence," he writes in one chapter that will be of particular interest to collectors, his association with the Old New York Book Shop in Atlanta. (He admits to having bought up to five thousand books there.) "I could build a castle from the words I steal from books I cherish," he writes in a tribute to the librarians of his early childhood. Everything this man of the South writes, he writes from the heart. The bookish drawings by Wendell Minor that garnish these lovely ruminations are a pleasant plus to one of the outstanding books about books of the season.

Jazz; photographs by Herman Leonard; Bloomsbury, 303 pages, $65.

The black and white jazz photographs of Herman Leonard, shot during the 1940s and '50s have become the stuff of legend. Louis Armstrong, Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Kenny Clark, Stan Getz, Modern Jazz Quartet--they're all here in this definitive collection, a veritable feast of musical images. "He was a master of jazz," music historian K. Heather Pinson wrote earlier this year on the occasion of Leonard's death at the age of 87, "except his instrument was a camera."

First Family: Abigail and John Adams, by Joseph J. Ellis; Alfred A. Knopf, 299 pages, $27.95.

Give Joseph Ellis all the credit in the world for committing his considerable skills to a fresh evaluation of the correspondence exchanged between John and Abigail Adams over the course of their marriage during what we can all agree were eventful times, and for demonstrating how the 1,200 surviving letters of theirs constitute "a treasure trove of unexpected intimacy and candor, more revealing than any other correspondence between a prominent American husband and wife in American history." David McCullough made full use of these same letters in his magisterial biography of John Adams a decade ago, though the canvas there was monumental. Here, it is focused strictly on the remarkable relationship as revealed through the letters. The writing, of course, is superb, as always, and a joy to engage.

Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution, by Charles Rappleye; Simon & Schuster, 625 pages, $30.

Collectors of Americana know Robert Morris as one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and covet examples of his autograph accordingly, but chances are that few know much about the Philadelphia entrepreneur's role in the founding of the Republic. According to historian Charles Rappleye, Morris was unsurpassed in his efforts to fund the rebellion; after the war, he served in the Continental Congress and United States Senate, and was the first Superintendent of Finance, or treasury secretary. His methods were not always above reproach, however, and a dramatic downfall led to a resounding fall from grace. All in all a ripe prospect for a modern biography, which Morris gets in this thorough examination of his life.

Madison and Jefferson, by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg; Random House, 809 pages, $35.

Dual biographies can be problematic undertakings, but Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, both respected historians and the authors separately of other books on early America, have combined here to produce a most readable account of a fifty-year friendship, perhaps one of the most consequential acquaintances in American history. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were Virginians who each served as President of the United States, we all know that, but their relationship, as profiled here, was as much symbiosis as it was mentor-protégé. Burstein and Isenberg had made a significant contribution to the literature of our Founding Fathers.

Beetle: The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith, by D. K. R. Crosswell; University Press of Kentucky, 1,008 pages, $39.95.

You could almost regard this huge biography as a bookend to the Morris volume cited above in that it looks at a significant player in American history who pretty much excelled away from the spotlight, in this case as Chief of Staff during World War II to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. As the consummate military man, Ike was legendary for delegating authority to key officers, and the aide who rode herd on all of them was Walter Bedell Smith. In 1950, Smith was Harry Truman's choice to head the CIA in 1950; three years later, his former boss, by then president, named him Undersecretary of State, in which capacity he oversaw the partitioning of Vietnam into two nations, and implemented a plan for a coup d'etat in Guatemala. This is the first biography of his life, one long overdue.

Encyclopedia of the Exquisite: An Anecdotal History of Elegant Delights, by Jessica Kerwin Jenkins; Nan Talese/Doubleday, 311 pages, $27.95.

No big surprise that Jessica Kerwin, writer for Vogue, thanks "legions of librarians" in the acknowledgments she appends to this charmingly eclectic compendium, given the wealth of arcania on subjects ranging from the balloon adventures of the Montgolfier Brothers in the eighteenth century, to the history of women's lingerie, to the tradition of dining outdoors known as alfresco. It is, in short, an encyclopedia of very interesting things, and the documentation is impressive. The writing is elegant, the style accessible; altogether a fun book.

Looking for some stocking stuffers? Here are five beauties I particularly recommend, with more to follow in the weeks to come.

Venice: Pure City, by Peter Ackroyd; Nan Talese/Doubleday, 403 pages, $37.50. Writing about the life of a city as if it were a living, breathing organism is a specialty of the estimable English writer Peter Ackroyd, his "London: The Biography" of a few years back being an exemplar of the form; with "Venice: Pure City," he offers a worthy companion. As a place seemingly set apart from the rest of Italy--Venice is a cluster of islands in a lagoon, really--the city's insularity has given it a degree of independence. "The Italians do not really think of Venice at all," Ackroyd writes, "it belongs to some other realm of fancy or of artifice." His blend of detail and atmosphere is always in perfect balance, his narrative skill apparent in every chapter.

For those of you who read and enjoyed Anne Trubek's essay on Paul Laurence Dunbar from our summer quarterly, I'm happy to report that Anne's book, A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses (University of Pennsylvania Press), is being published this month and is available to order from the bookseller of your choice. She'll also be doing readings/signings in Oberlin, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Lenox, NYC, and Washington DC, so check out her website if you might be able to attend one.

I was lucky enough to receive a galley of the book, and I so thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Anne takes us to Whitman's house in dilapidated Camden, NJ; to the slick shrine to Hemingway in Key West, FL; to the 'boyhood home' of Mark Twain in Hannibal, MO. At each stop, she takes a good look around and tries to separate fact from fiction, writer from building. It's a travelogue combined with literary history, written with humor and humanity.

If you've been reading along with me for the past year, you may remember that I'm a big fan of Thoreau. I've made the "literary pilgrimage" to Walden Pond maybe eight or ten times, even brought my then one year old on a tour of the Emerson House on one of the trips. Bad idea. In one of the chapters in A Skeptic's Guide, Anne goes to Concord--former home to so many literary luminaries--and finds herself "preternaturally anti-Concordian." I laughed at this, as I can completely understand how odd our strange devotions to these writers' haunts can be, and yet I can't help but associate that feeling with the desire to buy first editions. I suppose I'm hoping to see or experience something the way that author saw it, something very personal, like the view from her library window, his hat hanging on the hook by the door, or the first edition of his first book, if only for a moment.

I am delighted to report the publication of two books that I have been eager for some time to see appear between hard covers, having had the opportunity to know a bit about them beforehand, and to have had communication with each of the authors as they were works-in-progress. Happily, they are everything I expected they would be, gracefully written in both instances, wisely reasoned, and a genuine pleasure to read.

Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, by William Powers; Harper, 267 pages, $24.99.

A former staff writer and media critic for the Washington Post, William Powers
has written extensively on every manner of communications technology, developing the premise of this book--and coming up with the splendid title--while a Fellow at Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press in 2006. Powers is exceedingly savvy when it comes to navigating his way about the digital world, and while he is not about to abandon its wondrous applications in any way, shape, or form, he has chosen to step back a bit, take a deep breath, and pay attention to the wisdom of our cultural forebears. "The interior struggle" of "information overload," he writes--the phrase was presciently coined in the 1970s by Alvin Toffler--"is having a dramatic impact in our personal and family relationships." Constant connectivity with the entire world--text messages, cellphones, video streams--leads him to ask the fundamental question: "What is the point anyway?" This is neither a preachy polemic nor a boring diatribe, and while he calls on Plato, Shakespeare, Thoreau, and others for guidance, he does so with style, humility and elan. "Every space is what you make it," he concludes. "But in the end, building a good life isn't about where you are. It's about how you decide to think and live. Place your index finger on your temple and tap twice. It's all in there." Links to various reviews and broadcast interviews are available on Powers' website.

