A book list and a control measure
January 26, 2012
The following new and relatively new books are sitting on my desk, only they’re not physically present on my desk. They’re represented by pieces of paper torn from pages in book review publications. I consider this growing handful of paper a reading table of sorts. Actually, it’s a control measure due to books now living on the floor in my house, something I said I would never allow. Clearly, books on the floor is a sign I need to control my literary acquisitions. Hence, this style of reading table that gathers paper as a first step versus impulsively acquiring at first love.
I share these books because readers who don’t comb book review journals, especially those from London, may not be aware of them.
Act of Passion by Georges Simenon
NYRB Classics recently published this Georges Simenon novel, Act of Passion, about a successful doctor who abandons his comfortable married life to pursue and attempt to possess a love interest. Sounds like a common plotline; however, in the hands of Simenon, creator of Inspector Maigret, the story’s probably a well-crafted stunner. The Times Literary Supplement writes, “Simenon creates a character both compelling and repulsive, clear-eyed and deluded at the same time.” The novel was originally published in 1947 in France as Lettre à mon juge, a more fitting title to the story, considering it’s written as an apology letter from the doctor to the magistrate in his murder trial. Act of Passion is translated by the late Louise Varèse.
Julia by Otto de Kat
Perhaps it’s unfair to list this novel because it’s not published (yet?) in the U.S., although you can still purchase it online. I’ve come across it a few times in U.K. reviews, and it’s one I’ve got my eye on. Julia by Otto de Kat was originally published in Dutch in 2008 and recently translated into English by Ina Rilke. This slight, 168-page novel concerns a Dutchman’s encounter with a woman (Julia Berger) for a brief time in Germany, 1938. From The Independent: “De Kat’s ambition of theme is served by astonishing tautness of construction and spareness of language, beautifully rendered by Ina Rilke. And, most movingly, the novel offers us glimpses of uncompromising virtue, not always in expected places.”
The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue
Canadian author Emma Donoghue may bring to mind her best-selling Room, a ripped-from-the-headlines story about a kidnapping. She also wrote The Sealed Letter. It was published in the U.S. and Canada in 2008, before Room. It’s historical fiction based on a scandalous Victorian divorce in 1860′s London. Picador recently published it for the first time in the U.K. It was reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement, where it got my attention. On Donoghue’s website, a quote from the Daily Mail says it’s ”a page-turning drama packed with sex, passion and intrigue.” Also, according to The New York Times review in 2008: “the plot is psychologically informed, fast paced and eminently readable.”
The Manuscript of Great Expectations: From the Townshend Collection, Wisbech by Charles Dickens
This book intrigues me because of the opportunity to experience an author’s decision-making, word by word, sentence by sentence, as he brings a story to life. It’s an exact reproduction in color and size of the hand-written manuscript of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. The museum that owns the 1860 manuscript collaborated with Cambridge University Press to produce the original papers in book format for the first time (according to this article in The Guardian). I love that The Guardian provides a gallery view you can click through for a taste of what’s inside the book. What a wonder to think this is how books used to be written. Pen and ink seems so much more of an intimate, demanding experience with words than typing.
The New Granta Book of Travel
edited by Liz Jobey, introduction by Jonathan Raban
This collection of travel narratives will be available in the U.S. April 2012. It’s been a while since I’ve indulged in travel memoirs. One of my long-time favorites is Mary Morris’s Nothing to Declare. More recently, I wanted to read but didn’t Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia. And so here, a collection of diverse travels essays calling to me. From The Independent: “What’s particularly interesting is how it illuminates the diversity of modern travel. In ‘Arrival’ we have an asylum seeker’s first experience of coming to Britain. Albino Ochero-Okello’s poignant tale turns the idea of travel for pleasure on its head. For a refugee, travel is a means of survival.’” Also, reading the book’s introduction via Amazon’s preview option, Jonathan Raban describes an essay about a Victorian-style imperial expedition into the heart of the Congo as well as a walk in East Ayrshire – ”Her journey lasts an hour or so, and covers perhaps a mile, but one need not travel far or for long to travel deep…”
How It All Began by Penelope Lively
I became a Penelope Lively fan with her Booker Prize-winning Moon Tiger, so a new book always gets my attention. How It All Began is getting positive reviews by the major U.S. papers, a story that starts with the mugging of a retired schoolteacher in London and then unfolds with the resulting consequences. The publisher’s website says, “Through a richly conceived and colorful cast of characters, Penelope Lively explores the powerful role of chance in people’s lives and deftly illustrates how our paths can be altered irrevocably by someone we will never even meet.” Sounds like another good one — How It All Began is Lively’s 20th work of fiction.
