Poem for January

Billy Bracken’s second song  (Will Leadbeater)

When I was young
I thought that I would
love only one
the way certain birds
mate only once;
but when I grew older
and that first song broke,
I knew then that I would
have to love again,
to live,
or die with all my heart
broken to the sky.

I unexpectedly found this poem by my friend Will Leadbeater in the latest issue of Poetry NZ. which is also the way I am always finding Will in the library.  It started years ago, when the poetry books were on my floor, and I used to run into him among the shelves – literally. I never saw him approaching; it was always a sudden appearance, as if he had just then metamorphosed into human form from a mote of dust, a ray of light. Leaving, too, come to think of it. He’d about-face and poof! No one there.

The year that I met Will, five or six years ago, he won Third Prize in the Library’s Montana Poetry Day poetry contest.  I was in charge of shortlisting that year, and I remember his poem, handwritten in blue ink on the back of a real estate flyer. And above all, I remember a fabulous image about the moon like a crescent toenail in the Parnell Baths.

Now the poetry is on the floor above, but Will  still --  poof! -- appears beside me once a month or so, to present me with a sheaf of his newest poems. There were two series of bagatelles, and then there were clerihews, after I introduced him to these idiosyncratic four line poems invented by the English schoolboy Edmund Clerihew Bentley to combat the boredom induced by his chemistry lesson – at least, I presume that’s where he was, because his first clerihew was

Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

Will's first clerihew was:

Did Henry James
Ever like dames –
We all know he never married
But was this just because he tarried?

  --  Will Leadbeater's book of poetry Jubal's Lyre won the 2008 EoSAW Poetry Prize.

  --  Down in the Central City Library basement we've got three hoary old Bentley books of clerihews, The first clerihews, a classic with illustrations by GK Chesterton, Clerihews complete, and Baseless biography.

*** Update***

I just discovered that Bentley was not studying chemistry when he wrote his first clerihew, but Roman History.  It's in his wonderful essay about the invention of the clerihew  in Essays of the year (1929-30) which you can read on Google Books .

Bentley's first clerihew collection, Biography for beginners. was recently republished in a modern edition which uses the original text and artwork, and has just been ordered for the library. You can see a good preview of it on Google books.

Best book videos

In with the new! I have been introduced to a new phenomenon on the internet, which would have been called book trailers, except that apparently some obnoxious company is claiming to have copyrighted the name “Book Trailer”. I will call them Book Videos until we're sure the coast is clear.

Book Videos are like movie trailers, only they are for books. When they are done well, shunning the mere illustrated narrative, they are vivid, moody and ultimately exhilarating, like many of the best things in life.
Here are my three favourites, off of youtube:

1. Going West by Maurice Gee: this is far and away the best book video I have come across. An imaginative idea, visually amazing, Yay for the New Zealand Book Council!





2. The Little Prince pop-up book – as simple and pure as the story itself. Make sure you have your volume turned up so you can appreciate the sound track.




3. Pride and prejudice and zombies: a dark, handsome, if not especially tall, Italian film director gave me this book for a Christmas present. I had been dubious, but the video has done the trick. I am converted. Besides the syntax, they could have mentioned the accent, too. I couldn't even understand what she was saying, let alone be bored by it.



 There is a website called bookscreening.com where you can search around for hours, or days, or ________s. Have fun! 

The Wide Sherlockian World

Did you know that Neil Gaiman belongs to a group of Sherlock Holmes fans called “The Baker Street Irregulars” who celebrate Sherlock Holmes’s birthday every January in New York City, calling each other “Old Bean” and doing things like holding a “Junior Bloodstain” in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel?

The British also have a Conan Doyle society, but rather than stage events in London in January, what they do is go on trips to Switzerland in the summer where they dress up like Sherlock Holmes characters and re-enact the death struggle between Holmes and Prof. Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls on the Rhine. In fact, I recently spent a week in London and there was no Sherlock Holmes activity at all that I could see, unless you count the article in the paper about some inept thieves in Liverpool who tried to break into a money machine and then gave up and went home, where they were picked up soon after by the police, who had followed their footsteps in the snow. “Police use Sherlock Holmes techniques to capture robbers” trumpeted the headlines.

Unlike the Americans and the Brits, with their propensity for panto-style high jinks, Canadian Sherlockians are quite serious. Their society, The Bootmakers, has for many years been responsible for --  I want to get this right so I'll quote from their website, Sherlockian.net, -- "that relatively rare item, a Sherlockian publication prepared to publish articles which looked at the Holmes stories as literature, with Arthur Conan Doyle as their creator; a tradition which continues to this day.”

