This morning on CBS' "Sunday Morning," an interesting segment about "How E-Books Are Changing the Printed Word." Of course, this discussion (and argument) has been around for a decade or more now, and this piece plies the same material--Kindle, Google, the decline of the small bookstore--but this is succinct and interesting nonetheless, including an interview with Ken Auletta.
Though a month old now, this interesting news story popped up in the Times last December. Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize winning playwright, "borrowed" a first edition of a rare Samuel Beckett title from Bermondsey's Central Library... in 1950. Sixty years later, the same book was discovered by the antiquarian firm Maggs Brothers, in London, while preparing a catalogue of Pinter's extensive book collection. In a pleasing display of bookseller honesty, Ed Maggs arranged to pay the Southwark Council (which succeeded the Bermondsey Council) £2000 in order to keep the book with the collection. Appropriately,the money went toward funding creative writing classes. As for the book, a very rare first edition of Murphy, published in 1938, it was sold to a private collector along with the rest of Pinter's collection.
Read the whole article here.
Jonathan Shipley
Jonathan Shipley is a freelance writer living in Seattle. He’s written for the Los Angeles Times, Gather Journal, Uppercase, and many other publications.
Do not read Kurt Vonnegut. Do not read Isaac Asimov. Do not read Carl Sagan or Robert Heinlein. Do not read science fiction. This, from Way of Life Literature.
From their post...
Science fiction is intimately associated with Darwinian evolution. Sagan and Asimov, for example, were prominent evolutionary scientists. Sci-fi arose in the late 19th and early 20th century as a product of an evolutionary worldview that denies the Almighty Creator. In fact, evolution IS the pre-eminent science fiction. Beware!
You've been warned.
Missing manuscripts, vampires, and gothic churchyards make for fun reading, no doubt. But this isn't about Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, at least not directly. It's about Montague Summers (1880-1948), a renegade reverend who was also an expert on the gothic and supernatural and may have inspired Meyer's work. Summers was "internationally known for his erudite if sometimes idiosyncratic editions and histories of Restoration dramas, studies of the gothic novel, and often sensational writings on witchcraft, demonology and the occult," writes Dr. Gerard O'Sullivan in an article from the Autumn issue of The Antigonish Review.
Summers' literary papers went missing about 60 years ago, only one of the mysteries surrounding this odd author, who was refused a requiem mass at his burial and was rumored to have haunted his personal assistant. The papers--letters and holograph manuscripts--were apparently loaded into tea chests and sold by an angry landlady after Summers' death. In 1970, Father Brocard Sewell published an essay about the missing papers titled "The Manuscripts of Montague Summers," also in The Antigonish Review.
Summers' literary archive took quite a journey, which O'Sullivan skillfully recounts in his article, "The Manuscripts of Montague Summers, Revisited." He details the discovery and cataloguing of this important literary archive and notes where some wayward manuscript items have turned up along the way (at the Beinecke Library, for example, and with various dealers and private collectors.)
What is the fate of the reverend's papers now that they have been recovered?
"We are currently in conversation with university libraries in the hope of finding a permanent home for the papers. The family of Summers's personal assistant, Hector Stuart-Forbes, hope to have the materials remain together as a contiguous collection and be made available to scholars and researchers," wrote O'Sullivan in a recent email.
Summers' literary papers went missing about 60 years ago, only one of the mysteries surrounding this odd author, who was refused a requiem mass at his burial and was rumored to have haunted his personal assistant. The papers--letters and holograph manuscripts--were apparently loaded into tea chests and sold by an angry landlady after Summers' death. In 1970, Father Brocard Sewell published an essay about the missing papers titled "The Manuscripts of Montague Summers," also in The Antigonish Review.
Summers' literary archive took quite a journey, which O'Sullivan skillfully recounts in his article, "The Manuscripts of Montague Summers, Revisited." He details the discovery and cataloguing of this important literary archive and notes where some wayward manuscript items have turned up along the way (at the Beinecke Library, for example, and with various dealers and private collectors.)
What is the fate of the reverend's papers now that they have been recovered?
"We are currently in conversation with university libraries in the hope of finding a permanent home for the papers. The family of Summers's personal assistant, Hector Stuart-Forbes, hope to have the materials remain together as a contiguous collection and be made available to scholars and researchers," wrote O'Sullivan in a recent email.
Today is Italian writer/professor Umberto Eco's birthday. He was born in 1932. I'm not sure you can call yourself a bibliophile if you haven't read Eco's 1980 novel, The Name of the Rose. It is a mystery set in a monastery, with William of Baskerville as the main character. Need I say more?
If you haven't had the pleasure, I urge you to read it (millions of others have!); a lovely jacketed hardcover edition is published by Everyman's Library.
p.s. Do not see the movie adaptation starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater -- it is awful.
If you haven't had the pleasure, I urge you to read it (millions of others have!); a lovely jacketed hardcover edition is published by Everyman's Library.
p.s. Do not see the movie adaptation starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater -- it is awful.
Erica Olsen
Erica Olsen lives in Cortez, Colorado. She is the author of Recapture & Other Stories, a collection of short fiction.
Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City has published its catalogue no. 34, available in print and also downloadable here. The catalogue includes more than 300 items, with particular emphasis on Western Americana and Utah/Mormons.