Meet the Lasts, Downton Abbey’s future
January 18, 2012
Evelyn Waugh’s 1934 novel A Handful of Dust satirizes Britain’s landed gentry, whose power and influence diminished between the World Wars. It’s a book that gets called out on “best” lists, such as Time magazine’s All-TIME Best Novels and Modern Library’s Top 100. Last July, John Self in The Guardian tagged it as Waugh’s greatest achievement in an article about writers being famous for the wrong book. I get that now, being a big fan of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and presently a bigger fan of A Handful of Dust.
This greatest achievement became a beach read for me during a recent Florida visit. It came along in the suitcase as a book I’d intended to read before the close of 2011 and missed the deadline by a week. I didn’t think of it as beach material but wanted to meet my goal. Classics and bests carry a hovering stigma of something to be trudged through. That aforementioned Modern Library list also includes Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury, hardly sun, sand and surf material. Nevertheless, I sat in the beach chair – actually, a balcony chair overlooking the beach – and there read Waugh’s masterpiece for long hours of escape, completely surprised and delighted by this classic’s engaging force. This is one wickedly funny novel.
The book focuses on Tony and Brenda Last, who live on Tony’s inherited country estate, Hetton Abbey. It requires every penny they have to keep it going. Weekend visits by the London social set fill the Gothic structure’s cold, uncomfortable rooms. And while Brenda’s bored with the old house and its requirements, Tony lives for it. Not surprising, then, that Brenda escapes to London, where she engages in an affair with John Beaver, the novel’s moneyless social climber.
Waugh’s ingenious send-up includes many lively characters whose affiliation with the Lasts helps exaggerate their arrogant blindness. One most enjoyable is their literal-minded son, a young boy who, when told the London socialite Lady Cockpurse looks like a monkey, imagines her to be a ”hairy, mischievous Countess:”
“When kindly people spoke to him in the village he would tell them aboutt her and how she swung head down from a tree throwing nutshells at passers-by.
‘You mustn’t say things like that about real people,’ said nanny. ‘Whatever would Lady Cockpurse do if she heard about it.’
‘She’d gibber and chatter and lash round with her tail, and then I expect she’d catch some nice, big, juicy fleas and forget all about it.’”
Even though we realize Waugh is on a mission to ridicule country estate heirs and their privileged friends, he creates these characters without the drag of giving a lesson. It’s his witty, acerbic digs and savage humor that do the educational work and make A Handful of Dust so much fun.
A tragic accident on a fox hunt at Hetton Abbey hurdles the Lasts toward their downfall, with Brenda making a very telling and shocking remark. It’s an unforgettable moment in reading history, a blurted “Oh thank God” positioned with enormous implication. Despite the dark turn of events, Waugh skillfully controls the experience so we stay within bounds of the book’s irony and satire. He shocks us, and then lifts us right back up into the amusing divorce proceedings and a threat to Hetton Abbey, such as, in this scene, when Brenda’s brother negotiates with Tony:
“The truth is that Beaver is cutting up nasty. He says he can’t marry Brenda unless she’s properly provided for. Not fair on her, he says. I quite see his point on [sic] a way.”
