From Way, Way Back in Your Book Backlog

[Extollager]

Dask mentioned a Washington Irving story in a large anthology of adventure stories that he recently bought (Book Hauls). I went looking for the story in my two Irving books and saw that my copy of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. was bought from the Southern Oregon State College library book sale on 29 Oct. 1975. I don't know that I have read in it so far, so it's time to place it somewhere to catch my eye. Probably a good choice for late-night reading. It was ill-printed by Hurst of New York, which I suppose was one of those publishers, like A. L. Burt, that specialized in cheap reprints. Their books, once upon a time, thronged the shelves of used book dealers, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are disappearing. Here and there, they are snapped up by readers like me who aren't very particular about editions of classics -- and the classics themselves good reads; and also, I imagine that booksellers eventually decide that these old Walter Scotts and so on are likely never to sell, and throw them in the recycle bin.

I have a memory that I wish were more vivid of a store loaded, as it seems, with such books, along old Highway 99 from Ashland > Talent > Phoenix > Medford, Oregon, circa 1970, where I bought a book that is not an unread backlog item -- Tales of Sherlock Holmes.

My copy is not in such good condition. This is a specimen of A. L. Burt workmanship -- of course, it was better made than many books today. I suppose it originally sold for 75c or a dollar.

Stores that offered old books such as this one also abounded in the society novels of Robert W. Chambers, remembered in fantasy circles for The King in Yellow. I'm not a great admirer of the King, but I remember being allowed to borrow a copy of the first edition, which looked like this,

from a fellow high school student. How'd he come to have the book? I wonder. He was a bit of a strange bird. I believe he traded me some EC comics for a couple of L. Ron Hubbard fantasy paperbacks (Fear and The Ultimate Adventure; Slaves of Sleep)that I had bought used as light reading (I probably added some other things to the deal; it is too long ago for me to remember the deal). Yes, he was probably getting interested in Scientology.... a pity. I don't know if he was around for a full school year or how I got to know him....

 

[Extollager]

Finished The Curse of the Wise Woman -- the story could have been told unhurriedly in half the number of pages, I suppose, and it did take a bit of effort to read through to the end, but it's pleasing once in a while to read something steeped in that reminiscent atmosphere of the love of an outdoors area. I wouldn't be surprised if this is one of Dunsany's most autobiographical writings.

 

[j d worthington]

Just a brief word or two: The Sketch Book is one of those delightful volumes perhaps best described by using the title of another book by Irving: Salmagundi. It is a bit of a hodge-podge in that it goes all over the map; is occasionally witty and humorous, occasionally a bit bitiing and tart, and at times sweet and sentimental. Personally I found it very much to my taste, and would like to know what you think of it... also what the contents are, as different editions vary a bit.*

On The King in Yellow... that is one that, despite liking some of the stories quite a bit originally, I wasn't all that taken with the book as a whole on first reading... but over time I have found that it keeps rising in my estimation, so you might find a similar experience were you to go back to it again. It is certainly a subtler book, in many ways, than at first appears....**


*Also, I still see those Hearst volumes around now and again, though not as often as I used... just as is the case with the Burt editions (in fact, my copy of Wagner the Wehr-wolf is a Hearst reprint which, sadly, is in such delicate condition that one doesn't breathe on it too heavily.....). At any rate, they're still out there, but a bit less common than they were a few years ago.

**Have you ever read Robert M. Price's comments on it in his introduction and story notes to the Chaosium anthology The Hastur Cycle? He has some quite good insights into this little volume, something shared by several of the writers whose works are included in that anthology.....


bits of hodge-podge which rather go all over the map, but which is often a fascinating

 

[Extollager]

I expect to start Washington Irving's Sketch Book soon, but haven't decided whether to read all of Thoreau's Maine Woods first or to alternate Thoreau and Irving. (The Thoreau has three divisions corresponding to three excursions he made, with years between each. I'm curious to see if the sense we readers get of Thoreau will vary from trip to trip.)

 

[Jacob Larch]

From 1684 to 2012, some barristers haven't actually changed in their style of speech! I know a few judges who also speak thus...

 

[Jacob Larch]

I devoured whatever came my way as a child but had a visual style of reading that some authors could not ignite at the time so it would be interesting to see if I could return to the likes of the Lensman series, or the Foundation and Empire books and get into them this time.