And where is the largest collection of Sherlock Holmes artifacts in the world? Why, at the University of Minnesota. Here are two videos from youtube in which a series of tweedy professors with beards, but sadly not with “Fargo” accents, show off some of the 60,000 items they hold in their Special Collections, including an original of the 1887 Beeton’s Christmas Annual where the first Sherlock Holmes story was published, and a replica of Holmes’s Baker St. Apt., including the Persian slipper he kept his tobacco in, and something they call his “Chemistry set”, which I wondered– was that just for forensics, or was it perhaps where he was wont to mix up his seven percent solution of cocaine?

One of the videos ends with a shot of a giant replica of a Peanuts cartoon, in which Charlie Brown is reading The Hound of the Baskervilles to Snoopy as a bedtime story. “Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” he reads, and then it’s lights out. The look on Snoopy’s face is just how I used to feel after hearing about Marley's ghost.




You can read The Hound of the Baskervilles, or any other of the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels, in the volumes of The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, with its over 1000 illustrations and something like 3000 footnotes by Leslie S Klinger, a tax lawyer, one of the world’s foremost authorities on SH and a member of the Baker Street Irregulars. I wouldn’t have expected anything less.

Breaking news: It seems that some of the Baker Street Irregulars are a bit upset that Robert Downey Jr’s performance as Sherlock Holmes was nominated for a Golden Globe award in the category “Best actor in a musical or a comedy”. It's clearly not a musical, they say, so does that mean someone thinks it's a comedy? Hmmph.

Season of lists and mellow fruitfulness

The season of lists and mellow fruitfulness is once again upon us. Appropriately, I’m on the waiting list for a book about lists. It’s Umberto Eco’s just-published “The infinity of lists” (U.S. title; in the U.K. it's “The vertigo of lists”, same as the original Italian, what didn't the Americans like about 'vertigo'?), inspired by an exhibition he curated at the Louvre about lists in the history of art and literature.

I’ve always been fond of Umberto Eco although, and partly because, I have never been able to understand what his field of study, semiotics, is actually about -- and this despite having had a friend who studied with him at Bologna. But I appreciate that he genuinely believes in it and how he is never pompous, even when people call him one of the world's greatest scholars or “a modern-day Diderot”, as his publisher Rizzoli is doing now in the blurb for his book:

Eco is a modern-day Diderot, and here he examines the Western mind’s predilection for list-making and the encyclopedic. His central thesis is that in Western culture a passion for accumulation is recurring: lists of saints, catalogues of plants, collections of art. This impulse has recurred through the ages from music to literature to art. Eco refers to this obsession itself as a "giddiness of lists" but shows how in the right hands it can be a "poetics of catalogues".

What Umberto Eco himself says is “We like lists because we don’t want to die.” You can read the interview where he says this on Der Spiegel online and see also what he has to say about Homer’s lists of ships in the Iliad, Da Ponte counting Don Giovanni’s lovers (2,063) and how to describe a platypus. Is it true he has 30,000 books? He thinks it's around 50,000, but he has never made a list of them.

I like lists myself, but I have a hard time with top tens, especially with something as subjective as literary taste. Here are a couple of top 100’s instead:

100 notable books of the year from The NY Times

The 100 best books of the decade from The Times

And for something a bit more unusual:

“Unknown books of decade”  -- a list of overlooked titles from The Guardian


“Best forgotten books" –  'Writers pick their favorites” from the LA Times

and if you only look at one of the links on this page, it has to be this one.

Joseph Sullivan’s stupendous My Favorite Book Covers of 2009 on his website Book Design Review.

Christmas Stories

presenting a few of my favourites

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol will always be for me the story which most makes me feel like Christmas. In  our house, my father read it out loud to us every year, a chapter a night, on the days leading up to Christmas. Even now when I read it, it is his version I hear. Scion of a theatrical family and a bit of a ham, he was a splendid, uninhibited reader who always enjoyed  his performance as much as we did.