“Yes, I see his point,” said Tony. “So what your proposal really amounts to is that I should give up Hetton in order to buy Beaver for Brenda.”
“It’s not how I should’ve put it,” said Reggie.
My reference to Downtown Abbey in this post’s title is a bit cheeky, considering I’ve not seen the popular PBS show, what with no TV in the house; however, from all I’ve read about it, I couldn’t resist the juxtaposition, for a Last perspective, so to speak. Because Waugh would’ve had a field day with this show about an English country estate and its inhabitants. But then, maybe he already has had that day in A Handful of Dust, which ends with Tony lost in a South American jungle and to Hetton Abbey. Indeed, Waugh’s greatest achievement.
Some didn’t believe, some kept flying
December 21, 2011
The Conference of the Birds is being referred to as the perfect gift book this season. It definitely fits that pocket, being the book is beautifully illustrated and tells a meaningful story about the human journey to make sense of our lives. It sheds light on the arduousness of the journey, the obstacles encountered and the reason why, as Winston Churchill proclaimed during World War II, one should “never, never, never, never give up.”
I don’t like the gift-book designation for The Conference of the Birds because it makes me think of relegating it to the coffee table for public display, and the story is one that should be kept more intimately near, at the bedside or in a personal drawer at the office. Its philosophies are worth revisiting to help us keep sight of life’s higher purpose, beyond the minutiae on our iPhones and Blackberries.
Peter Sís’ is a seven-time winner of The New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book of the Year award. He’s also a MacArthur Fellow (2003). The Conference of the Birds is an adaptation of Sufi poet Farid Ud-Din Attar’s masterpiece with the same title about one’s search for divine truth. Attar lived in northeastern Persia between the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, according to the book’s end pages.
Sís’ version opens with the poet Attar waking one Kafkaesque morning and realizing he’s a hoopoe bird. He gathers together all the birds of the world and rallies them to search for King Simorgh, hidden behind a veil of clouds, who has the answers to the world’s troubles. Some of the birds are reluctant to embark on the journey because they don’t want to leave their comfortable lives, and they’re not sure the king exists.
"Parrot: I like it here. I feel safe. They bring me food and water every day. Peacock: I'm special! I'm not like anybody else - look at all my colors!"
Nevertheless, off they go, filling the skies, soaring high and far. On their journey to find King Simorgh, who lives on the Mountain of Kaf, the birds must pass through seven valleys: quest, love, understanding, detachment, unity, amazement and death.
"The endless deserts are crystals of sand. The mountain ranges are a string of beads."
Some perish in these valleys; some lose hope; some get confused. In the Valley of Unity, “All who enter here are bound at the neck by one rope.” In the Valley of Detachment, “It is here that all curiosity and desire expire.” Most perplexing is the Valley of Amazement, “place of constant pain and gnawing bewilderment.”
"You don't dare to look here...you don't dare to breathe...piercing swords of pain."
Valleys are typical representations of challenges in a journey. Sís, however, keeps his storytelling unique and vibrant not alone with the colorful, abstract illustrations but also with the experiences of the feathered characters. Throughout, he reminds us the birds’ long flight is a pathway to wisdom by frequently incorporating into the artwork the symbol of a labyrinth, that circular path one walks to find the way to the center.
The most powerful and direct messages come toward the end with the explanation of why many birds don’t make the full journey. That is, why they give up. It’s a piercing reality check about human weakness, and one of those reasons I suggest the book be kept near. The power of fear and discouragement can be overwhelming, and that’s not only on spiritual journeys, but also the personal journeys one takes when following the heart or pursuing a dream.
"A band of thirty battered, beaten, beleaguered companions trying hard not to try and hardly able to fly..."
Layers of new meaning reveal themselves with each new reading of the text. As I work on this post, I recognize for the first time, after two readings, the foreshadowing behind a statement the hoopoe makes in the beginning, pointing the birds toward a truth that will be revealed regarding the king on the Mountain of Kaf: “He is as close to us as we are far from him.” When you read the book, you’ll understand why.