The Groaning Shelf and Other Instances of Book Love, by Pradeep Sebastian; Hachette India, 295 pages, 12.99 GBP ($20 US).

A well-known literary columnist in India whose many pieces for major publications are available on the Internet, Pradeep Sebastian has entered the books about books genre in impressive fashion, with a very nice collection of his erudite pieces on a striking variety of subjects, many of them previously published in different form, though a few--including a generous profile of yours truly he calls "The Collector of Collectors"--appearing here for the first time. How can a reader of the Fine Books blog not be simpatico with someone who makes this admission: "Holding a book but not actually reading it gave me time (and put me in the mood) to reflect on the act of reading and the physicality of the book; the book as material object." Or someone whose favorite Sunday afternoon ritual is take volumes off his groaning shelves and rearrange them in a new order? "Should I abandon the by-author arrangement and categorize them by subject matter?" Very heavy concerns, indeed. The book has just been released by the India division of Hachette, parent company of Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt. It should be available in U.S. outlets shortly; for now it can be ordered through Amazon.UK.

Earlier this week, the exhibition Money on Paper opened at Princeton University. Looking at bank notes as an art form, curator of numismatics Alan Stahl puts on display several treasures, including the recently discovered bank note engraving of a grouse by John James Audubon. The 1763 New Jersey shilling seen here (printed by James Parker of Woodbridge, courtesy of Princeton University) is one of the fascinating examples of nature printing in the exhibit. According to the exhibition's website, "the most inventive printer of paper money of the time was Benjamin Franklin, who devised a system of transferring the vein patterns of tree leaves to printing plates to foil counterfeiters. The Princeton exhibition includes a large selection of Franklin's nature-print notes." Reading this prompted me to reach for a new book I recently received from Mark Batty Publishers -- Impressions of Nature: A History of Nature Printing by Roderick Cave (mbp, $85). There are several pages devoted to nature printing techniques in colonial America with examples of bank notes. Cave writes, "Franklin adopted various devices such as the use of paper incorporating flecks of mica, or pieces of coloured thread -- methods still sometimes used by securities' printers -- but in the adoption of nature printing he was unique."

Impressions of Nature is a beautiful book, brimming with full-color illustrations. Cave impressively relays the early history of nature printing, its spread through Europe, the work of major printers, and its applications in photography and graphic design. There seems to be something for everyone in this splendid volume.

Richard Goodman, known to you all as a long-time FB&C contributor, has published his third book, A New York Memoir, which hits stores this week. The story begins in 1975, when Goodman arrived in New York City, where he lives today. It follows the author as he meets remarkable people and grapples with the city's ups and downs. Susan Vreeland, author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue, said of the book, "So much more than an engaging memoir of New York, this is a heart laid bare. One can learn much from this man who feels tender toward cobblestones and old women, nostalgic about a daughter's childhood, frightened at the prospect of dying alone—a rare individual who, with honesty, sensuousness, and keen observation, turns yearning and remembrance into art."

Taking this opportunity to chat with Richard about something aside from rare books and deadlines, I asked him about creating this memoir and about his life in New York City.

Fine Books Press, an imprint of FB&C magazine, recently published Nick Basbanes' About the Author: Inside the Creative Process. Here's a glowing review from the July issue of the Midwest Book Review:

Nicholas Basbanes was literary editor of the Worcester, Massachusetts Telegram & Gazette from 1978-1991, in which capacity he was able to interview hundreds of authors whose publicity tours took them through the city of Boston. In "About the Author: Inside the Creative Process", Basbanes draws upon his conversations with an immense diversity of literary greats ranging from Alfred Kazin, Arthur Miller, John Updike, and Toni Morrison, to Doris Lessing, Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Simon and Alice Walker, to explore the motivations and processes that authors experience and utilize to create their novels, poetry, histories, and other literary works. A fascinating read from beginning to end, this 246-page compendium is as informed and informative as it is insightful and inspiring. Thoughtful and thought-provoking, "About the Author: Inside the Creative Process" is highly recommended reading and a seminal work for both academic and community library Literary Studies reference collections.

Well-done, Nick! About the Author is available in both a trade edition and a signed limited edition in the FB store. 

FB&C readers will be pleased to learn that the new edition of Baldwin's diary is now available (it was excerpted in our spring issue). Titled A Place in My Chronicle: A New Edition of the Diary of Christopher Columbus Baldwin, 1829-1835, it is a diary of the American Antiquarian Society's first librarian. This edition includes more than 160 illustrations. In a blog post last week announcing the publication, co-editor Caroline Sloat wrote, "Baldwin took up his appointment as AAS librarian on April 1, 1832, and thereafter followed his passions for books, history, and collecting. He admired scholars such as the young Jared Sparks who was embarking on an edition of George Washington's papers. He happily labored in 90 degree temperatures in a smelly Boston oil warehouse to pack pamphlets and a missing volume of Cotton Mather's diary that would fill a wagon, only to be deflated when he returned to Worcester by the dismissive reaction of the Council to his treasure. (They later changed their minds.)"

This book is the first publication in honor of AAS's 2012 bicentennial. It can be purchased online at AAS or through Oak Knoll Books.  

Back in December, Christopher Lancette wrote a profile for us of author John Pipkin, who had just won the Center for Fiction's First Novel prize for Woodsburner. The novel is based on a true historical event, when Henry David Thoreau--known to us all as the nature-loving, proto-environmentalist--accidentally set a huge forest fire outside of Concord, Massachusetts.

The minute I read that profile, Woodsburner went on my wish list. A few weeks later, that wish came true, and yet the book sat on my bedside table until I could find the time to read it. It's a lovely novel. Supporting Thoreau is a full, intriguing ensemble cast of nineteenth-century characters, including, as Chris pointed out in his article, a Boston bookseller who dabbles in pornography and an illiterate book collector, who tucks away some of the great first editions of the time period on her single bookshelf.

Kirkus Reviews called the novel "Pulitzer Prize material" (though this year's Pulitzer for fiction went to Paul Harding's Tinkers, also now on my wish list). Indeed, this is the kind of novel that seems rare these days. I don't often post book reviews here, but if you enjoy historical fiction or literary fiction, take a chance on this one. 

Two recent books may be of interest to book collectors, dealers, and historians. Book Makers: British Publishing in the Twentieth Century was just released by the British Library. In the press release, the author, Iain Stevenson, commented:

"Publishing people are fascinating, interesting, occasionally horrifying and astounding.  This book shows that their contribution to twentieth century British history and intellectual life was enormous and my research has forced reassessments of people like Robert Maxwell and Allen Lane as well as re-introducing many lesser-known individuals whose roles were important in shaping what we read."

The pub details: Book Makers: British Publishing in the Twentieth Century by Iain Stevenson, Hardback, 336 pages, 244 x 172 mm, £25.00. It can be purchased from the British Library Shop (tel: +44 (0)20 7412 7735 / e-mail: bl-bookshop@bl.uk) and online as well as other bookshops throughout the UK.

Another just-issued title will be of particular interest to Francophiles -- it's a new English-French, French-English glossary of terms by Roland Herrmann. From the press release: "More complete, more precise, more realistic than anything that exists so far, it contains approx. 1300 entries each way. A handy and elegant volume, it will prove of considerable help in your understanding and/or drafting of book descriptions."