"Marley was dead, to begin with." He gave the opening line a neutral, conversational tone, which contrasted marvellously with the tingle of excitement running through us as finally, after dinner, coffee and cigarette (for him) we settled on the couch to let the yearly ritual begin. But by the time we got to "What a turkey! There never was such a turkey", the words were rolling forth in inspired waves, pulling you under into their oceans of gusto and jollity. Finally I could forget the terrifying chapter where the ghostly hand draws back Scrooge's bedcurtains, which would keep me awake for hours afterward with the sheet drawn up to my eyes, casting my eyes about in the dark to make sure no ghost could creep up on me unannounced.

The reading was dosed so that the final triumphant chapter would fall on Christmas Eve. When we got to the lines "And it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge"  my father read them out with such heart that I had to agree with my sister, thirty or more years later, when she suggested it would be the single best phrase to remember him by.

You can read both the abridged version of A Christmas Carol, which Dickens used to read aloud on his incredibly popular author tours, and the longer version, at dickenschristmascarol.com.  

And while you're at it, visit David Perdue's wonderful site, the Charles Dickens Page, where The Christmas Carol page offers links to illustrations, maps of Dickens's London, even things like Dickens's original accounts page for A Christmas Carol (6000 copies sold the first day). At the very bottom, there is this jewel from A Christmas Carol:

"It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself."

A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas

"One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six."

Even if you didn't grow up where it snowed, A Child's Christmas in Wales will be one of the stories most evocative of Christmas you'll ever read, which shows you what a great poet can do. It's all there: the panoply of human types -- the imbibing aunts, the snoozing uncles, the human arts of music and conversation, the human love of sweets, and the mysteries of human time which is both unstoppable and yet capable of preserving some things for you forever.

One of the very best ways to experience A Child's Christmas in Wales is to hear Dylan Thomas reading it aloud. It takes 20 minutes on the wonderful Caedmon collection of Dylan Thomas recordings, 11 CDs where he reads his work and the work of others, including Shakespeare, which you can get from the library.  But you will probably enjoy it so much that you'll want to hear more.

The Gift of the Magi by O.Henry

I am always telling people to read this beautiful little turn-of-the-century story by O.Henry about, as they say, the meaning of Christmas. O.Henry is famous for short stories with a twist ending, often given you to read in school as ambassadors for the form, also because mostly they are very funny - The Ransom of Red Chief about the kidnapping of a little boy so annoying that in the end the kidnappers are willing to pay the family to take him back is one of my favourites. But The Gift of the Magi is sad and sentimental. Approach it with an open mind and you won't be disappointed. You can read it on the Literature Collection website.

O.Henry, a romantic figure (although he always demurred on this) who had headed west from the Carolinas as a young man to work on a cattle ranch, spent time in prison for embezzling bank money, which he may or may not have done -- he first ran off to Central America, to somewhere for which he later invented the term "banana republic", but returned to the United States to be with his wife who was dying of tuberculosis, entering prison the next year and spending three years there -- said "There are stories in everything. I've got some of my best yarns from park benches, lampposts, and newspaper stands."

Who knows what stories you might get from this bench - in Christmas colours, note - photographed in front of an Irish library?

Book bench by Irish typepad

First fruits

This is just to say  (William Carlos Williams)  

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Biting into the first plums of the season this month, I could not help remembering this poem by William Carlos Williams and being overcome, as well as by the flavour of the plums, by the desire to pass this poem on. So here you are.

You can read more poems by this bespectacled doctor from New Jersey who was a friend of Ezra Pound and an inspiration to Allen Ginsberg on the Poetry Foundation website   -- which if you like poetry you should know about anyway -- where you can also hear Library of Congress recordings from the 1940s of WCW reading his poetry aloud, including the famous "The Red Wheelbarrow", which has a special meaning for me, in as much as hearing it dissected at University in a Modern American Literature class made me forswear an academic career forever --  I might even say that had it not been for "The Red Wheelbarrow", I would not today be the person I am.


From the library:

 -- Random House's  William Carlos Williams from The Voice of the Poet series is a 1 hour CD of WCW reading his poetry and an accompanying book with the texts of the poems

 -- WCW's Collected poems in two volumes

-- The William Carlos Williams Reader edited by M.L. Rosenthal

Alone in Berlin

When I was 15 or 16 and going through my Hemingway period, reading everything I could find by him or about him and copying bits from Death in the Afternoon to tape up above my desk, I came across something in which he listed the books he thought everyone should read. Everyone! Me!