Shopping Brooklyn bookstores
December 6, 2011
Oh that every city had indie bookstores like those in Brooklyn. I visited five in the New York City borough this past weekend and was reminded what we miss out here in the other-land that sells books via food markets, big-box “I can sell you everything” stores and, of course, Barnes & Noble. The browsing was extraordinary, tables covered not with the typical and predictable, rather the unusual and hard to find in novels, art books, travel memoirs, classics and literary non-fiction. Here I found shelves devoted to the New York Review Book Classics Series and Melville House Art of the Novella Series. I found signed books in paperback and hard-cover, including The Day Before Happiness by Italian author Erri de Luca at Book Court in Cobble Hill. A very nice store with a wide space for author readings. This independent has been around since 1981.
The Community Bookstore in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn is a small, comfortable shop filled with literary discoveries. A cat snoozed beside a bookcase and a lizard chirped in the back of the store. This is the kind of shop we all think about when imagining an independent bookstore, crowded with books but easily navigated and smartly organized, cozy in lighting and exuding a sensory feel of profound riches. One shelf provided the personal recommendations of authors who reside in Brooklyn, including Paul Auster, Mary Morris and Jonathan Safran Foer.
I came away with one of those Melville House novellas, Henry James’ The Lesson of the Master, and also Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, which recently won the National Book Award for fiction – a choice copy because it’s a first edition without the NBA award sticker. Also, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, which somewhere in my reading this year someone said must be read, and also The Conference of the Birds by Peter Sis.
Greenlight Books is nearby in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a bright modern space offering a plethora of signed books, many of them paperbacks stacked among the unsigned, the signature within signified by a sticker. Here I purchased a signed copy of my all-time favorite Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem and also a debut novel by Justin Torres, We the Animals, which I’ve been meaning to read since it came out this year. A glance at their literature shelf, and there I saw not only Hans Fallada’s popular Everyman Dies Alone, but also his lesser-known books. It’s just that which is so lacking in literary mega-store retail and depriving us of possibility and exposure – the lesser-known books kept in stock to be discovered.
Most impressive for its distinctive selections is Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers (“I’ve been to Sugartown, I shook the sugar down”*) in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn. I couldn’t figure out its focus at first, seeing eclectic art, philosophy and design books among recently released novels on its large center table in the 
small space. The bookseller told me “it’s not a literary bookstore,” and then added the owners don’t like it when she says that, but it’s true.
There’s something very different about Spoonbill & Sugartown, as if the selections come from someone’s vision for the store, which has been around since 1999. The store’s website says, “We also hand pick thousands of good books every month for our voracious clientele.” The bookseller told me the owners are descended from a former gallery owner in New York City and that the bookstore opened with books from his personal library. I wish I could’ve spent more time asking questions about the store’s history, but it was time to move on. I came away with a copy of Rudolph Wurlitzer’s Hard Travel to Sacred Places.
Also in the Williamsburg area, selling used books and specializing in literary fiction, both classic and contemporary, is bookthugnation. I didn’t spend much time here, but I came away with a vintage paperback, Aldous Huxley’s After the Fireworks and Other Stories. It was originally published as Brief Candles by Harper & Bros. and likely one of those paperback editions bestowed with a passionate,romantic illustration to sell more copies.
Across the street, not a bookshop but the Brooklyn Art Library where the Sketchbook Project is underway, a collaborative series of art books created by 5,000 artists. Anyone can participate. The Brooklyn Art Library sells vintage notebooks, art supplies and stationary inspired by the past.
If you go to Brooklyn, here’s where you’ll find the bookstores:
- BookCourt 163 Court Street, Cobble Hill
- Community Bookstore 143 7th Avenue, Park Slope
- Greenlight Bookstore 686 Fulton Street, Fort Greene
- Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers 218 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg
- Bookthugnation 100 N. 3rd Street, Williamsburg
*Quoted on the Spoonbill & Sugartown bookmark, this line is from a Bob Dylan song, Tryin’ to Get to Heaven.