Available at: Librairie de l'Amateur, Strasbourg (France), or e-mail: libamat@wanadoo.fr. Price 23 € plus postage. 

Film buffs & poster collectors, take note. Film historian Ira M. Resnick has just published Starstruck: Vintage Movie Posters from Classic Hollywood, which features the best of Resnick's personal collection of more than 2,000 vintage movie posters and 1,500 stills. It contains 250 posters and forty stills from the golden age of Hollywood -- 1912 to 1962.  The publishers bills it as "A one-of-a-kind art book, Starstruck combines cinematic history, a guide to poster collecting, firsthand account, and dramatic full-color artwork--a blend of genres that is unlike any other movie poster book. Resnick offers entertaining anecdotes about how he managed to acquire such stellar examples of movie poster art, as well as historical information about the stars and films shown on the pieces he collected. Bonus material includes a list of Resnick's fifty favorite one-sheets, advice for the movie poster collector, and a glossary of terms and poster sizes. A must-have book for every collector and film buff, Starstruck offers a beautifully illustrated, personal tour of a bygone age of the motion picture advertising industry."

An exhibit of vintage posters from his collection will be on view at the Furman Gallery at Walter Reade Theater through March 9.

Below, Resnick's book signing at Rizzoli Bookstore in Manhattan, last month.

The news this week that the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris had acquired the manuscript memoirs of the great eighteenth-century Venetian lothario known to one and all as Casanova--Tiger Woods can only dream of walking in this guy's remarkable footsteps--brought to mind a very nice book published a decade ago by Louisiana State University Press, Casanova Was a Book Lover: And Other Naked Truths and Provocative Curiosities about the Writing, Selling, and Reading of Books. This smart collection of bibliophilic essays was written by John Maxwell Hamilton, an occasional commentator on NPR and dean of LSU's School of Mass Communications; you have to love a book that is dedicated to "all reviewers," and includes the explanation that "only ungrateful asses would pan a book after having it dedicated to them."  

Hamilton's title piece took irreverent note of the fact that Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt (1725-1798) spent the final years of his eventful life as a librarian in the household of Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein of Bohemia, and it was in that dreary castle that he took pen to paper and wrote Histoire de ma vie, the racy memoirs for which he became famous, and which an anonymous benefactor acquired on behalf of the French National Library (BNF). Though the actual purchase price was not disclosed, the figure was widely reported to be five million euros, about $9 million, which, if correct, would qualify it as the costliest manuscript transaction on record. The papers--comprising 3,700 pages of yellowing sheets--were transfered Monday to the BNF in thirteen boxes, and represent the complete, uncensored account of Casanova's amorous adventures. The material had been owned since 1821 by the Brauckhuas publishing company in Germany, and was once thought to have been destroyed in World War II; it was later found safely stored in a bank vault.

For those truly interested in the role of librarians, especially those coping with so many seismic changes brought on by the twenty-first century, I heartily recommend a new release from HarperCollins, This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, $24.99, by Marilyn Johnson. A staff writer for Life magazine. Johnson says that she first became interested in the subject while doing research for her first book, a well received examination of obituaries wryly titled The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries. "With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former solder in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians."

Before long she was fully involved in the world of these wonderful professionals whose sole goal in life, it seems, is to provide knowledge and information to others. Johnson's coinage of the word "cybarian" takes note of the changing nature of the business, and of the many ways the people she proceeded to spend so much time with have adapted to the new technologies. She describes the modern librarian as a person whose job is to "create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future."

The result is a most enthusiastic book that is great fun to read (and one which, I feel bound to disclose, makes generous mention of several books that I have written.) Its greatest contribution, I think, is that it pays tribute to an essential public service that so many government officials blithely feel can be cut at will during budgetary crises, reductions made especially easy for them to impose since these temples of wisdom have no well-heeled lobbyists throwing corporate money around to champion their cause. The epigraph to one of Johnson's chapters says it best: "In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste."

Ever see the effects of rubber cement on an old book? Scotch tape? Spilled coffee? It's not pretty. For some basic advice on how to handle such problems, try Joyce Godsey's Book Repair for Booksellers (April, 2009). Godsey, a bookseller herself, describes it as "A handy guide for booksellers and book collectors offering practical advice on how to improve the quality and look of your books and ephemera ... Clear, easy to follow directions for repairing books at home or in the shop. Includes torn pages, shaken spines, library pockets, bookplates, stickers, crayon, writing, insects, leather care and much more. 88 pages." It's one for the reference shelf. 

The Times Literary Supplement, published monthly in the UK, comes out in late November with its Books of the Year edition.  I don't subscribe to the publication because I enjoy eating so much and the U.S. subscription price of $189 would mean several meals per year would probably have to be exchanged for some form of protein originally intended for cats.

But a friend of mine was kind enough to share his copy with me. (Thank you, Gary!)

In it, 57 authors of world-renown are asked to write about some of their favorite reading experiences of the preceding year.  Among the 57 writers this year were Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, etc.  Opening this annual issue is akin to a circus car arriving in your mailbox that opens up and, instead of clowns, deposits some of the greatest writers into your living room all in a tumble where they proceed to hold a grand salon.

A consistent theme runs through many of the entries: everyone seems a bit pea-green with envy over Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.  They complain about its intelligence, the hype, about the Man Booker Prize - but everyone eventually manages to get over themselves and it seems to have been cited most often by this august group of 57, who have the good manners to refrain from wishing they'd written it themselves.

Another favorite seems to be The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940.  (There are three more volumes to come.)

Julian Barnes devotes his two paragraphs to a gracious salute to John Updike, who died in 2009.  Barnes feels that Updike's final works, My Father's Tears and Endpoint were grotesquely misunderstood. "Death afforded him no courtesy, and the stories received several reviews of impudent stupidity."  He reminds us all of Updike's Herculean contribution to letters by noting that Everyman has published Updike's final reworking of the Rabbit quartet as Rabbit Angstrom and calls it "the greatest American novel of the second half of the twentieth century.

Reading the TLS Books of the Year edition is not for the faint of heart, because whatever books you've read this year suddenly seem like Miss Piggly Wiggly.

Marjorie Perloff would like you to try out a 700-page bilingual edition of The Poetry of Rilke, translated by Edward Snow. David Wooten urges you to pick up the 13 lb. (yes, 13 lb.) The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Also be prepared to thank Michael Hofman for suggesting a novel from 1970 (Metropole), which has just been translated into English from the Finnish.

The TLS year-end summary may be the most satisfying and the most challenging of the "Best Books of the Year" genre.  It will inspire you to stretch your reading habits; to read harder. It's the literary equivalent of feeling compelled to go to the gym. I am perfectly willing to have these 57 writers serve as my personal coaches. I look so much better sitting on a sofa than I do on the treadmill.

I have a couple more gift-book suggestions to propose, each one a recent arrival that came in too late to make my holiday roundup published earlier this month in Fine Books & Collections, but which I offer now as last-minute recommendations.

Elizabethan Architecture: Its Rise and Fall, 1540-1640, by Mark Girouard; New Haven, Yale University Press, 516 pages, $65.

Mark Girouard is internationally admired for several accessible books on architecture, most famously the best-seller Live in the English Country House. This latest effort of his has all the makings of monumentally about it--a grand subject, handled by an acknowledged authority in the field, and published sumptuously in a beautiful edition. The many considerations take in social structure, craftsmanship, patronage, continental influence, and of course execution. This copiously illustrated production is published in conjunction with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith From 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965, by Sam Stephenson; Alfred A. Knopf, 268 pages, $40.