As I recall, the list was heavy on Rooshians, as Hemingway describes Ezra Pound calling his beloved Dostoevsky & Co in A Moveable Feast  --  “To tell you the truth, Hem, I’ve never read the Rooshians” he has him confessing -- which were a big part of my literary landscape at the time anyway, and there would have been a few others I’ve forgotten because I simply got them and read them, but there were two which eluded me, due to them having eluded my parents and our small local library.

In those pre-internet days that meant you just kind of filed them away in your head to see if you’d run across them someday, somewhere. The first one, The Lost Grove, the autobiography of the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, showed up maybe ten years later, in a remainders bookstore in Italy. The second held off until ... this year.  It was Everyone dies alone by Hans Fallada. I hadn’t thought of it in years, had long stopped wondering who this mysterious man with the strange interlanguage, fairy tale name was, but suddenly there was a review of it in the TLS, a brand-new English translation, with a less-literal version of the title – it’s called Alone in Berlin – but it was clearly The Book, the one Hemingway wanted me to read.

Hans Fallada turned out to be the pen name of a man who in his life knew both success and suffering, mostly suffering: at eighteen he had killed a friend in a bungled suicide pact, he was addicted to drugs, spent time in prison for theft, and although in the interwar years he had written bestsellers including one picked up by Hollywood and made into a movie, he couldn't make himself leave Berlin when he should have and spent the war in a terrible state, with Goering pressuring him to write pro-Nazi propaganda, which he sort of gave into and sort of didn't, succumbing to alcohol and drugs again and ending up in a Nazi insane asylum. He wrote this book the year after the war ended, in only 24 days, and died not long thereafter.

I asked the library to get it. It came, and I started reading it by chance on the day after the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, November 9th. More pertinently, it was also the day after the 71st anniversary of Kristallnacht, as the book turned out to be a depiction of life in Berlin under the Nazis, as seen through the thoughts and actions of a cast of average, just-getting-through-the-day men and women. It is over 500 pages of which every single one is dark. It reminds me of nothing so much as Rossellini’s great neorealist film Germania Anno Zero, perhaps the most depressing film I’ve ever seen, and I've seen many, set in Berlin after the city's surrender and occupation.

Maybe it’s even more depressing, considering that in Germania Anno Zero we see a beaten people, which you can’t help but feel contributes to their passivity. Here they are active, and most of them are either jackals or suck-ups to authority, or both. The plot -- based on a true story -- revolves around a couple who are dropping anti-Nazi postcards around Berlin, risking their lives, and it goes something like this: out of 48 postcards they distribute, 44 are in the hands of the Gestapo within a few weeks, and the four which are not, were not passed from hand to hand to read, as they had hoped, but had been burned, or ripped up and flushed down the toilet.

I skipped bits at first, the build-up was uneven (not much time to rewrite and polish when you write a 500 page novel in 24 days) but when I got to the last third or so, from when the couple are caught and put on trial, I couldn't skip a word. The depiction of the nightmare world of totalitarianism is so disturbing  that it made me physically uncomfortable, not because of scenes of gore or torture but because of the overwhelming sense of oppression. I can see how Hemingway would have loved us all to read this book, together with Rafael Alberti's terrible stories about the other ghost stalking Europe, as one of his poems called Generalissimo Franco of Spain.

One funny thing that came out of all this was that I went searching the internet to see if I could find that list again to see what else was on it. It turns out that Hemingway loved making lists of books everyone should read, and there are hundreds of them around. Among them was hidden this gem: a list of the books in his library in his Finca in Cuba, compiled by a team of Cuban librarians after he died. As they couldn’t speak English, the books were all the same to them, so that right after his Rooshians, you find the recipe booklet for his Waring Blender. Or maybe they were smarter than it seems and were simply well aware of the essential role of the frozen daiquiri in Hem’s philosophy of life.

Larkin in the Library

We found a fantastic Have-Your-Say in the library suggestion box.

Here is what someone had written under the library's invitation to
Please share your thoughts with us


Morning at last: there in the snow
Your small blunt footprints come and go.
Night has left no more to show.
Not the candle, half-drunk wine,
Or touching joys; only this sign
of your life walking into mine.
But when they vanish with the rain
What morning woke to will remain,
Whether as happiness or pain.

-- Philip Larkin

Did the person who left this know - of course they did, they must have - that Philip Larkin worked his entire adult life as a librarian in Hull, a city in Yorkshire so off-side that its only other claim to fame, that I know of, is being the hometown of the great Mick Ronson. It's one of the few things I knew about him. The others are that he wrote a poem which started with the remarkable lines "They fuck you up, your mum and dad/ They may not mean to but they do" and that in letters to his friends he used disparaging terms about a number of ethnic groups and women. I pictured him reclusive, crabby, funny, English, unemotional. But as often happens, there were many more things to know once I took the time, inspired by this anonymous donation.