The title of this post was changed 12.13.11. It formerly was ”I’ve been to Sugartown.”
Obsession of a modern-day Ahab
October 16, 2011
I haven’t given Moby-Dick its due in my reading life, not like Matt Kish, who’s read the classic close to 10 times. Now he’s illustrated the whaler’s story using the Signet Classic paperback edition with the Claus Hoie painting “Pursuit of the Great White Whale” on the front. In the Foreword to his new book, Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page, Kish writes, “So many editions of the novel have boring historical illustrations on the cover; this one really appealed to me for its fearless modernism.” But the Signet Classic also conveniently fit Kish’s project by beginning the story, with its famous opening line “Call me Ishmael,” on page one – Kish intended to create one illustration for every page of the book.
Working like a modern-day obsessed Ahab, he also set a goal to create those illustrations for the book’s 552 pages one per day, forcing himself to work creatively but efficiently. He ended up completing the project in 543 days.
I heard Kish speak at the official book launch held at the Wexner Center for the Arts where he remarked that as he got further and further into the project, he struggled with the relentless schedule that at times became depressing and bleak. It didn’t help that his creative space was the size of a closet – because it was a closet, approximately three feet wide and six feet deep. Much of Kish’s story about his days illustrating Moby-Dick in Pictures can be read in his book’s Foreword and also on Kish’s blog, which began the day he started the project, August 5, 2009.
The pace sounds like torture, but to hear Kish speak about the project with his energized joy is to hear the truth about what it’s like to set your mind on a project without any ultimate value attached to it other than personal achievement. No one urged him to start this rigorous creative project except himself, and he kept to it, day after day, while holding a full-time job that involved a 90-minute commute one way. That is, three hours in a car every day to get to and from work. Kish, having no formal art education, does not consider himself an artist. “Since I have never had to depend on art for an income, I have always been able to make whatever kind of art I want. The work is for me,” he writes in the Foreword.
"I will have no man in my boat," said Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale."
A publisher eventually came knocking, but that was neither envisioned nor expected. And when that happened, Kish said he “weirded out” over the idea that someone now wanted to put his illustrations into a published book for retail. Thoughts of “Will the book sell? Will people like it?” troubled him but not for long. Kish said he knew the illustrations were about Moby-Dick, not him, and that’s what kept him going, focusing on his personal and immediate responses to Melville’s story, guided by his intuitive and instinctive reactions.
"Look aloft!" cried Starbuck. "The St. Elmo's Lights (corpus sancti) corposants! the corposants!" All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.
The illustrations are created with an assortment of acrylic paint, colored pencil, ink, marker, spray paint, watercolor and other materials. And because they are created on found paper, intriguing images and words often are visible in the background of the drawings, such as a description of sleeve finishes for a sewing project, numbers on a tube placement chart and instructions on how to prune roses.
...then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its gripe.
Moby-Dick in Pictures is a beautiful book. The natural response upon picking it up is to flip through the colorful illustrations, and then to casually read Melville’s quoted words next to them. But true engagement comes from starting as Kish did, on page one, so you can see how Melville’s story evolves under Kish’s creative eye. Also, that approach inspires a desire to read Melville’s classic again, or for the first time. Because as Kish writes, “…Moby-Dick is a book about everything. God. Love. Hate. Identity. Race. Sex. Humor. Obsession. History. Work. Capitalism. I could go on and on. I see every aspect of life reflected in the bizarre mosaic of this book.”
Illustrations posted here are photos I took from my copy of Kish’s new book. You can see more illustrations from Moby-Dick in Pictures on the websites of The Huffington Post and The Atlantic. Finally, the Signet Classic paperback of Moby-Dick includes an introduction by Elizabeth Renker, who teaches English at The Ohio State University.
