summer catalogue - parts 1&2

After much cataloging and scanning, I've finally finished both parts of my summer catalogue. It's arranged alphabetically, with part 1 covering the first half of the century, and part 2 the second half. While much of the catalogue is given over to the historical avant-gardes, there are many items in the fields of design, architecture, literature, modern thought and culture. I'll be integrating the catalogues into my website soon.

June slides by

This has been an impossible month, with Samantha and me putting the apartment on the market and trying to imagine just what is next. My reading has taken a turn toward the bucolic, with lots of food related books (both old and new) making it to the bedside table. More about those books later. We've both been separately grappling with the idea of writing, and imagining that our new rural surroundings may aid in that process. Of course, this is a fantasy. Samantha, though has been working on it all along - her blog has become more than a dumping place for the daily brain clutter, or a rehash of interesting links. It's really an investigation of the process of baking, and of becoming a baker, from the inside out. What's more, she's developing readers, well beyond the well-wishing friends and relatives that form every (well most) writers' first audience. I'm just a bit jealous.

I've been wrapped up in the appraisal of the archive of a well-known horror writer. In fact a very nice, very literary chap. This constant exposure to the process of writing, seems to be having an effect on the way I organize my thoughts. Certainly, it helps to demystify the workings of the writers' mind when you see the constant revising, the complete but discarded novels, the thousands of pages written before recognition reveals itself. When craft is laid out in front of you like this, it seems more possible, but much more work.

While the blogging has been on hiatus, it's been a month of great reading. Last night finished Zbigniew Herbert's King of the Ants, a retelling and extension of a mythological stories. The narrator assumes an attitude of amused consideration, filling in gaps in the original tales, or following incomplete threads to a previously unspoken conclusion. While the book hasn't the sheer brilliance of Barbarian in the Garden, it still provides a peak into the swirl of ideas which is Herbert's mind.

time to resume

It's been more than a month now without my laptop, and thus, no blogging. Events come and go, reviews are waiting, and generally work is piling up, but not to worry, blogging is an entirely voluntary activity!

it's spaghetti harvest time

For one of the great hoaxes in history, look to the British. The august BBC ran a piece on a news program called Panorama, in which a highly-respected journalist, Richard Dimbleby, delivered with absolute seriousness a story about the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest. Spaghetti was relatively unknown at that time in the U.K. and viewers began calling the BBC asking how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. The BBC encouraged caller to place a stick of spaghetti upright in a can of tomato sauce. Here's the transcript:

It isn't only in Britain that spring this year has taken everyone by surprise. Here, in the Ticino, on the borders of Switzerland and Italy, the slopes overlooking Lake Lugano have already burst into flower at least a fortnight earlier than usual. But what, you may ask, has the early and welcome arrival of bees and blossoms to do with food? Well, it's simply that the past winter, one of the mildest in living memory, has had its effect in other ways as well. Most important of all, it's resulted in an exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop.The last two weeks of March are an anxious time for the spaghetti farmer. There's always the chance of a late frost which, while not entirely ruining the crop, generally impairs the flavor and makes it difficult for him to obtain top prices in world markets. But now these dangers are over and the spaghetti harvest goes forward.

Spaghetti cultivation here in Switzerland is not, of course, carried out on anything like the tremendous scale of the Italian industry. Many of you, I'm sure, will have seen pictures of the vast spaghetti plantations in the Po valley. For the Swiss, however, it tends to be more of a family affair. Another reason why this may be a bumper year lies in the virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil, the tiny creature whose depredations have caused much concern in the past. After picking, the spaghetti is laid out to dry in the warm alpine sun. Many people are often puzzled by the fact that spaghetti is produced of such uniform length but this is the result of many years of patient endeavor by plant breeders who have succeeded in producing the perfect spaghetti.And now the harvest is marked by a traditional meal. Toasts to the new crop are drunk in these boccalinos. And then the waiters enter bearing the ceremonial dish and it is, of course, spaghetti, picked earlier in the day, dried in the sun, and so brought fresh from garden to table at the very peak of condition. For those who love this dish, there's nothing like real, home-grown spaghetti.

- thanks to Manhattan User's Guide for the info.

my reading table

Recently finished reading Anatole Broyard's Kafka was the Rage, a Memoir of Greenwich Village. He manages to single out various elements which made the world a very different place at that moment. While the art of the moment didn't grab him, the strange nature of relationships between men and women, and men and men, did. Broyard's descriptions of NYC's citizens beholden to what they read as much to their actual existences were enticing if exagerated.