I also loved Dune but got bored with "children..." so it would be nice to return to that.

What would I read again? I still have my Harry Harrison collection by the fond memory of a child reading adventure stories of pure escapism, as well as a battery of others (Rendezvous with Rama, The Duelling Machine, Three Hearts and Three Lions etc) and my series by McCaffery, Tolkein and C.S.Lewis.

Would I read them again? I'd love to, when I'm not writing, self publishing, and film making myself! Maybe one day, because there's far too much quality science fiction then AND since to miss out on!

 

[Extollager]

Just a brief word or two: The Sketch Book is one of those delightful volumes.......would like to know what you think of it... also what the contents are, as different editions vary a bit.*

Contents of my edition of Irving's Sketch Book:

Advertisement to the First American Edition (1819)
Advertisement to the First English Edition (1820)
The Author's Account of Himself
The Voyage
Roscoe
The Wife
Rip Van Winkle
English Writers on America
Rural Life in England
The Broken Heart
The Art of Book-making
A Royal Poet
The Country Church
The Widow and her Son
The Boar's Head Tavern, Eastcheap
The Mutability
The Inn Kitchen
The Spectre Bridegroom
Westminster Abbey
Christmas
The Stage-Coach
Christmas Eve
Christmas Day
Christmas Dinner
Little Britain
Stratford-on-Avon
Traits of Indian Character
Philip of Pokanoket
John Bull
The Pride of the Village
The Angler
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Postscript
L'Envoy

 

[Extollager]

Have you read much of Hawthorne's short fiction? I've read a fair portion, though it has been quite a while for most of it and I should reread. Anyway, his short fiction made him a favorite of mine. Like Poe the Gothic sensibility pervades the stories, though I think Hawthorne's stories show a bit more variety than Poe's.Randy M.

Now here are two Hawthornean items from my backlog -- is anyone acquainted with these?

The Dolliver Romance, Fanshawe, and Septimius Felton -- a Houghton Mifflin book, in which the most recent copyright date is 1883 -- I have read Dolliver (nine years ago; don't seem to remember it; bought this book 27 May 1987 from Acres of Books in Champaign, Illinois. My title page looks similar to this, but doesn't have a copyright date.

Hawthorne's Doctor Grimshawe's Secret -- Harvard UP 1954 -- sketches and drafts; apparently contains a multi-page passage in which Hawthorne writes to himself about his failing creative powers/writer's block; this is also a book I bought in the 1980s, I think at a library book sale or something of the sort.

 

[j d worthington]

My printing of that edition of The Dolliver Romance, etc., is from 1884, but it appears to be identical, given the picture you've posted. I read it about a year ago, and found it very interesting, though Fanshawe itself is among the weakest of Hawthorne's completed works. (Not surprising, given it was his first novel.) I do know that there were some alterations made to Septimius Felton, some of which are rather notable, by Sophia Hawthorne, thinking thereby to protect Nate's image (the original ms. versions can be found in the Centennial edition of Hawthorne's works); still, it is a very fascinating read, with lots of intriguing possibilities, and -- as with the History of Middle-earth series -- giving a great deal of insight into Hawthorne's creative processes. It also has some of his finest writing, here and there.

My edition of Doctor Grimshawe's Secret is a recent Wildside Press reprinting of an edition from the 1880s, done by his son, Julian, who presents it largely as an almost-finished novel, with some examples of variant texts here and there. Again, one gets the feeling with this of disjecta membra, but it, too, has some fine passages and is an intriguing tale, as far as it goes; well worth reading despite its (sometimes serious) flaws. The things it hints at show that, whatever else, Hawthorne's imagination was still among the best, and by itself this would make it worthwhile to anyone who loves fantastic (including allegorical) literature....

 

[Extollager]

My edition of Doctor Grimshawe's Secret is a recent Wildside Press reprinting of an edition from the 1880s, done by his son, Julian, who presents it largely as an almost-finished novel, with some examples of variant texts here and there. Again, one gets the feeling with this of disjecta membra, but it, too, has some fine passages and is an intriguing tale, as far as it goes; well worth reading despite its (sometimes serious) flaws. The things it hints at show that, whatever else, Hawthorne's imagination was still among the best, and by itself this would make it worthwhile to anyone who loves fantastic (including allegorical) literature....