Adventures in vintage drug paperbacks
July 31, 2011
Early this summer, a friend gave me a framed poster she found at a garage sale. It’s an uncut sheet featuring six rows of 36 vintage paperback covers from a box set of cards. At first, the books seemed to be random pulp fiction titles but then, it dawned on me, they were all about drugs: Marijuana Girl by N.R. de Mexico, The Pusher by Ed McBain, Black Opium by Claude Farrere and Acid Party by Anthony Yewker, to name a few.
I got it in my head to try to find these vintage books, realizing some might be beyond my budget because I recognized #17 on the poster, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict by William Lee. Lee is a pseudonym for William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and famous Beat Generation drug addict. The first edition price of this 1953 confessional paperback tends to head north of $1,000. It’s Burroughs’ first book.
Undaunted and unknowing of what I might be getting into with this decision to acquire the books, I headed to Pulpfest 2011 in Columbus to see what I could find among the 36. As is typical of most book shows, dealers are in a large room with their books spread over tables and in display cases. For the first-timer to any show, it can be overwhelming. All I could see upon entering the room was a sea of paperbacks on and under tables and in boxes. Also, I realized, to ferret out my books, I would have to ask, “Does someone here deal with books on drugs?” It sounded comical and naïve.
I approached the booth for Hooked On Books where the owners Wayne, a retired reference librarian, and Deb, a retired CPA, took a look at my list and began educating me about which ones were hard to find (expensive) and easy to find (less expensive) and also, which ones were pornography (ok, good to know). Then I talked with Scott Edwards of Dearly Departed Books in Alliance, Ohio, because displayed on his table was a beautiful copy of #16 on my poster, Marihuana by William Irish. Scott explained why the book was the narrative size of a short story — it was sold in 1941, along with other similar-sized books, in vending machines for 10 cents. William Irish, I learned, is a pseudonym for noir crime novelist Cornell Woolrich. The Alfred Hitchcock movie “Rear Window” is based on Woolrich’s short story “It Had to Be Murder.”
The vending machines explained the stories I found by such classic authors as William Somerset Maugham in those small-sized, 10-cent books. As written on the back of Maugham’s 64-page paperback The Beachcomber: “Now for the first time you get famous stories by famous authors that first appeared in higher-priced books or publications, attractively produced in a pocket-sized book at a price of 10 cents each.”
Authors listed thereafter on this Dell paperback under current and forthcoming titles include Wallace Stegner, Pearl S. Buck, Edna Ferber, John O’Hara and Fannie Hurst. BTW, the original title of Maugham’s 1931 short story is “The Vessel of Wrath.” It became a movie under “The Beachcomber” title.
I came away from Pulpfest much wiser and with an affordable purchase for my poster collection — I Made My Bed published in 1958, written by Celia Hye. It happens to be the first book of the 36 on my poster and has all the dramatic blurbs written on it that you could want of this vintage literary art form: “A blazing novel of delinquency — intimately … frankly … shockingly revealed by a teenage addict.” To balance the tawdriness, I’ll add that I also came away with not only the classic Maugham (above left) but also a 1965 first printing Ballantine paperback of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, which, on the back, has a blurb by the aforementioned William Burroughs.
A thirst for fame: John Wilkes Booth
May 25, 2011
Ever heard of the author David Stacton? I hadn’t, until I received in the mail my NYRB Book Club selection for May, The Judges of the Secret Court, a historical novel about John Wilkes Booth. The story begins the day of President Lincoln’s assassination, Good Friday 1865, with Edwin Booth experiencing disturbing premonitions about his brother John Wilkes. It moves swiftly through the dramatic historical events of Lincoln’s death; John Wilkes Booth’s desperate flight to the South, capture and death; and the trial of Booth’s associates that was a mockery of justice.