The New York jazz scene that burst forth in a constellation of brilliance in the 1950s and '60s, with such names as Miles Davis, Theolonius Monk, Johnny Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, and Bill Evans, is at the heart of this rich selection of material culled from the archive of the photographer W. Eugene Smith, who spent eight years documenting the rich culture, exposing 1,447 rolls of film comprising some 40,000 images, in the process. His base of operations was 821 Sixth Avenue, in the heart of the flower district. Sam Stephenson spent thirteen years going through the archive, now housed at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Classic Toys of the National Toy Hall of Fame: A Celebration of the Greatest Toys of All Time, by Scott G. Eberle; Philadelphia, Running Press, 264 pages, $29.95.

What kind of great stuff is in the National Toy Hall of Fame--yes, Virginia, there is such a creature, happily installed in the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York--is the subject of this evocative treat. G. I Joe, the Hula Hoop, the Radio Flyer, Barbie dolls, Crayola crayons and Monopoly games, of course, but Erector sets, Play-Doh, Lincoln Logs, and Jumbo Jacks as well, quite a feast here for the young at heart. A nice text puts it all in context; a very useful reference for toy collectors, needless to say.

The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present, edited by Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas, Edmund Keeley, and Karen van Dyck; New York, W. W. Norton, 692 pages, $39.95.

A rich canon of Greek poetry, epic, drama, and lyric--even some few precious lines that survive only in fragments--are gathered in this fat anthology of 1,000 poems that spans the centuries, many of them newly translated, and appearing in English for the first time. Four eras are defined: Classical Antiquiry, Byzantium, Early Modern, and Twentieth Century. Some 186 artists in all, Homer, Sappho, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides at one extreme, Nikos Gatsos, Odysseus Elytis, Yannis Ritsos, George Seferis at another. Quite a bounty.

China, principal photography by Ming Tan, edited by Guang Guo; New York, Abbeville Press, 244 pages, slipcased with a numbered print, $235.

Of all the books you might pick up showcasing the natural wonders and architectural landmarks of China, you will be hard pressed to top this truly panoramic effort, which really has pulled out all the stops in pursuit of elegance. Yes, the book is enormous--12 pounds, 18 inches by 12 inches, with a dozen gatefold spreads that open up to 44 inches, almost four feet in width, and is justified by the subject matter--the Himalayas, the Great Wall, the terracotta army of the First Qin Emperor among them. It is an amazing piece of bookmaking, not many of examples of which you are likely to see these days. The photography is crisp and beautifully reproduced, a generous gift for anyone whose passion is the history and culture of the Middle Kingdom.

The Vatican and Saint Peter's Basilica of Rome, by Pavl Letarovilly; New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 320 pages, $125.

First published posthumously in three volumes in 1882, this remarkable suite of intricate architectural drawings of the Vatican and St. Peter's Basilica was executed by Paul-Marie Letarovilly (1795-1855), "an acute, opinionated architect and a superb draftsman who devoted most of his professional life to a single massive enterprise: drawing and publishing the architecture of Rome from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries,"  Ingrid Rowland writes in the forward to this elegant new facsimile edition; it is published in conjunction with the Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America, and the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame.

Flora Mirabilis How Plants Have Shaped World Knowledge, Health, Wealth and Beauty, by Cahterine Herbert Howell (National Geographic Books, 256 pages, $35.) Yes, this is a title that will certainly interest gardeners, but of far greater import is the appeal it undoubtedly will have to collectors of botanical books, and people who are interested in various special collections devoted to the genre in general. How plants have figured in history is the essential theme--rice, maize, flax, wheat, cotton, opium poppy, pepper, coffee, grape, potato, passionflower, date, olive, bamboo --use your imagination, the likelihood is that it's here. But making this presentation a special bouquet of wonders for bibliophiles is the 200 illustrations, all of them reproduced from a remarkable rare book collection maintained by the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, established in 1859, and the beneficiary in 1893 of an outstanding library of pre-Linnaean works on medical botany, agriculture, and edible or otherwise useful plants gathered by Edward Sturtevant, a major collector. The earliest work represented in the volume is the Gart der Gesundheit (Garden of Health), a compendium of medicinal botany printed in Germany in 1487. The text is arranged in ten chapters, and follows an arc of botanical exploration and trade throughout the world. Quite a nice book, and ideal as a gift. My forthcoming piece for this month in Fine Books & Collections, incidentally, will showcase my top choices for holiday giving.

And while we're at it:

Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, by Christopher Andrew; Alfred A. Knopf, 1,032 pages, $40.

This is my kind of book--big, fat, packed with fascinating detail on an irresistible subject, in this instance the 100-year history of the British Security Service, better known as MI5, which opened its archives to the scrutiny of an independent historian. I won't pretend I've read the whole thing yet--it just came in a couple days ago--but what I have dipped into so far, I have devoured. Christeopher Andrew, a professor of modern and contemporary history at Cambridge University, is the author of 14 previous books, including two volumes of The Mitrokhin Archive. "The Service," he writes in the preface here, "like the rest of the intelligence community, was to stay as far from public view as possible." This little bit of sunshine should open a lot of eyes.

History in the grand tradition--including one new edition of a classic written 2,500 years ago--comprise my choices for this current batch of new releases, each one worthy of your attention.

Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, by Gordon S. Wood; New  York, Oxford University Press, 778 pages, $35.

Gordon S. Wood, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for The Radicalism of the American Revolution, here offers a painstaking account of the United States of America during its first quarter-century, a continuum that takes in the formation of the Republic and the beginning of nationhood under the Constitution, and follows through to the War of 1812. It is a period, as David M. Kennedy, general editor of the Oxford History of the United States--of which this is the latest installment (three earlier titles in the series have also won Putlizers)--was an "astonishingly volatile, protean movement that lay between the achievement of national independence and the emergence of a swiftly maturing mass democracy and modern economy in the Jacksonian era." Wood's approach takes in politics, law, the economy and popular culture, and anticipates the great battle that will divide the country by the middle of the nineteenth century. One ominous note at book's end is the realization that despite Northern opposition, slavery was stronger in 1815 than it had been in 1789. Wood's effort--30 years in the making--has all the earmarks of being a standard work.

The American Civil War: A Military History, by John Keegan; New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 396 pages,$35.

In more than twenty books over the past half-century, the British scholar John Keegan has established himself as the outstanding military historian of his generation, with several of his works, most notably The Face of Battle, The Second World War, The Mask of Command,  The Price of Admiralty and A History of Warfare, acclaimed as classics in their own time. In his last book, Keegan offered a cogent analysis of the Iraq War; now, he applies his outstanding grasp on the nature of human conflict to offer a fresh evaluation of the American Civil War. He opens thusly: "I began an earlier book with the sentence 'The First World War was a cruel and unnecessary war.' The American Civil War, with which it stands comparison, was also certainly cruel, both in the suffering it inflicted on the participants and the anguish it caused to the bereaved at home. But it was not unnecessary." Among the numerous areas he explores are psychology, ideology, and demographics, but most tellingly, the role of geography in the unfolding course of the war. One of the more astonishing findings: "about 10,000 battles, large and small, were fought in the United States between 1861 and 1865. This enormous number of battles, seven for every day the war lasted, provides the principal key to the nature of the war. Americans fought as frequently as they did in the Civil War because they could find no other way to prosecute the conflict. Economic warfare, excepting blockage, was not an option."

Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, by Morris Dickstein; New York, W. W. Norton, 598 pages, $29.95.

A great deal has been written about the long national nightmare of the Great Depression, with numerous interpretations offered as to its causes, concerns made especially relevant by the recent downturn in the economy that has had many people recalling the bad old days. But none, to my knowledge, have taken on the subject in a true cultural sense--the films, the novels, the architecture, the music, the photography, the penetrating images that continue to resonate of those dark days. Morris Dickstein, professor of English and theater at CUNY Graduate Center in New York and author previously of Gates of Eden and Leopards in the Temple has fashioned a remarkable narrative of the times that is a model of interdisciplinary technique, and a true joy to read. The Empire State Building, Citizen Kane, the Yellow Brick Road, Scarlett O'Hara, the Rockettes, the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, James Agee, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Richard Wright, Bing Crosby's White Christmas--it all fits in, and is all handled seamlessly. Dip into this, and you will quickly appreciate why Norman Mailer called Dickstein "one of our best and most distinguished critics of American literature."

The Red Flag: A History of Communism, by David Priestland; New York, Grove Press, 676 pages, $30.

The official publication date for this big book is Nov. 9, the twentieth anniversary of when the Berlin Wall began to come down, the first vital sign that the twentieth century's thunderous experience with Communism was entering its final stages. David Priestland, a lecturer in modern history at Oxford University, offers a sweeping overview of the phenomenon, tracing its roots to the  French Revolution, and carrying it forward into its continuing applications today in China, Cuba, and Korea. All the big names are here--Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Chairman Mao, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara--and many others who are lesser known, but just as compelling. Drawing generously on the wealth of archival materials that have become available in recent years, he is able to offer fresh insights that do not rely entirely on the published works of others. Just as important, he writes in a lively, accessible style that never loses sight of the continuing drama. A massive, admirable effort.


The Landmark Xenophon's Hellenika, translated by John Marincola, edited by Robert B. Strassler. New York, Pantheon, 579 pages, $40.

This new translation of the ancient historian Xenophon's Hellenika joins earlier editions in the Landmark series of Greek histories by Thucydides and Herodotus, and includes a fabulous selection of maps, annotations, photographs, illustrations and sixteen appendices written by notable classical scholars. This work covers the years between 411 and 362 B.C., a time when relations between Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Persia were extremely volatile. A student of Socrates, Xenophon was an Athenian who first served in the expedition against the Persian King Artaxerxes II, and later joined the Spartan army.

A little bit of something for everyone with this quartet--solid nonfiction, a scholarly biography, a charming novel, a new selection of poetry from the work of a grand master. Fall, indeed, is here, and the new releases not only are plentiful, but remarkably rich, surprisingly so, given all this noise we've been hearing lately about good books being in decline, and publishers cutting back on their lists. Can't prove it by me.

Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness, by Tracy Kidder; Random House, New York, 277 pages, $26.

Tracy Kidder has to be ranked among the best writers of literary nonfiction out there, one of the few authors who you can pretty much say, time after time, is not going to disappoint you with his latest effort. No surprise, then, to report that this, his eighth book, may well be his best--which is saying quite a bit, when you consider that his earlier efforts have included The Soul of New Machine, Mountains Beyond Mountains, Home Town, and Old Friends, and that his honors include the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and Robert F. Kennedy Award. The story can be summarized briefly--a young man comes to New York from Burundi in 1994 with $200 in his pocket, a survivor of the horrific civil wars that have decimated his country, no English-speaking skills at all, but filled with hope and grit. Two years later, he enrolls in Columbia University without so much as a green card to his name, his story not only one of survival and hope, but one of tenacity, decency and good will that will lead him on to medical school and a life filled with purpose. It's a great tale, of course, and Kidder is one terrific reporter.

The Virgin Warrior: The Life and Death of Joan of Arc, by Larissa Juliet Taylor; New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 251 pages, $30.

As historical figures go, I can think of no other individual who has achieved the kind of iconic stature accorded in death to Joan of Arc (1412-1431), the peasant girl from Domremy variously cast as saint, sorcerer, soldier, lunatic, witch, gifted leader, and martyr in the seven centuries that have elapsed since her execution by the English, and her subsequent passage into sainthood. Larissa Juliet Taylor, a history professor at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, has written a splendid  biography of the young woman that takes a fresh look at the original sources--which survive in abundance--and presents a full, rich examination of the person and the many myths that grew around her. Just as interesting is the informed look Taylor offers into medieval life.



The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker; New York, Simon & Schuster, 243 pages, $25.

I was planning on taking this one along with me on a flight I'm making tomorrow out to Columbus, Ohio--I'm speaking at a meeting of the Ohio Preservation Council on Thursday, and will file a report here in due course--but wound up getting absorbed in it beforehand, and read it straight through. So it goes. What impresses me most about Nicholson Baker, I think, is the easy facility he has for going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction, sort of the way David Halberstam used to do one big work of cultural history, then treat himself to a change of pace with a book about sports. I don't know which form is more relaxing for Baker, though I would suspect it is the novel. His latest here is a fun book, especially for those among us who are fascinated by the creative process. Baker's narrator is a middle-aged poet named Paul Chowder who is trying like the dickens to write an introduction to a new anthology of poetry--rhyming poetry, no less--and finds himself blocked. The ruminations are witty, as always, a delight to read, and the celebration it offers of poetry most welcome. The voice is spot on here, vintage Baker.

Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems, a new selection edited by John N. Serio. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 326 pages, $30.

With this volume we go from a novel that considers the creation of poetry to an actual poet who not only excelled at the craft, but tried his level best to explain it to others. "No other poet I  know of has written so elegantly and so persuasively about the beauty and significance of poetry in everyday life," writes John N. Serio, a noted scholar of the great American poet, Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). "The imagination--frequently synonymous with the act of the mind, or poetry, for Stevens--is what gives life its savor, its sanction, its sacred quality." This generous selection of the Reading, Pennsylvania, native's work--published to mark the 130th anniversary of his birth--will delight those familiar with his work, and encourage newcomers to thirst for more. Kudos to the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, for its commitment to publishing great poetry in beautiful, superbly edited editions.

September is right around the corner, and the new books for fall are starting to trickle in from the publishers. Among those that have caught my fancy--and which, I believe, are richly deserving of your attention--are the following:

The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels, by Janet Soskice; New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 316 pages, $27.95.

This meticulously researched effort takes what for decades has been an intriguing footnote in the history of textual serendipity, and gives it the full examination it so richly deserves. Janet Soskice, a professor in philosophical theology at Cambridge University, tells the story of Agnes and Margaret Smith, identical twin sisters from Scotland, and their discovery in 1892 at St. Catherine's Monastery in Egypt of what was then the earliest known copy of the Gospels--it was a palimpsest that had escaped earlier detection--and how against all accepted convention for two women in Victorian times without university degrees, translated the document from Syriac into English, and secured for themselves a place in the history of biblical scholarship. The story of their spirited adventure on camelback to Mount Sinai where the ancient Greek Orthodox monastery is located makes for an exciting adventure, which Soskice accomplishes with style and aplomb. I am reminded, in this effort, of Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman, in which a theretofore ignored interlude in literary history (in that instance an institutionalized killer's manifold contributions to the Oxford English Dictionary), became a breakthrough bestseller. All in all, this is a welcome addition to the books-about-books bookshelf.

The F Word, edited by Jesse Sheidlower, foreword by Lewis Black; New York, Oxford University Press, 270 pages, $16.95.