Philip Larkin - older than I realised - started writing poetry in the thirties and got his first job as a librarian during World War II, in Shropshire, in a library so small that he was the only employee. One of his duties was to light the library's gas lamps. The librarian he replaced was over 70, which means, if my calculations are right, that he would have been born about the same year as Charles Dickens died. And Philip Larkin stopped writing poetry in the 1970s, just as Mick Ronson, dubbed "The Pride of Hull", was playing guitar for David Bowie on the mountaintops of Hunky Dory, Aladdin Sane, Ziggy Stardust.

During those forty years, this man who described himself as looking like an egg, with a bald head and black plastic glasses, this man who was not actually a recluse but certainly solitary, who replied when asked if he wouldn't like to visit China "I wouldn't mind going if I could come back the same day", lived three long, contemporaneous love stories -- the three women proffering hostile stares over his deathbed -- and published no more than a few slim volumes of poetry. He was reputed to be the most costive of artists, according to John Banville in the New York Review of Books. Rarely can I not make even an educated guess at the meaning of a word, but costive was beyond me. It turned out to mean constipated.

Luckily, like most librarians Philip Larkin couldn't bear to throw anything away, and after his death over a hundred poems were found and published in the Collected Poems, all of them works any less perfectionist of a poet would have published without a qualm. For one particularly fine love poem it was noted that he might not have published it to avoid one of his lovers asking for whom he had written it.

You can read John Banville's  "Homage to Philip Larkin"  in the New York Review of Books online

and Richard Goodman's essay on Philip Larkin, librarian from About Larkin.

Then get Philip Larkin's Collected poems at the library

Bolaño, el gaucho insufrible

I stopped reading Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives at about page 80, exasperated with experiencing in real time the lengthy, rambling thoughts of young literary poseurs that I kept mixing up so every few pages I'd have to flip back ten pages to try to remember who they were. Or actually, no. To identify them, not to remember who they were. I remembered who they were. They were that late-seventies phenomenon, the freaks, travelling around Europe, India, North Africa with their embroidered bags full of Caran d’Ache watercolour pencils, shiny things and dope, this last tending to make their conversations boring and pointless, although if you had partaken too you noticed this less.

Roberto Bolaño had come over from Mexico in those years and was travelling around Europe, perhaps with an embroidered bag, or possibly with one of those brown, black and white Inca woven bags. In Europe in those years South American was sexy. Where I had gone to live, in Florence, Iranian students at the University used to try to pass themselves off as South American to get laid. There were barricades in South America and barricades were an important theme back then. I had someone say to me, seriously, "When the Revolution comes, we know what side of the barricades you'll be on, but we're not sure about him", "him" being a newly come-out gay friend of mine who was living an endearing enthusiasm for Barry White music and disco-dancing.

So when I read in The New York Times, as I was waiting for my copy of The Savage Detectives, that Roberto Bolaño, Chilean who had lived in Mexico since he was young, had probably not in fact gone back to Chile to join the struggle against Pinochet and then been arrested and freed only by the miraculous coincidence of having been at school with one of the guards (A Chilean Writer’s Fictions Might Include His Own Colorful Past), I was okay with cutting him some slack. Someone misunderstood and thought so, he didn’t correct the story right away, and afterwards it was too hard. Or maybe he wanted to construct a narrative for himself which he felt expressed him better than the real circumstances. After all, didn’t Hemingway do the same thing with his World War?

But the problem turned out to be, I didn’t like the book anyway.  I wonder who made it into such a myth; it must be either people who missed out sociologically on the whole phenomenon, or people from a later generation, even better if young and uncritical,as I was when I managed to make my way through seven - or was it nine - volumes of Anais Nin's diaries in high school. I asked a friend of mine, who, like me, had known in her time not a few characters like the ones in the book, if she understood why someone wanting to write a “love letter to his generation“, as he apparently called it, would choose to describe a time when they were so young and so full of themselves? There was a pause and then she said, “Well, perhaps if you were dying of liver disease you would.”