Stacton (1923 – 1968) was critically acclaimed for his historical novels during his writing life, more so in Europe than the United States, where his books didn’t resonate with the reading public. Even so, the editors of TIME magazine included Stacton in a list of impressive novelists during the early 1960s, alongside Joseph Heller, John Updike, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud and Ralph Ellison.
Stacton these many years later seems out-of-place among those laudable literary names, but he is indeed worthy of being singled out for his historical novels, if his fictional expression of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the events that followed represents all his work. The Judges of the Secret Court is surprisingly addictive with its post-Civil War atmosphere and politics deftly conveyed without textbook tedium, as well as the fast-paced drama of Booth’s evasion of justice and the intriguing psychology of the actor’s delusional self-perception.
Violating the “show don’t tell” writing principle, Stacton’s narrative style tells the story in a very certain, confident and refreshing voice. He adheres to the factual events of Lincoln’s assassination, the historical figures and what follows, instead of embellishing the story with fictional characters and scenes. (The New York Times’ review of The Judges of the Secret Court, August 13, 1961, claimed the story “tells more about the quixotic assassin, probably more accurately, than any historian’s biography could…”) Also – and herein lies the imaginative spark for this great read — Stacton employs the God-like omniscient perspective, and so he enters the interior, private thoughts of the event’s participants, including President Lincoln, Vice President Johnson, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, let alone John Wilkes Booth and his friends.
Even those well-read on the topic of Lincoln’s assassination will find this 1961 novel a fascinating account of this moment in American history and the days that followed. Stacton leaves us not only with a renewed understanding of what happened but also a well-crafted exposition on the soul of an actor thirsting for fame.
Old paperbacks: irresistible vs. collectible
May 15, 2011
Pulpfest 2011 is taking place the last weekend in July. The event primarily features pulp magazines and related materials, but among those related materials will be vintage paperbacks. That got my attention, and I marked my calendar. While I don’t actively collect vintage paperbacks, as I expressed two years ago on TLC, I can’t resist them if they cross my book-life pathways.
As I type, I even hesitate to use the qualifier “vintage” for my predilection. Maybe what I can’t resist isn’t always vintage collectible, just old and intriguing, such as the 1968 Dell first edition paperback of John Fowles’ classic The Magus to the left, with Candice Bergen seductively wrapping her leg around Michael Caine. It was published after the movie, which starred the aforementioned couple and also Anthony Quinn. Nostalgic thoughts about those young actors captured me more than anything else.
Same can be said about this 1960 first edition Signet paperback of Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger, below. My grandmother, not fully understanding the storyline, took my sister and me to see the movie when we were too young for violence. She rushed us out of the theater the first time Oddjob threw his killer hat.
Another movie-related paperback in my library is this issue of Faulkner’s The Reivers, published after the film hit theaters, starring Steve McQueen. The paperback even came in its own slipcase. Inside the pages, I found a Cracker Jack surprise – a newspaper article from the Chicago Daily Tribune dated December 13, 1950: “Faulkner Just a Farmer Who Likes to Write: Nobel Prize Winner Is No Literary Man.” Faulkner won the 1949 Nobel prize for literature but received it in 1950. He gave his acceptance speech December 10, 1950. The Associated Press article reports on his life in Mississippi and thoughts about his books.
Is this one a collectible vintage paperback, or just a collectible paperback because it’s a 1969 first edition of a Faulkner novel?
Here’s another old paperback I couldn’t resist buying. This 1950 Bantam edition of Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye would fit nicely into the line-up of many dramatic cover illustrations I’ve seen featured on vintage paperback websites, along with its subtitle: “Strange loves in an emotional underworld.” The guy on the cover looks like a gorilla ready to pounce on that vulnerable, sexy woman in her luxurious slumber.
One more: this 1965 Fawcett Crest edition of John Updike’s Of The Farm. No racy cover illustration, but the irresistible element is on the back, a line drawing of Updike. Love the design of it and hey, the book has doubled in price over the years from its original 75 cents — I paid $1.50 for it. Another 50 years, it may go for an astounding $3.