This release is a real challenge to write about in a public forum, but I'm going to give it my best shot because I rather like it, number one, and because the word in question--no ambiguity at all, by the way, about which word we are talking about--is an integral part of our language, and one of the very few I know of that works variously as a noun, verb, adverb, and adjective. (Feel free, please, to use your imagination.) That a compilation like this should come from such a distinguished publishing house as Oxford University Press gives me all the cover I need; that it should now be in its third revised edition, moreover, makes it all the more irresistible. So what, you might ask, is there to learn from this compendium? The word's etymology, for starters--no, it's not an acronym, it's far to old a coinage for that, with roots going back to the fifteenth century, Germany being the likely origin, though the precise progenitor is vague at best. That master wordsmith of all time, William Shakespeare, never used it--the word was decidedly vulgar, even then--though there are numerous allusions and puns in the canon that leave no doubt about what the old rascal had in mind. All in all, this is a scholarly work, though unquestionably with a light tough, and includes dozens of definitions presented in traditional OED style, with illustrative quotations drawn from myriad published sources. Jesse Sheildlower's introductory essay is a superb overview of this truly phenomenal word.

Darwin's Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution, by Iain McCalman. New York, W. W. Norton, 423 pages, $29.95.

This has been the bicentennial year of Charles Darwin's birth, an occasion that has brought forth numerous books, a few of which I have noticed in earlier postings. This one, a later release, should not be lost in the deluge. Iain McCalman, a professor at the University of Sydney in Australia, and a past president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, has written an energetic, lively account of evolution that casts a wider net, as it were, and takes in the contributions of Darwin's principal champions, the botanist Joseph Hooker, the the biologist, Thomas Huxley, and the zoologist Alfred Russel Wallace, whose support in the early going was crucial to the reception of his monumental work. McCalman begins with a most engaging account of Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, and describes in highly accessible prose the intellectual process that led to formulation of his theory. Some excellent illustrations are included.

Raymond Carver: Collected Stories, edited by Maureen Carroll. New York, The Library of America, 960 pages, $40.

Every time I think I have exhausted my inventory of superlatives when it comes to the Library of America and what this essential publishing initiative means to our shared culture, a new release comes along that forces me to dig deeper and come up with another. I admit, I am bragging a bit here--but I have every book issued in this series going back to when it started in 1982, close to a150 of them, all kept together in their own book case. It's both a collection for me, and an indispensable resource that I turn to on a regular basis. This latest effort gathers all of Raymond Carver's published stories--"Will You Please Be Quiet, Please", "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," and "Cathedral" among them--along with many of his early sketches, and pieces that were discovered after his death in 1985. A thorough chronology of Carver's life and accomplishments--more like a mini-biography--is included in one of several appendices. Like all the others from LOA, this one's a keeper.
 

In case you haven't heard, there is a brand new edition of Ernest Hemingway's fictionalized memoir of his expatriate years in Paris during the 1920s, A Moveable Feast, now arriving in bookstores, nicely spiffed up in a fresh dust jacket and bearing, in bold type, a subtitle unequivocally declaring this to be"The Restored Edition."

What in the world does that mean, you might reasonably ask: restored to what? Restored to what Hemingway intended when he agreed toward the end of his life to publish a truncated version of the notebooks he had kept while living abroad three decades earlier, and which had been rediscovered in 1956 by him, quite miraculously, in the bottom of a steamer trunk that he had left in storage at the Ritz Hotel in Paris and forgotten all about? Or "restored" to modify what has stood since 1964--the year the work was first published by Charles Scribner's (now just Scribner)--with ten additional essays that  Hemingway also wrote, and which reflect more kindly on Pauline Pfeiffer, his second wife--and the grandmother of Sean Hemingway, who has edited this new edition for publication?

There's been a lot of huffing and puffing going on, all of it quite fascinating, all of it quite amusing, if you want to know the truth.  On the one hand you have Sean Hemingway, a 42-year-old curator of ancient art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and editor of two earlier collections of Papa's writings on war and hunting, declaring in the introduction his belief that his re-cobbled version "provides a truer representation of the book my grandfather intended to publish" than the one offered up forty-five years ago by the writer's fourth wife, Mary Hemingway. And on the other you have the argument for retaining the original text, as articulated by  A. E. Hotchner, 89, a close friend of Hemingway over the final fourteen years of his life, and the author of Papa Hemingway, an affectionate biography published in 1966. Writing in an OpEd piece published this week in the New York Times, Hotchner pointedly recalls discussing the manuscript with Hemingway, and delivering it personally to Charles Scribner Jr. in New York. "The manuscript," he asserts, "was not left in shards but was ready for publication."

With Hemingway's suicide in 1961--we all know the grim details of that depressing story--the book was prepared for publication by others--Mary was his executor--and the portrait painted of Pauline was not pretty at all. Their tempestuous affair had ended Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson, a deeply unpleasant turn of events that the writer eloquently bemoaned in what became the final chapter of the published book. The compelling title, A Moveable Feast, was derived by Mary Hemingway from a beautiful sentence her husband had written which seemed to capture the spirit of the writings perfectly: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."

Given that essential circumstance--the understanding that yes, the 1964 work surely represents Hemingway's writing, but that it was presented to the world as an unfinished work not only groomed and signed off on by others, but titled by them as well--my take on the matter is this: A Moveable Feast--which is a splendidly evocative memoir of a young writer's emerging life in 1920s Paris--should stay in print, just the way it was issued, and that the material newly published in the "restored edition" appear under another title of the new editor's choosing. Why not? We all know that neither distillation is likely to reflect the true "authorial intention" precisely, since the author did not live to see through the press what was ultimately selected from his writings. And the reality of the matter is, there is some great material in the new edition--ten previously unpublished sketches--and it very definitely should appear between hard covers.

Lost in all this, of course, is the role of the publisher, Scribner. Ernest Hemingway has been a cash cow for the imprint for many decades, and what this squabble does more than anything else is to insure more sales; this reality is underscored by the announcement that both versions will remain available to a credulous public for purchase.To this point, in particular, I defer to Hotchner, who has this to say about the matter:

"As an author, I am concerned by Scribner's involvement in this 'restored edition.' With this reworking as a precedent, what will Scribner do, for instance, if a descendant of F. Scott Fitzgerald demands the removal of the chapter in 'A Moveable Feast' about the size of Fitzgerald's penis, or if Ford Maddox Ford's grandson wants to delete referneces to his ancestor's body odor...All publishers, Scribner included, are guardians of the books that authors entrust to them. Someone who inherits an author's copyright is not entitled to amend his work...I hope the Authors Guild is paying attention."

In the week that has passed since my last posting, I have exhausted my supply of recreational reading, a circumstance that has occasioned a trip to Parnassas Books, one of my favorite haunts here on the Cape, located on Route 6A in Yarmouthport, now in its fiftieth year at the same location, with many thousands of volumes packed in a three-story building that dates to the 1800s. In an earlier life the structure was home to Knowles General Store, purveyors of every manner of necessity (in years past some of the old-timers could point out where the pickle barrel stood and where the "wet goods"--the liquor--was sold.) I mentioned Parnassus in an entry five months ago, and am pleased to report that my record of always finding something here of interest--and I can date my fist call on bookseller Ben Muse and his wares  to the summer of 1978--remains intact.