Currently in the middle of M.F.K. Fisher's little book, A Cordiall Water, a slight survey of healing concoctions througout history.

plunder to return to southern Italy

"Wartime loot may summon up images of art treasures plundered by the Nazis from persecuted Jews, rather than a rare book acquired by the British Library from a respectable English army captain.

But now a 12th-century missal which has formed part of the library's collection since 1947, must be returned to its home city of Benevento, in southern Italy, according to a ruling.
It is written in the rare Beneventan script, unique to the region, which flourished from the 8th to the 13th centuries.

The ruling marks the first time that an artwork plundered during the second world war and held in a British national collection will be returned to its rightful owners."

- from a report in the Guardian.

plus Dumas, s'il vous plait

'The Knight of Sainte-Hermine', a previously unknown novel by Alexandre Dumas, of Three Musketeers fame, has been discovered in the French National Library. Le Figaro reports the 900 page work will be published in France in June.

This comes on the heels of a survey of designed to find the 'Greatest Frenchman of All Time, which neglected to include Dumas, Sartre, Belmondo, and others. I was pleased, however, to see that fiesty food and anti-globalisation crusader Jose Bove made the list.

MET acquires Gilman collection

The Gillman Paper Company collection of photographs is going to the Met. It is likely the most important collection of photography in private hands, and its arrival at the Met makes the museum one of the most important institutional photography collections in the world.

Just when I thought it impossible to start another collection of my own, I've been making piles of cookbooks on the floor. Cookbooks are nothing new to our home, as Samantha (a professional pastry "cook" - she won't let me use the "chef" word), has quite a collection, the growth of which I've been very involved with. But a recent trip to Maine and Doug Harding's shop in Wells, a perennial stop on our visits north, drove home to me how engaged I've become with these shop manuals for the kitchen. I was rooting in the art and poetry sections, while Samantha hit the cookbooks. She emerged happy with a small pile of books by Pierre Franey and others. But later when I viewed the cookbooks, something broke inside my brain, and I started pulling titles off the shelf for myself.

Later when we compared stacks, I realized that we saw two entirely different things in our quarry: she sought books for information she could use (although living with a bookseller she understands the aesthetic and other qualities of books), while I sought pieces of history. History in the information (about chefs, restaurants or even entire cuisines gone by), and history in the printed artifact. My finds included Pelleprat's L'Art Moderne Culinaire in a 1930's dust jacket, Rene Coste's monumental two volume work on coffee production, Paul Elliot and Luis Quintanilla's drinking manual, 'Intoxication Made Easy', and best of all a first of Elizabeth David's first book, 'A Book of Mediterranean Food"a book which British bookseller Nigel Williams call "an early example of gastro-porn'. Some other recent acquisitions include the first Zen Macrobiotic cookbook (I won't be using those recipes anytime soon) and a nice first of the most handsome bar book ever - the Savoy Cocktail Book.

Getting hungry now - must eat!

Cabrera Infante dead at 75

The Guardian reports that Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the greatest Cuban novelist of his generation, has died at 75.

"In 1967, he published Tres Tristes Tigres (Three Sad Tigers), one of the classics of the "boom" in the Latin American novel. Its playful tongue-twisting title sets the tone for this completely original, elliptic and difficult novel, "a celebration of Havana nights", as he put it. Cabrera reinvented a magical 1950s city, packed with music, sex, dancing, sweat and conversation. His master was James Joyce (J'aime Joys, as he said in one of his wonderful polyglot puns), and Three Sad Tigers has multiple narrators, scant plot and a middle section like something out of Finnegans Wake.

Cabrera's wit, imagination and brilliant language hold together the book, which culminates in a long conversation that ties up most of the threads. Its themes are those that recur throughout his writing: sheer joy in physical pleasures and in the human contact of jokes and anecdotes. Cabrera believes in seducing and entrancing his readers. Most critics resort to music to express the book's quality: bursts of solo sax, vibrant duets and long, melancholic interludes." from today's Guardian obit."

Greenwich Village Antiquarian Book Fair

This weekend, Friday through Sunday, you can find me at the Greenwich Village Antiquarian Book Fair, a long-running benefit for p.s.3 here in NYC. It's a pleasant fair, with a bit of the feel of book fairs from times gone by. There's a list of some of the items I'll be bring to the fair at my bookselling website. If you're in the area I hope to meet you.

lives of writers and my own

Once again there's been too much time between entries. But I've been to Fayetteville, AR and the Turks and Caicos in between so I'll pretend I have an excuse. The work in Arkansas was the second and final phase in a cataloging job for the appraisal of a major literary archive. The work is quiet but focussed, and it's always interesting to see how immersion in the daily creations of writers, artists and other thinkers can impact my own ideas about a well-lived life. One thing that struck me while working was the need of this writer for both extreme isolation and, simulataeously, for true companionship. I found my self longing for my little place in Maine, no tv, a competently equiped kitchen and my library. At the same time I admired the deep literary friendships expressed in his correspondence, the ability to communicate in relative honesty about writing, struggles, politics and of course, sex and sustenance.

The isolation is relative, although I find myself leaning more and more toward a severe form of isolation which may involve moats. A few acres will likely do just fine. On the literary companionship front, all of my efforts to develop literary correspondences with my hard reading friends generally never get off the ground or quickly stall for the usual reasons: lack of time, other diversions, conflicting schedules. Another thing I've noticed is that none of us has the same, or even a remotely similar, reading list. Samantha and I both read fiction and food history books, but it's rare that we have both read the same titles. Dennis the poet and I both spend many hours reading verse, but it may be only one book out of ten or more that we both digest. Is this a modern condition? Or is it just an illusion that in previous eras there was a good chance that reading was a more commonly shared experience?

more Mondovino vs. Robert Parker

In a wonderful essay in the London Review of Books, Steven Shapin charts the history of discriminating taste, from Sancho Panza, through David Hume and Brillat-Savarin to the current state of wine connoiseurship. He sees pitfalls in the adherence of much of the world to Robert Parker's 100 point system for rating wines, and more danger in the world's desire to supply wines which rank highly in the system. Should the nose of one man (Robert Parker) have so much power? Enter Jonathan Nossiter, whose three hour documentary, Mondovino, takes on globalization within the wine industry, and makes a serious case for the true local craft of winemaking, once the province of men (and women) in love with their own few acres of dirt, sky, and vines.

mcmurtry to shutter bookedup because archer city is boring

"I like to go out at night," he said. "I like to sit in a nice room and look at beautiful women. I don't want to just sit on my back porch drinking scotch, and there isn't much more to do in Archer City."

Well, bookselling has never particularly been a portal to the proximity of beautiful women, and many of us take solace in the attractive bar and waitstaff of bars and restaurants nearby our shops, homes and bookfair locations. Our sour, disappointed faces, distorted by another day spent at another slow bookfair can suddenly brighten as dinner plans materialize. Thoughts of tasty food and a tastier coat check girl can eliminate thoughts of sore feet and stupid questions from "customers". I can fully appreciate McMurtry's need for some scenery.

pain, lobsters, and David Foster Wallace

Norwegian scientists have now definitively (we can hope) demonstrated that lobsters, and other invertebrates, feel no pain. This puts the crimp in DFW's review of the Maine Lobster Festival, which appeared in the August issue of Gourmet. Thanks to The Elegant Variation for the heads up on the Guardian article.

a stolen book now in dispute

A dispute between the German government and a St. Louis bookseller has risen over a rare book of 16th century drawings and etchings. As much as booksellers are frequently described as having less than perfect morals, I don't personally know any dealers who wouldn't recognize that it is abundantly clear that the book belongs back in the collection it was stolen from (not by the dealer). The dealer did a bit of homework, and seems to have originally operated in good faith, but it doesn't matter in the end. The book was stolen, and should be returned. (thanks to bookslut for the link)

woodcut masterworks at the Grolier Club

A current exhibition at the Grolier Club, NYC, displays early woodcut illustrated books collected by Lessing J Rosenwald. The 15th and 16th century books, include works by Durer, Urs Graf and Hans Burgkmair. The exhibition is up through February 5th.

mondovino

Can't wait until March when 'Mondovino', Jonathan Nossiter's documentary about winemaking and globalisation comes to America. Nossiter's 2.5 hour paean to small vineyards and local methods has already struck a nerve with some of the large scale producers, and should continue to do so as the film gets wider distribution. It is perhaps in winemaking that the idea of "local is best" is most evident. Fine wines have almost always been identified by region and sought by educated drinkers and collectors who have known that two vineyards on opposite sides of a river valley can create radically different qualities of wine. So why now the push for homogenization? We'll see what Nossiter says, but my own guess is that the emphasis on varietals in naming (Merlot, Chardonnay, etc.) has conspired with efforts to open new markets to create global consistency of the characteristics (as defined by whom?) for those grapes. Connoiseurs will still follow terroir, which seems to be staging a comeback on its own, but in the meantime how many wonderful vineyards will be pulled up to be replanted with grapes whichcan command higher prices on the world market? Let's hope the forces for small will win out in the end.

Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, is shaping up to be one of the more talked about non-fiction titles of the beginning of the year. First a lengthy positive review in the New Yorker, followed by a half-page Op-Ed in the NYTimes. Now the title has been included in the Guardian's list of literary highlights of the coming year.