Carson McCullers’ eyes on me
July 23, 2010
I noticed this the other day. Walking down the stairs and turning to go out the front door, there she was, as if she’d casually leaned over and looked out from the side of the bookshelf to gaze at me.
This photo of Carson McCullers is from the back of her sixth book, Clock Without Hands, published in 1961, twenty-one years after her acclaimed first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I’ve read the latter, as well as McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Café, but not the former, even though it’s sitting on my bookshelf.
I purchased my copy of Clock Without Hands – a first edition — because the dust jacket is pristine, and it’s tough to find a first edition dust jacket in such fine condition. A circle is cut out of the center of it, framing the title and emulating a clock, and that makes the dust jacket fragile. It’s typically damaged.
Clock Without Hands got panned by The New York Times in a review on September 17, 1961. The critic regarded it as less successful than McCullers’ earlier books and said the most “disturbing” quality “is the lethargic flatness of the prose.” The story summary from the dust jacket’s inner flap of my edition says: “Here is a book which faces directly the overwhelming question of good and evil and reaffirms our faith in the dignity of life. J. T. Malone, the unwilling hero of this powerful novel, is engaged in an inner struggle that parallels his impending death. Through extreme moral suffering he discovers the greatest danger is not death but the loss of one’s own self in life, and because of a decision of conscience, he acts and finds himself.”
I’m not inclined to read Clock Without Hands, being it’s not one of McCullers’ best, but I’ve been thinking lately to re-read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. It’s a recurring thought that existed before I noticed McCullers leaning over and having a look beyond the bookshelf. I read the acclaimed classic long ago in a college lit class, and I don’t remember much of it beyond scenes from the movie flickering in and out of memory. Perhaps it’s time to get to it, what with those watchful eyes. Either that or I move Clock Without Hands to another bookcase.
Alan Furst’s new day in the barrel
July 21, 2010
For a little more than 20 years, Alan Furst has been spinning irresistible espionage set in Europe’s dark time leading up to and including World War II. He’s considered a master at combining history, politics, espionage and romance in a spellbinding style that drops you into the moment. But Alan Furst hasn’t always been a big hit. His first novel published in 1976, Your Day in the Barrel, is a comic murder mystery, which he followed with two more of similar theme in 1980 and 1981. You won’t find these three embarrassments listed under “books by Alan Furst,” though. In remarks about them to The New York Times, Furst said, “All I was doing was showing how smart I was.” Next came Shadow Trade in 1983, a contemporary spy thriller that transitioned him to Night Soldiers (1988), the first of his historical WWII spy fiction for which he’s now known. But Night Soldiers and, next, Dark Star (1991) didn’t skyrocket his popularity and sales, either, although a cult following sprouted around them and grew. With each successive book about espionage set during what’s become Furst’s signature historical time, more and more readers came on board. Now when Furst publishes a new book, it hits the best-seller list, including this summer’s Spies of the Balkans.
Spies of the Balkans takes place in northern Greece close to the borders of Bulgaria and Turkey. It is 1940 and Mussolini and Hitler are eagerly looking to add Greece to their empires. The book opens with the protagonist, special police agent Costa Zannis, chasing a German spy. When captured, the German’s briefcase reveals photographs of the Greek-Bulgarian border. What follows is the usual suspenseful plotline set in the WWII dark time of uncertainty with history’s people and events expertly threaded through the scenes and a complicating romance hanging in the background. Zannis collaborates with a Jewish woman in Berlin, married to a high-ranking protestant Nazi, in setting up an escape route through Austria, Hungary and the Balkans to Greece and a safe exit to Turkey. He also gets involved with the British in moving an important RAF pilot out of Nazi-occupied Paris in a series of unforgettable, harrowing scenes. This is the good stuff fans rely on, that Furst consistently delivers.
If espionage captures you and Spies of the Balkans is your first Furst, you’ll come away wanting more, which you can satisfy with the 10 previous novels in the series. You can get a complete list with plot summaries on Alan Furst’s website, under About the Books. Regarding those beginning novels Furst would rather ignore, they’re no longer in print yet fetch a nice penny in the collectibles market, with a signed first edition of Your Day in the Barrel commanding between $500 and $1,000.