This time around, the find was not a particularly old book--even though the stock-in-trade at Parnassus is overwhelmingly second-hand books, with a respectable inventory of antiquarian items and a tastefully-chosen selection of new-releases mixed in--but a work I confess I totally missed when it was released two years ago, and am thrilled--dare I say relieved?--to have come across now. How I missed The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist (New York, De Capo Press, 2007), by Reviel Netz and William Noll, I can not fathom. But there it was, on a shelf, at a very good price, and all I can say is better late than never.

Perhaps a little back-story is in order here. One of the key contemporary collectors I had the privilege to profile in A Gentle Madness was Dr. Haskell F. Norman, a San Francisco psychoanalyst who had put together what was renowned to be the outstanding collection of medical and science books assembled by anyone in the twentieth century. A year before his death in 1996, the Grolier Club in New York published One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine, edited by Hope Mayo and based on a 1994 exhibition conceived and organized by Dr. Norman. In his interview with me, Dr. Norman had explained quite precisely why he had chosen to put his books on the market, so when Christie's announced that it would mount a three-part sale in 1998, I was not surprised at all, and decided in fact to attend each session. When all was said and done the books brought in a whopping $18 million, breaking all sorts of sales records in the process.

Though a landmark auction in and of itself--and a great tribute to one of the most decent people I ever had the privilege of meeting (remind me some day to explain what I have come to regard as the "Haskell Norman Moment" in the writing of all of my books)--the final day of the sale, Oct. 29, 1998, was marked by yet another extraordinary book event. Halfway through the bidding for the 501 lots, a time-out, in essence, was called, so that another mini-auction could proceed in and of itself. What was about to go on the block--and a battery of television cameras was set up in the back of the Park Avenue gallery to record it all--was a dingy, dreary-looking little volume that had come to be known as the Archimedes Codex.

On the surface, the book is a medieval manuscript prepared in the thirteenth century for liturgical use in the form of a palimpsest, which once-upon-a-time was a standard method for recycling leaves of parchment by scraping away unwanted writings, and inking them over with a new text. What made this palimpsest especially noteworthy was that it contained the earliest known writings of Archimedes (287-212 B.C.), the greatest mathematician of the ancient world. In a fast-moving exchange of bids, an anonymous American buyer outbid a representative of the Greek government, which had hoped to bring the document back to its native land, paying $2.2 million, the most money ever spent, Nicolas Barker would later quip, "for a text that can not be read with the naked eye."

The Archimedes Codex begins, dramatically enough, with the Christie's sale, and continues on with what becomes a thrilling account of traditional scholarship and modern technology, written by William Noel, curator of manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, who  headed up a research team of scholars and conservators known as the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, and Reviel Netz, a professor classics and philosophy at Stanford.Their efforts--fully supported and underwritten by the new owner, coyly referred to as Mr. B--resulted in the discovery of several previously undiscovered Archimedes writings, Balancing Planes, On Floating Bodies, The Method of Mechanical Theorems, and the Stomachion. The manuscript also contained some lost speeches by Hyperides, a noted orator of ancient times.

Addressing complaints from some quarters that such an important manuscript had not found a permanent home in an institution, Noel offers this: "When the Archimedes Palimpsest was sold, some scholars were outraged that the book had returned to a private collection. But if Archimedes had meant enough to the public, then public institutions would have bought it. Archimedes did not. Public institutions were offered the book at a lower price than it actually fetched at auction, and they turned it down. If you think that is a shame, then it is a shame that we all share. We live in a world where value translates into cash. If you care about what happens to world heritage, get political about it, and be prepared to pay for it."

Once again, a collector came to the rescue. This is a great read, and since January, available in a new paperback edition.

Though I have always been a reader, I did not become a serious collector of books until I was in my mid-30s. I have always loved "things," however, and it was not without reason that my mother called me a magpie for all the junk I hoarded as a kid. My earliest pursuits as a child were rocks, an interest I have retained to this day, especially while walking on beaches, and postcards, which I kept under my bed in a tattered old valise I had rescued from the trash. I began to gather these fabulous little curiosities around the age of seven or eight, and kept at it well into my teens, when other interests began to kick in.

I undoubtedly had this childhood fascination for postcards in mind back in 1984 when I bought, at a small auction put on by the Friends of the Goddard Library at Clark University, in Worcester, Mass., 4,800 of them filed judiciously in eight boxes, all gathered over many years by the late Francis Henry Taylor, who from 1931 to 1940 was director of the Worcester Art Museum, followed by fifteen years at the helm of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, then back again to Worcester, until his death in 1957. Taylor had gathered most of these pieces of graphic ephemera while traveling the world to build the collections of the two museums, and used them, from what I have been able to determine, as a kind of pre-Internet form of search engine to gather information, not only for his art quests, but also as background for his writing; he was the author, in 1948, of "The Taste of Angels," a best-selling history of art collecting.



What has prompted me to recall my interest in postcards, and to mention my sub-collection of Francis Henry Taylor (which I wrote about, by the way, in "Among the Gently Mad," pp.32-36), is a fabulous exhibition showing now through May 25 at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the publication of a splendid catalog to accompany it, "Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard," by Jeff L. Rosenheim (Steidl/Metropolitan Museum of Art, 408 pages, $65.

Walker Evans (1903-1975), of course, was one of the great photographers of his time, acclaimed by some as the poet laureate of the medium in America. A master of the documentary approach, Evans is best known for the 1938 monograph of his work, "American Photographs," and for his collaboration with the writer James Agee in 1941 on "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" a powerful commentary on life among tenant farmers in the rural South during the Great Depression.

The exhibition at the Met includes a number of Evans' photographs, but the principal thrust is on showcasing several hundred examples of a collection that consumed him for more than fifty years--the gathering of some nine thousand postcards--and the way they informed his vision as an artist. "A surprising number of highly accomplished writers, picture makers, and performers are obsessive collections," Rosenheim, a curator of photography at the museum, writes in the monograph, noting the butterflies of Vladimir Nabokov, the bakelite bracelets of Andy Warhol, the vast collection of paintings by other artists coveted by Edgar Degas as just three examples.

In the instance of Evans, the postcards--most of them dating from the early decades of the twentieth century--are in the permanent collection of the museum, part of the Evans archive which it acquired from the artist's estate. "He collected postcards when they were new and he was young, and when he was old and they had become classics," Rosenheim notes. Evans also collected such things as printed ephemera, driftwood, tin-can pull tabs and metal and tin wood signs that he photographed in situ, and then removed from their moorings. Altogether my kind of guy.

Not content to merely collect postcards--which covered a vast range of subjects, from the purely pictorial to the nutty and the whimsical--Evans researched their history, and wrote about them as a cultural phenomenon distinctive of their time. In 1963, he gave a lecture at Yale University on them that he titled "Lyric Documentary," a phrase he coined to describe their function as a window into American cultural life.

The book includes color reproductions of 400 examples from the collection; Rosenheim's text is richly informed, and represents an important contribution to the study of this largely unappreciated form of popular art, and makes a very strong case for the premise that his photography was greatly influenced by it. A terrific book--and a terrific exhibition; by all means take it in if you find yourself in New York over the next couple of weeks.

The Silk Road, sex and World War II, both behind closed doors, and fascinating curiosities of literature--what could be better for a week that begins in the satisfying aftermath of a three-game sweep  of the New York Yankees by the Red Sox at Fenway Park. With the Celtics and the Bruins more than holding their own in the playoffs, it's a great time to be a Boston sports fan. Between innings, however, and on travel days for the others, there remains plenty of down time to dip into some really good books.

Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present, by Christopher I. Beckwith; Princeton University Press, 472 page, $35.