I think I may just, eventually, read the Julian Hawthorne edition first, recognizing it as frankly a father-son creation, and only thereafter look again into the critical edition that I already have, which attempts to show what Nathaniel actually left.

Yes, those Hawthorne Centenary editions are impressive! I have only the French and Italian Notebooks,* but I remember poking around, about 35 years ago, in the set as owned at the time by the Southern Oregon State College library; that was perhaps the first multi-volume scholarly edition I ever spent any time with, worth mentioning.

*For which I paid about $80 some years ago; but you can buy the same book now at abebooks.com for about $13.

 

[Extollager]

On The King in Yellow... that is one that, despite liking some of the stories quite a bit originally, I wasn't all that taken with the book as a whole on first reading... but over time I have found that it keeps rising in my estimation, so you might find a similar experience were you to go back to it again.

Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy 1 was another book from my backlog (29 Sept. 1972!). I may have read the de Camp-Pratt "Wall of Serpents," but I think that most, at least, of the four novellas have been unread; but today I read Chambers's "Maker of Moons." That's one strange story. I suppose its components severally are not that unusual, but what an unusual amalgamation the whole thing is: bird-hunting in the north woods near the Canadian border; federal agents hunting down and killing men who have figured out how to make gold; a dreamy romance with a lady by a fountain; disgusting but perhaps not harmful spider-crabs; and a black, amorphous water-entity!

It appears from Wikipedia that editor Lin Carter suppressed something -- I hesitate to say "the ending"; rather, a bridge from the ending to another story. I approve of his decision!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maker_of_Moons_%28short_story%29

 

[Extollager]

Couple more, still unread... Kazantzakis's Zorba the Greek, bought about 35 years ago, and Alain-Fournier's The Wanderer (29 Jan. 1982).

 

[Extollager]

Gnawed by Fritz...

I have here an orange-spine Penguin* of The Major Works by Sir Thomas Browne -- Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia (Urn Burial), etc. I believe that Fritz Leiber relished some of this writing. Anyway, I mean to get into this book. I can no longer tell when I bought it because the part of the front cover where I wrote that information was gnawed (23 years ago) by Fritz the rabbit. Fritz himself was unexpected. We were living in Minnesota at the time and, of a snowy day, he simply appeared. he had obviously been living near us for some time because I observed trails of rabbit droppings. He was a domestic rabbit. We took him in and he resided in a garage with books in boxes, and of his depredations we were unaware for a time. He seems to have liked the taste of the cover more than that of the pages. We held no grudge against him.

I suppose one could start a separate thread about pets' mishandling of books, but perhaps if those stories exist, they may be related here.

* http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/533752-orange-spine-penguin-english-library-books.html

 

[Extollager]

Gollum wrote:
Originally Posted by GOLLUM
P.S. I will post next week regarding some books I have had a long time in my library that I do intend to read.


I'm waiting!

 

[Extollager]

Well, a book from 11 July 2002 isn't way, way back in my backlog for me, since I have so many from the Eighties and even Seventies that I haven't read yet, but it's backlog: Geofrrey of Monmouth's Histories of the Kings of Britain, an old Everyman's Library book in blue cloth. I didn't read the editorial matter and skipped about a dozen pages dealing with King Arthur's war with Lucius of Rome -- these were the most tedious pages of Malory's Morte, as I recall.

If you're familiar with Malory's version, Geoffrey's Arthurian material (which accounts for about 40% of the book) is remarkable for what it does not have: there is no Guenevere-Lancelot affair, Mordred is not Arthur's own son by his half-sister, there's no sword in the stone, there are no Round Table knights or quest of the Grail. Reading Geoffrey prompts one to feel grateful for Malory's characterization, since the earlier book has virtually none. There was less of the marvelous than I might have expected. So it's somewhat dry reading.

I was in the right mood for Geoffrey's chronicles, however, and found the book of some interest. It begins with Aeneas and Brute and tells us a little about King Lear and Cymbeline (cf. Shakespeare). It contains about ten pages of prophecy by Merlin: I would say they sound the way prophecies should sound in an Arthurian chronicle. Apparently they remain mostly obscure; one wonders if there was a key, now lost.