I discovered Wakoski’s “Greed”
June 16, 2010
Oh that great American pastime. What The New Oxford American Dictionary defines as an intense and selfish desire for something. We usually associate greed with money and the things that money buys, but when I discovered Diane Wakoski’s take on this component of the seven deadly sins, I found a definition I couldn’t forget. In her series of poems The Collected Greed: Parts 1 – 13 Wakoski casts a broad net that catches all of us:
“Greed, I keep reminding you,
is the failure to choose. The unwillingness to pick one thing over
another. Wealth or simplicity; you cannot have both. Accord,
agreement, harmonious relations with others or your honesty; you
cannot have both. The
telling of the truth
is not beautiful; does not make people feel good.
I do not think any alternative is absolutely right or wrong.
I do know that it is absolutely wrong not to commit yourself
to one alternative or the other.”
Wakoski started her Greed poetry series in 1968 and then added to it through the years. Number 13 was completed in 1984. (She has since published #14 in 2000 within another collection, The Butcher’s Apron.) The poems read like diary entries, confessional, complaining, judging and, for the most part, laying out in plain, unmistakable view what we chose to ignore – that which motivates our desires. Her rants and raves are refreshingly honest and come from the poetry confessions of the 1960s and early ’70s (à la Anne Sexton), a time when poets expressed confessional anger, angst and sin way before writers began dumping them into memoirs. You can hear Wakoski’s unique strong and plaintive voice in these poems, and I relished all of her emotions about self and others because they felt alive and real.
She’s been writing for decades — her first poetry book published in 1962 — and there are many poetry books to show for it. Along with the Greed collection, I’ve read the slim volume/poem Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons (1969), a signed copy published by Perishable Press in 1969 (see below) that I purchased at an antiquarian book fair. (You can read the poem here.) It’s more of that unforgettable autobiographical voice and a beautiful poem, and it later became part of Wakoski’s well-known collection, The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems (1971).
That’s where I am with Wakoski — in discovery. All of her books except for three new collections, published during the last 10 years, are out of print, and I like finding them by chance in used bookshops and at antiquarian fairs. I’ve purchased Cap of Darkness (1980) and Waiting for the King of Spain (1976), two collections sitting on the bookshelf for someday reading. I must get ahold of those motorcycle betrayals.
It’s about the soldiers
June 5, 2010
I discovered Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy via Ken Lopez, an antiquarian bookseller in Massachusetts. His weekly e-newsletter included a first edition of the fourth/revised edition of this classic account of the French Indochina war between 1946 and 1954. I’d never heard of the book and, being drawn to stories — fiction and non-fiction — on the U.S. Vietnam War that filled the black-and-white TV screens of my childhood, I copied the newsletter summary of Fall’s book in Notepad and kept it on my computer.
It bears mentioning here that several weeks back I read Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn, an unforgettable, gut-wrenching novel that follows a fictional U.S. battalion in Vietnam. The now best-selling novel so fully absorbed me I wish I could start it new again, to relive the days when all I wanted to do was read that book. My gravitation to Street Without Joy seems natural in this context because Bernard Fall lays bare the French army’s strategic mistakes that led to their famous defeat at Dien Bien Phu, giving the U.S. obvious warnings we’d repeat their failure if we proceeded similarly, which we did.
When Street Without Joy was first published in 1961, the Kennedy administration was escalating the presence of U.S. troops in Vietnam. The book didn’t get much attention, an unfortunate response considering Fall hammers home the impossibility of Western military arms and technology triumphing over the region’s terrain and people. Colin Powell attests to the oversight in his autobiography, My American Journey when he writes:
“I recently reread Bernard Fall’s book on Vietnam, Street Without Joy. Fall makes painfully clear that we had almost no understanding of what we had gotten ourselves into. I cannot help thinking that if President Kennedy or President Johnson had spent a quiet weekend at Camp David reading that perceptive book, they would have returned to the White House Monday morning and immediately started to figure out a way to extricate ourselves from the quicksand of Vietnam.”
The fourth edition of Street Without Joy, published in 1964, includes revisions by Fall that address the escalated U.S. military presence in the region. I see it as a non-fiction prequel that gives the novel Matterhorn deeper meaning. I’m reading a library copy of Fall’s book, but I don’t think that’s going to diminish a developing, insistent desire to own its rare cousin available from the antiquarian bookseller.
That cousin is inscribed by Fall to a Major Weber in 1964, and there’s also an ownership signature of a major in the U.S. Air Force dated 1965. Who knows how many other soldiers read this copy, as they prepared to fight the same enemy as the French. I imagine these solider-readers as those I got to know in Matterhorn and see the two books sitting side-by-side on my bookshelf in necessary recognition of what happened to them. What stops me is the price, beyond what I can justify within my book collecting budget; however, it’s likely only a matter of time before I give in. Of course, if I wait too long, the book may no longer be available. But that’s how this collecting jig is danced.
My ADD book collecting habit
May 6, 2010
I’ll be moderating a panel about book collecting this weekend. The preparation has led me to consider my own book collecting habit, and I wonder if I’m expressing attention deficit disorder in that area of my life. It all began when I decided to collect William Faulkner, but as you can imagine, first editions of his books are pricey, so I took the tack of “what I can afford” Faulkner. That means I own a first edition of The Sound and the Fury in spanish, published in Buenos Aires. At least, I think it’s a first. I stopped collecting Faulkner and began collecting Katherine Anne Porter for a while, and then Thomas Pynchon and Shirley Jackson. Oh, and Louis Bromfield, William Styron, Andre Dubus and James Salter. There are also first edition paperbacks of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels on my bookshelves as well as my Perry Mason collection.
I envy “completists,” who focus on one author or idea, because I think they’ll end up with collections worthy of a library installation or a great sum of money. A few years ago, I was on a bus with collectors touring libraries in Washington D.C. Everyone introduced themselves and what they collect. Their answers were so very neat and tidy. The journals of Arctic explorers. Miniature Bibles. Books published by Thomas B. Mosher. Alphabet books for children pre-20th Century. My thoughts scurried about as to what I could say. “I seem to like everything” didn’t sound very sophisticated. Someone before me said he collected modern firsts, so I used that. It was close enough. Nobody needed to know about my erratic collecting of bird books.
Here’s something else. I find myself buying the odd one-offs. Books that fit nowhere into any of my collections. Like, The Second Funeral of Napoleon in Three Letters to Miss Smith of London and The Chronicle of the Drum published in 1841. William Makepeace Thackeray penned it using Michael Angelo Titmarch as his nom-de-plum. Then there’s this $75 paperback, WeeGee’s Naked City. What attracted me was the blurb on the cover: “Weegee photographs that O. Henry might have done if he had worked with a camera.”
Obviously, I don’t complete, I don’t focus and I can’t afford the top ticket items that would make my collections worthy of a bus announcement, but book collecting is a thrill for me. Everything – from the search to the surprise-find, from roadtrips to attend book festivals to borrowing from the house maintenance budget to pay for a must-have — figures into that thrill. And I’ve learned along the way, something I hope the panel communicates to our audience, there are all kinds of ways to collect, and all kinds of collections. Neatly packaged and defined is not a requirement.
Keep your books
January 17, 2010
In the 1980s, I read an article in The Wall Street Journal that said a first edition of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot was selling in the range of $250. I couldn’t believe it. I owned a first edition. It was a Christmas present from my mother the year King’s second novel was published, 1975. Years afterwards, it traveled with me as I boxed up books and moved to new cities, new homes. I wasn’t a book collector during those years. I didn’t even know book collecting was something someone did, or that some books increased in value over time. I just kept my books. It was second nature.