A region often overlooked in the grand continuum of world history--a huge, landlocked part of the world between Europe and Asia that has been home to such empires as those of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and the Mongols, Tamerlane and the Timurads, the Anatolians, the Tibetans, and the Scythians--is given its just due in this majestic work that spans a sweep of five thousand years, from the Bronze Age to the present. In the process, Christopher Beckwith, a professor of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University, tackles a number of misconceptions, not least among them that the peoples of an international trading network in Central Eurasia known collectively as the Silk Road were primarily nomadic, warfaring, barbarous and generally slothful groups. Indeed, he argues that for several critical centuries in the development of global civilization--and despite incursions by Persians, Greeks, Arabs, and Chinese, among others--Central Eurasia led the world in science, economics, and the arts. In the process of illuminating this essential piece of the human past, Beckwick constructs a scrupulously researched narrative that is wholly accessible, and demands close attention.

Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love, by Thomas Maier; Basic Books, 411 pages, $27.50

If the subject is about how a single book has the power to impact the way people think and comport themselves in intimate relationships, then you have to include the release in 1966 of Human Sexual Response by William Masters and Virginia Johnson, a blockbuster with international consequences that was followed four years later by a powerful followup, Human Sexual Inadequacy. Prior to these books, what people knew about the mechanics of sexual relationships came from text books. Their first-hand reports of human sexuality, reported clinically in their books--Masters and Johnson observed 10,000 sexual acts in pursuit of their data--changed the entire paradigm. Thomas Maier--the biographer previously of another inhabitant of this exclusive group of attitude-changing authors, the baby doctor Dr. Benjamin Spock--has written a compelling profile of the two pioneers that concentrates on their own relationship and working patterns. Altogether a fascinating book.

World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis, and the West, by Laurence Rees; Pantheon Books, 442 pages, $35.

As creative director for the BBC, documentary filmmaker Laurence Rees has produced several television series on war and the atrocities that usually follow, including "The Nazis: A Warning from History," ""War of the Century," "Horror in the East," and "Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution.'"  He also is the author of five books on the same subjects, and was the recipient three years ago of the British Book Award for History . This effort--which is being released to coincide with a PBS series that will air on three successive Wednesdays beginning May 6--draws on the testimony of more than a hundred witnesses to the events which had been kept secret for decades, only available recently since the opening of the archives of the former Soviet Union. Though not likely to alter prevailing evaluations of the war, the book does offer fresh insights on the relationship between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill.




Curiosities of Literature: A Feast for Book Lovers, by John Sutherland, illustrations by Mark Rowson; Skyhorse Publishing, 273 pages, $22.95.

Last--but not by any means least--we have this thoroughly engaging compendium of literary arcania (and plenty of significa as well) to salute. British academic John Sutherland has culled every manner of primary source to unearth such nuggets as the longest novel in the English language (Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa," c. 1 million words), an interesting enough fact in its own right, but for him the springboard for a learned essay that explores the phenomenon of "writing long" in depth, citing Stephen King's "The Stand" (464,216 words) and Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy" (591,554) as particularly egregious examples of tomes that require, as a condition of being read, the development of "considerable upper body strength." In a chapter he calls "The Body of Literature," Sutherland tells of the battle among provincial forces for the right to bury the corpse of Thomas Hardy, with a compromise finally being hammered out that provided for the novelist's remains to be divided among home-town loyalists in Stinsford--they got the heart--and Westminster Abbey, which got the cremated ashes of what was left. Similarly, Lord Byron's heart was interred at Missolonghi, where the swashbuckling Romantic died in defense of Greek independence, while his body--too carnal, apparently, for sacred interment in the sanctity of Poet's Corner--was laid to rest in the family vault. This is a really fun book, and smartly written to boot. Highly recommended.

With all the gloomy news about the publishing industry cutting back drastically on worthwhile releases in the face of pressing economic times--take a look at the most recent developments at one major New York house, where a new imprint devoted to pop culture and entertainment has been announced--it is gratifying to report on some fabulous books being released this spring that are truly worth spending valuable time with (dare I say, too, actually "worth the paper they're printed on"?).

A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, by Elaine Showalter; Alfred A. Knopf, 586 pages, $30.

I admit I'm a sucker for books about books, and that I am particularly partial to trenchant works of literary biography and literary criticism, especially when new ground is clearly being broken. Elaine Showalter, professor emerta from Princeton University and author previously of A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from From Bronte to Lessing (Princeton University Press, 1977), a standard work, now offers a penetrating history of American women writers in America, as the subtitle states, from the early seventeenth century, up to the present moment (a nice touch, that--Anne to Annie.)

"I believe that American women writers no longer need special constituted juries, softened judgment, unspoken agreements, or suppression of evidence in order to stand alongside the greatest artists in our literary heritage," she writes, explaining her purpose. "What keeps literature alive, meaningful to read, and exciting to reach isn't unstinting approval or unanimous admiration, but rousing argument and robust debate."

Lighter Than Air: An Illustrated History of Balloons and Airships, by Tom D. Crouch; Johns Hopkins University Press, 191 pages, $35.

This copiously illustrated overview of lighter than air aviation chronicles an adventurous period in human accomplishment with style and insight, focusing on the earliest attempts to take flight by way of inflated envelopes, with two French paper-makers, the brothers Jacques-Etienne and Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, leading the way in the 1780s. "Why did it take so long to learn to fly?" Tom Crouch, curator of aeronautics at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, asks.  "The Greek philosopher Archimedes (287-212 BC) explained the basic principle of buoyant flight more than twenty centuries before human beings first took the sky aboard balloons." He offers a fascinating account of the thrilling quest for human flight.

Babylon, edited by I. L. Finkel and M. J. Seymour; Oxford University Press, 238 pages, $40.

Few names from antiquity conjure up images of exotic mystery and curiosity more than biblical Babylon, the city of the wondrous Hanging Gardens,the Tower of Babel, King Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel in the Lion's Den, the Ishtar Gate, despite the passage of 2,500 years since its fall. Located on the banks of the Euphrates River in what is now war-torn Iraq, what remains of the vanished city today are mostly dim memories and second-hand accounts passed on by such historians as Herodotus and Ctesias, and, of course, a range of exquisite artifacts that have been recovered over the years and removed to a number of great museums.

Irving Finkel and Michael Seymour have edited this comprehensive catalog issued in conjunction with what by all accounts has been a dazzling exhibition at the British Museum in London (it closes on March 15), showcasing treasures from numerous collections, the BM's, of course, but also twenty-three other lenders, including the Louvre in Paris and the Vorderasiatisches in Berlin. "Babylon, in all its manifestations," they write, "is at once remote to us and all around us. Like no other city, its history has become bound up with legend."

History buffs, art buffs, and archaeology buffs alike with love this book.

At yesterday's ceremony in New York to honor the heroic acts of Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III and the crew of U. S. Airways Flight 1549, Mayor Michael Bloomberg presented each member of the team with a key to the city, and in a light footnote to the festivities, gave "Sully" a copy of the book he had lost in the crash landing of his A320 Airbus on the Hudson River on Jan. 15.

For those of us who care about these things--the library in California that had loaned the waterlogged book to Sullenberger had declined, for privacy reasons, to identify the title--the book turns out, in a delightful twist of aptness, to be "Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability"  (Ashgate Publishing, paperback, $29.95, hardcover, $39). According to the dustjacket blurb, the author, Sidney Dekker, is a Professor of Human Factors and System Safety, and Director of Research at Lund University School of Aviation in Sweden.