In the latter category is a typographical curiosity: an 1869 Book of Mormon printed in the Deseret alphabet, a 38-letter writing system created in the 1850s at the behest of Brigham Young. The alphabet represented the English language phonetically. Intended to make English easier to learn for converts who weren't native speakers, the alphabet also enhanced a separate cultural identity for Mormon Utah, aka Deseret.
Just a handful of publications were printed using the alphabet, however--including the primer pictured at left, also available from Ken Sanders Rare Books. The Deseret alphabet fell out of use after Brigham Young's death in 1877.
Sometimes a book comes along, smacks readers in the head, alleviates our ignorance, and leaves us with a new perspective on something we thought we already knew.
That's what happened when I read Following the Drum: Women at the Valley Forge Encampment (Potomac Books, 2009) by former historic interpreter Nancy Loane. The title is too modest in conveying the scope and power of the book. It doesn't fully capture the idea that the work adds colorful, riveting details to the basic portrait of the American Revolution that hangs in our minds ... elements that help give us a more complete, accurate picture. The title doesn't deliver the punch of the easy-to-digest 164 pages: We owe an enormous debt of gratitude not just to the men who fought in the Revolutionary War but to the women whose sweat and sacrifice also forged our freedoms.
Much of the book is focused on the wide range of roles women played in what happened at Valley Forge. As a quick refresher, Valley Forge is where a rag-tag and seemingly hopeless band of men staggered into Pennsylvania farmland in December of 1777, endured a bone-chilling winter, trained, and exited as a disciplined army that went on to win its next battle and ultimately the war.
That, of course, is what we all learn in school. We don't often study the full range of people who made contributions to the Revolution, including the role that more than 5,000 African-Americans played. (Robert Ewell Greene's 1984 book, Black Courage 1775-1783, is a great place to start.)
Nor do we often learn that women were there, too.
Women of high social class like Martha Washington provided great comfort to her commander-in-chief husband George Washington while women of the "common sort" performed countless thankless chores that helped the army survive. They ran household headquarters for officers so that they could remain focused on developing strategies to win the war. They cooked for exhausted soldiers, made clothing to help protect them from the elements, cleaned the camp to help slay the biggest enemy at Valley Forge -- the range of ailments caused by unsanitary conditions. More bravely, they risked their own lives by nursing diseased soldiers.
Following the Drum would be worth reading even if it stopped right there. The book, however, is full of surprises -- some sweet, others sorrowful.
llluminating the larger contributions women made throughout the Revolutionary War, author Loane introduces us to women such as Lucy Knox, one of my favorite ladies of the era. When her British parents forced her to choose between them and the love of her life, Boston bookseller and artillery man Henry Knox, she chose the latter. The love letters Loane quotes make it clear that she made the right choice but she never saw her parents again.
We become acquainted with the tragic story of Catharine Greene, wife of General Nathaniel Greene. Though blessed by beauty and charm, she spent much of her life in depression. And for good reason. One of her children developed whooping cough and died in her arms. Another baby died after she took a nasty fall in the kitchen that brought on premature labor. Those were only two of the tragedies she faced. (Lucy Knox could relate: Only three of her 13 children made it to adulthood.)
Following the Drum takes us to battlefields to meet women who shed their blood for the American cause. Margaret Corbin "took up her husband's artillery position when he went down" Loane writes. "She was seriously wounded for her efforts (an arm was almost torn off
and a breast mangled)". She later became "the first camp woman with the Continental Army to be acknowledged by a pension."
By Loane's own account, too little is known about the women who served at Valley Forge.
"Most of the hundreds of women with the Valley Forge encampment," she writes, "remain only as shadowy, anonymous figures of a bygone war. We will never know their names. We will never know their stories, or how they individually contributed to America's freedom."
Still, her book offers a treasure trove, even if a small one, that highlights what women did to give us the country we have today. While we tend to only think of such topics during Women's History Month or Independence Day, the snow and ice gripping much of the country this winter mark an especially poignant time to express our thanks to the women of Valley Forge.
Here's an online version of an amazing exhibit that ran last year at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, curated by Dr. Teresa Vann and Jill Dubbeldee Kuhn.
...The books in this exhibit all bear the marks left by previous generations of readers, who wrote in them, marked them, damaged the covers, or warped the bindings. Some people might think these books have been damaged by previous owners. Book Marks invites you to consider these books as archeological objects, providing us with a window to the lives and thoughts of past users and the sometimes surprising way they used books...
Ever find an interesting bookmark or book mark (marginalia) in an old book? I once found a press pass that belonged to William Shirer tucked into a first edition of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. I spent a pre-Google year chasing the details of the press pass and concluding that Shirer and Miller were probably friends.
...The books in this exhibit all bear the marks left by previous generations of readers, who wrote in them, marked them, damaged the covers, or warped the bindings. Some people might think these books have been damaged by previous owners. Book Marks invites you to consider these books as archeological objects, providing us with a window to the lives and thoughts of past users and the sometimes surprising way they used books...
Ever find an interesting bookmark or book mark (marginalia) in an old book? I once found a press pass that belonged to William Shirer tucked into a first edition of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. I spent a pre-Google year chasing the details of the press pass and concluding that Shirer and Miller were probably friends.