The savage detectives by Roberto Bolaño

Graphic Fahrenheit 451

Just out and much praised, Tim Hamilton's graphic adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, authorised by Ray Bradbury, the man who just over fifty years ago wrote the original novel about a book-burning future where rebellious souls pick books and memorise them to keep them alive, has now arrived at the Library.

It's very pleasing: the cover shiny and sharp-cornered, the pages that when you flip through them smell like vanilla and cream, the drawings going along all dark and then exploding into flame and then dying down again.

And a great dedication:

To David Passalacqua
Whose voice is still in my head every day
And I would like to thank the following:
Ray Bradbury, Thomas LeBien, Deep6 Studios,
Chris Sinderson, Tory Sica,
Howard Zimmerman, Dean Motter,
My mom, and Jean lee.



And then there was a passionate introduction by the big man, Ray Bradbury himself:

"... so what you have here, now, is a pastiche of my former lives, my former fears, my inhibitions, and my strange and mysterious and unrecognised predictions of the future. I say all this to inform any teachers or students reading this book that what I did was name a metaphor and let myself run free, following my subconscious to surface with all kinds of wild ideas.

Similarly, in the future, if some teacher suggests to his or her students that they conceive metaphors and write essays or stories about them, the young writers should take care not to intellectualise or be self-conscious or overanalyse their metaphors; they should let the metaphors race as fast and furious and freely as possible so that what is stirred up are all the hidden truths at the bottom of the writer's mind...

Finally, may I suggest that anyone reading this introduction should take the time to name the one book that he or she would most want to memorise and protect from any censors or "firemen" and not only name the book, but give the reasons why they would wish to memorise it and why it would be a valuable asset to be recited and remembered in the future. I think this would make for a lively session when my readers meet and tell the books they named and memorised, and why."

I am sure some of you out there will already be thinking of your choice. Me, I thought first of Macbeth, because you do tend to think of Shakespeare, or I do, and it's my favourite of the plays. Then I thought oh I should leave it for Paul Reynolds, he's much better suited, with that sublime Scots speaking voice.

Next I came up with Stuart Little. It's perfect for me: funny, sentimental, heroic and with a final message I really love, ie that even though Stuart hasn't accomplished what he hoped to do when he set out, which was to find his lovely lost Margalo, it's a happy ending.

"That's the way I look at it," said Stuart. "I rather expect that from now on I shall be traveling north until the end of my days."
"Worse things than that could happen to a person," said the repairman.

And then I thought, actually, even better, I might do the Odyssey, Stuart Little being a sort of starter Odyssey, if you think about it, the hero with more brain than brawn, the journey which becomes its own end.  For dessert, I could recite the final lines of Tennyson's Ulysses, which I already know by heart:

Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars until I die.

On the publisher's website you can see a video of an interview with Ray Bradbury ‌in which he talks about the genesis of the novel and the graphic adaptation.

******
Fahrenheit 451: the authorised adaptation by Tim Hamilton, Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury's original Fahrenheit 451

Critterati at The New Yorker

The New Yorker is rightly famous for its cartoons (available in anthologies at the library) but it is not just its Roz Chasts and Charles Barsottis which can brighten your day. For instance, I've always gotten a good laugh out of the little advertisements in the margins of the last pages.  I think the first time I would have read them by chance, maybe nothing left to read but those, but I was hooked right away. They are like haiku versions of John Cheever's beautiful stories saluting, with tenderness and irony, the gods of 1960s New England suburbia.

I'll just flip through a withdrawn library New Yorker which I happen to have at hand so you can see what I mean:

Specialty Bow Ties
Handmade silk ties
by Beau Ties Ltd of Vermont.

The original brass Blo-Poke
The Essential Fireplace Tool
Handcrafted in New England since 1941.

The "I" in College Admission Essay
Your teen finds his/her truth, and gets noticed
By writing the personal essay of a lifetime.

The Pavilion at McLean Hospital
Unparalleled psychiatric evaluation and treatment
Unsurpassed discretion and service.

'Tis an unusual world.
Hendrick’s. A Most Unusual Gin
“Voted Best Gin in the World.” The Wall St. Journal

And now my adored New Yorkers have outdone themselves with the Critterati “Dress your pets like literary characters” contest.  Off they went, having great ideas and rustling up little outfits for their cats and dogs, where do they get the time, I wondered, with those long hours they work, and then dropping by that deli where everyone has to go or you’re not a real New Yorker, not to mention a run or a game of squash and getting sushi and watching The Wire (is it still on?) and David Letterman?