Reading The Wall Street Journal article I figured, what the heck, I’m not a Stephen King fan. I don’t need to keep this book. Off I skipped to a local dealer and traded it in. Too bad it didn’t dawn on me that Salem’s Lot would continue to increase in value. That maybe I should hang onto it.
I saw Salem’s Lot for sale at a local dealer a few days ago. Asking price is $700. It’s a first edition book with a second issue dust jacket. That’s likely what I had. Salem’s Lot was published with the wrong $8.95 price on the dust jacket, and the publisher quickly reprinted it with the correct $7.95 price. Consequently, there are hardly any first edition books with first issue dust jackets. Sellers online are asking prices similar to the $700 for Salem’s Lot in a second issue dust jacket, so that seems the going price. Of course, much more is being asked for signed editions.
Not all books increase in value, and that’s the gamble when we sell our books. When Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was published, how could a reader know it would become a cultural icon let alone valuable in its first edition? The same could be said for the first Harry Potter book.
I still sell my books, mostly because of shelving space in my home. I’m not a bibliophile who will rent a storage locker for books. (At least, not yet.) My rule is to keep the books I love, review and collect or, for some reason, regard as special. Anything beyond that becomes questionable when space gets tight. Did I love Salem’s Lot? I can’t remember. I just wish I’d kept it.
No monkey business here
December 27, 2009
I discovered Steve Jenkins’ Never Smile at a Monkey: And 17 Other Important Things to Remember on The Book Design Review blog. It’s listed there as a favorite book cover for 2009.
The cover alone didn’t attract my attention but also the 18 interior, cautionary maxims that feel appropriate during this time of New Year’s resolutions. Yes, let us declare never to smile at a monkey, stare at a spitting cobra, touch a tang or corner a cassowary.
The point of this children’s book is there are dangerous animals we know to avoid, and there are dangerous animals we don’t realize are dangerous. Like the rhesus monkey, who will interpret your show of smiling teeth as aggression and respond violently. And the shy cassowary that can deliver a lethal kick with its sharply clawed feet.
Who knew? I didn’t. Never Smile at a Monkey: And 17 Other Important Things to Remember is a children’s picture book, but’s it fun for curious adults, too. The illustrations of the animals are collages of cut and torn paper.
Content & design: “Too Much Happiness”
November 28, 2009
Alice Munro’s new collection of stories sits on my “soon-to-be-read” stack. Not surprising, it’s made The New York Times 100 Notable Books for 2009 and receives a glowing response in the Sunday, November 29, NYT Book Review.
Munro rules the short story kingdom with unmatched ability to create engrossing mini-novels within a short-story structure. I’m eager to read these 10 new stories but, for the moment, I’m interested in the book’s design.
Book design is something I’ve been taking note of lately. With the potential demise of book art haunting literary production, depending on the success of e-readers, I’m curious, and sad, about what we’re letting go of. Becoming familiar with Too Much Happiness before I read it (an act of flipping through the pages, reading random paragraphs, cruising publication notes, skimming blurbs and acknowledgements), I came upon “A Note on the Type.”
The following is fascinating and gives a bit of a chuckle, considering Munro’s roots lie in British soil:
“This book [Too Much Happiness] was set in a modern adaptation of a type designed by the first William Caslon (1692 – 1766). The Caslon face, an artistic, easily read type, has enjoyed over two centuries of popularity in our own country. It is of interest to note that the first copies of the Declaration of Independence and the first paper currently distributed to the citizens of the newborn nation were printed in this typeface.”
We don’t get these notes much anymore, a “hail to the design” for the type chosen, let alone the artwork on the dust jacket and then the whole of the book’s design, pieces and parts that are as important as the content but, like much in the arts today, losing ground. Consider what’s behind the beautiful production of Munro’s collection:
- The front and back dust jacket images are pencil-on-paper creations of the artist Peggy Preheim, whose work is represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea, New York City. You can see more of Preheim’s work here.
- The dust jacket design is by Carol Devine Carson. Her website features a wall of book covers she’s designed and/or directed. You can get to it here.
You can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can certainly want to own a book for its cover. There will be more about the book as an art object on TLC.