 

[Extollager]

Matteo over at the Eddison Worm Ouroboros thread (Classic SF and Fantasy) wrote, "This is a book I've had for what I now realise must be over 20 years and it's a book I've never got around to reading." I thought this was worth posting here, too. Hope you don't mind, Matteo.

And I've just begun to read a book I acquired on 31 Dec. 1981, John Fowles' The Enigma of Stonehenge, which is largely a picture book featuring the (generally superb) photographs of Barry Brukoff. It gets off to a great start with two contrasting accounts, that of Fowles' visit as a boy in the Thirties, and then his recent one.

I've been reading Geoffrey of Monmouth and now Layamon, and both of them have the story of the British expedition to Ireland to take the Giants' Dance (as it is in Geoffrey) or Giant's Ring (as it is in Layamon) -- enabled by Merlin. Both authors say the stones originally came from Africa. This is the origin of Stonehenge.

 

[Extollager]

A Penguin edition of Parkman's The Oregon Trail, bought on 1 March 1985. I'll sometimes buy literary classics that I wasn't specifically looking for, when I see them for sale at low cost. This practice can easily result in the possession of in inordinate number of unread treasures, since cheap classic books are easy to find at library sales and so on.

 

[Extollager]

P.S. I will post next week regarding some books I have had a long time in my library that I do intend to read.

Still waiting...!

 

[GOLLUM]

Still waiting...!

Unbeknownst to yourself and most other folk here I've been out of action the past few months due to various offline issues. The good news is that I'm getting back on track and have more time on my hands now leading up to the New Year. Therefore I will now be able to revisit various posts including this one as I begin to play catch-up on these forums. Finally...

Some of the books I'm still to read inlcude:

Mississippi Writings - Mark Twain *Library of America publication. *more specifically Puddn'head Wilson and Life on the Mississippi.
The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts - Mark Twain
The Warden - Anthony Trollope
Beyond Good and Evil - Nietzsche *dipped into only.
Light Years - James Salter
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
The Complete Works of Francois Rabelais *read sections of Gargantua and Pantraguel. A more recent acquisition I know but I'm not sure if I ever will get around to reading the whole dang thing! A very big volume.
One Thousand and One Ghosts & The Black Tulip - Alexander Dumas
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
The Female Quixote - Charlotte Lennox
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien *dipped into but would like to read properly.
Memoirs of a Midget - Walter de La Marre *partially read, skimmed over.
The Maggot - John Fowles.
The Phoenix and the Carpet & The Story of the Amulet - E. Nesbitt

Quite a few more that have been gathering dust over the years but that's a start at least.

 

[AndrewT]

Unbeknownst to yourself and most other folk here I've been out of action the past few months due to various offline issues. The good news is that I'm getting back on track and have more time on my hands now leading up to the New Year. Therefore I will now be able to revisit various posts including this one as I begin to play catch-up on these forums. Finally...

Some of the books I'm still to read inlcude:

Mississippi Writings - Mark Twain *Library of America publication. *more specifically Puddn'head Wilson and Life on the Mississippi.
The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts - Mark Twain
The Warden - Anthony Trollope
Beyond Good and Evil - Nietzsche *dipped into only.
Light Years - James Salter
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
The Complete Works of Francois Rabelais *read sections of Gargantua and Pantraguel. A more recent acquisition I know but I'm not sure if I ever will get around to reading the whole dang thing! A very big volume.
One Thousand and One Ghosts & The Black Tulip - Alexander Dumas
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
The Female Quixote - Charlotte Lennox
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien *dipped into but would like to read properly.
Memoirs of a Midget - Walter de La Marre *partially read, skimmed over.
The Maggot - John Fowles.
The Phoenix and the Carpet & The Story of the Amulet - E. Nesbitt

Quite a few more that have been gathering dust over the years but that's a start at least.

"Life on the Mississippi" and "Roughing It" by Mark Twain should be read back to back since they are autobiographical following in direct sequence. Life covers 1852-1861 and Roughing 1861-1867. Both are extremely entertaining, witty, and educational. I just finished Roughing It last month and found it the better of the two. I was very impressed with Twain's life story. What a well-travelled and knowledgeable man he was. You have to take it with a grain of salt that a few things he said are considered very racist today though. A good editor would clip a few pages from Roughing It and leave us none the worse. But if that doesn't offend you in an extreme way then these are quite worth the time.