There must be a department at FAO Schwarz with funny pet clothes; they could not possibly have had that stuff on hand in their apartments. Myself, I wouldn’t have gotten further than “We could photoshop a black bob on a picture of the cat and call her Kat Mansfield” – but that’s why I’m not a New Yorker. New Yorkers, je vous salue.

See them all: the Critterati contest winners on The New Yorker online.

My favourites are the dry French couple; you’ll know why when you see them.

Judging a book by its cover

Here’s a wonderful book jacket from the 1940s, a satanic thriller which I picked up in our basement stacks the other day. The book is unreadable now, if it ever was, one of sixty churned out by a man Trashfiction.com describes as “a writer of no great talent, [whose] books were clunky, lumpy slabs of indigestible narrative”, but you have to admit, the cover is a classic.

Something I enjoy with the covers of the old books in the basement is reading the blurbs. Unlike today when every book cover boasts two or three hyperbolic quotes from well-known authors pushed into service by their publishers, the old covers are sort of like long ago Olympic games when athletes were amateurs and wore long pants; they offer quaint phrases like

“I have no hesitation in pressing this delightful story on you” 

That's the Daily Dispatch reviewer on a book by a man named John Symonds, noted for having had Dylan Thomas’s wife Caitlin attack him with a knife at a party.

Then there are those ambiguous lines like this one which Anthony Burgess composed for an Irish writer named Paul Smith,
 
“When every drunken Dublin writer is a genius I don’t feel like committing myself to the word; but I am sorely tempted.”


It's close to “Damning with faint praise” territory, which I always thought of as an English tradition until I spied this quote on another cover, from James Finn in The New York TImes:

"What Terrarossa attempts is limited but it offers the very real satisfaction of a work that achieves its purpose exactly.”

As for the cover designs themselves, it never ceases to amaze me how, within the hundred years or so that they have existed, book jackets have always had this trait of perfectly evoking a moment in history. I suppose all objects of design do this, but at least for me, the difference between book covers and say, coffeemakers, is that with book covers every period is fantastic, bar none.

Anyone out there love Penguin Classics? The man who came up with the idea of putting photographs of paintings on the covers of the Penguin classics was an Italian named Germano Facetti, who had been deported to Mauthausen during the war for anti-fascist activity, aged only 17, met a Milanese architect there and joined his studio for a while when they got out, and then moved on, Paris, London, Penguin Books.

When my in-laws (who knew him) told me about him I thought that his job consisted of looking through art books all day or visiting museums, picking out paintings to match to various great books. It seemed like the dreamiest dream job ever and I expect I can blame hearing about it for another couple of years of arrested development with regard to thinking seriously about a career.

Now that I work in a library which has the fine history of Penguin Books, Penguin by Design, in its collection, I know that while Facetti did indeed personally pick out many of the paintings, he also invented the grid, chose the font (Helvetica) and did many other ground-breaking things. There's a forum on the Typophile website where book world denizens talk about him, with a link to a gallery of his covers.

Two other books for book cover aficionados are By its cover: Modern American Book Cover Design which pointed out to me that book covers are a form of “communication art” and proceeds designer by designer with a fair amount of depth, and Front Cover: Great Book Jacket and Cover Design which is a bit more slapdash in that a spread can be an author (eg Agatha Christie), a designer (eg Jeff Fisher, creator of the extraordinarily successful dark dark blue Captain Corelli’s Mandolin cover), a time period (eg “the beat generation”) or a publisher (eg Harvill Press, who did the beautiful edition we have in our basement of The Leopard with the calligraphic writing and the curtain pulled aside to reveal the rampant Leopard -- they date the cover as 1960 so it might be the very first English version).

Websites are of course wonderful places to browse book covers. Coverbrowser.com offers you the chance to browse over 1000 Greatest Book Covers with another gallery of the covers of the greatest novels of all time. Check out the period On the Road with its Natalie Wood-inspired female labelled "Wild and unrestrained", or perhaps they mean the story. There are also sundry jazz musicians, but no sign of Old Dean Moriarty.

Bookcoverarchive.com has thousands of covers which can be viewed by titles, authors, designers, photographers, publication date, etc. There are links to the portfolio sites of about twenty of the designers. I clicked on Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich because the name was so improbable, and guess what! It turned out to be the very name I can put to all my least favourite covers in the entire library, particularly these two books that without ever having opened them I can assure you I will never, ever, read because yes, I judge them by these: