Lines from the Library

The Fales Library has always had excellent holdings of Gothic fiction -- from The Castle of Otranto (1765) on down, all the major (and many minor) writers of the 18th and 19th centuries can be found on our shelves. What might not be so well-known is that we have outstanding holdings in contemporary Gothic fiction as well.

One great place to start one's explorations of late-20th-century Gothic writing is this volume: The New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction.

This volume appeared in 1991, edited by Bradford Morrow and Patrick McGrath. It is full of writers whose works are collected in depth here in Fales: Jamaica Kincaid, Lynne Tillman, Joyce Carol Oates, Angela Carter, Brad Morrow, Peter Straub, Kathy Acker, and William T. Vollman.

About ten years later, Peter Straub was invited to serve as guest editor for an issue of the journal Conjunctions. He produced this excellent volume in 2002: Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists.

This collection collects even more names to be found filling the Fales stacks: John Crowley, Kelly Link, Jonathan Lethem, and Elizabeth Hand. In addition to the brief "Guest Editor's Note," this volume includes essays from two of the most thoughtful observers of contemporary gothic/fantastic/science fiction/fabulism -- Gary K. Wolfe and John Clute. Definitely required reading for anyone trying to get their mind around contemporary Gothic fiction.

While we're on the subject of John Clute and theorizing horror, one really must read his book The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror (2006) -- available in Fales, of course.

Other notable anthologies of recent years include Paraspheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction - Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Stories (2004) and The Apocalypse Reader (2007). Both anthologies include plenty of authors who have long been collected in Fales -- Brian Evenson, Dennis Cooper, Rick Moody, Lynne Tillman, and on and on.

The latest addition to this growing body of anthologies is Poe's Children: The New Horror (2008)

This volume is also edited by Peter Straub and includes a wonderful mix of writers, almost all of whom are well-represented in the Fales Library. Dan Chaon, Elizabeth Hand, Brian Evenson, Kelly Link, John Crowley, Thomas Tessier, and more. Straub's sometime-collaborator Stephen King is also included in this collection and I am pleased to say Fales holds a complete set of King's works from Carrie (1974) through his latest story collection, Just After Sunset (2008).

Capping it all off, Fales is now home to the personal papers of Peter Straub himself. The collection is currently being processed and will soon be available to researchers. It is as complete an archive as one could hope for: full of notes and multiple drafts of all of his works (published and unpublished); extensive correspondence with agents, authors, and friends; photos; contracts; and much more.

Next: Looking Backward: The Not Quite As New Gothic

I love The Chatterbox! It is one of my favorite sources for nineteenth-century creepy babies and images of kittens and puppies.

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

I could pull any number of Halloween-themed items from the vast collections in Fales. Something from our 18th-century Gothic holdings; something from Peter Straub or Stephen King or H.P. Lovecraft. Instead, I present you with one of the most underrated American masters of the weird and fantastic: The King in Yellow by R. W. Chambers (1895).

About half of the short stories contained in this volume are set in and around Washington Square. This passage from "The Repairer of Reputations" is one of the most chilling reading experiences I have ever had:

It was, I remember, the 13th day of April, 1920, that the first Government Lethal Chamber was established on the south side of Washington Square, between Wooster Street and South Fifth Avenue. The block which had formerly consisted of a lot of shabby old buildings, used as cafes and restaurants for foreigners, had been acquired by the Government in the winter of 1898. The French and Italian cafes and restaurants were torn down; the whole block was enclosed by a gilded iron railing, and converted into a lovely garden with lawns, flowers and fountains. In the centre of the garden stood a small, white building, severely classical in architecture, and surrounded by thickets of flowers. Six Ionic columns supported the roof, and the single door was of bronze. A splendid marble group of "The Fates" stood before the door, the work of a young American sculptor, Boris Yvain, who had died in Paris when only twenty-three years old.

For those who don't know their historic New York City geography, Washingon Square South between Wooster Street and Fifth Avenue South is the exact location of Bobst Library.

Happy Halloween!

Here are two more examples of circulating library labels in Fales books. Unlike the example in the previous entry, these labels are on the inside front covers, so they were harder to find.

Here's a specimen that's quite similar to Sam's:

John Carpenter offers an almost identical selection of merchandise -- no genuine medicines and no specific mention of magazines, however. Carpenter also offers more actual printing services than Sam.

This label was in a copy of Songs by the Ettrick Shepherd -- that's Mr. James Hogg.

[Apologies for the lousy image here.]

Here's a nice American example:

B. Huling in Saratoga Springs, NY kept his label short and sweet. Remember that Saratoga Springs in the nineteenth century was a very swank vacation spot -- comparable to Bath in England.

This label is in a copy of Master Humphrey's Clock by Charles Dickens.

This is just one of ELEVEN editions of Master Humphrey's Clock held in Fales. I'll keep my eyes peeled for more labels.

I have been talking to a lot of classes over the last few weeks, so I thought I would highlight some of my favorite teaching examples in this space.

This one is at the very top of my list. Dig it:

Here's a transcription of the label:

Sams' Circulating Library, Hoddesdon, Herts.
Books Lent to Read, by the Year, Half-Year, Quarter, or Single Volume.
Magazines, And other Periodical Publications, on the Shortest Notice.
Every Article in the Stationery, Bookselling, and Perfumery, at the London Prices.
Genuine Medicines.
Books Neatly Bound.

If you are interested in learning about the circulation of books in the nineteenth century, the history of commercial circulating libraries is the place to start. Here's an article that makes for a nice introduction: "The Economy of Novel Reading: Jane Austen and the Circulating Library" by Lee Erickson. For a longer treatment of the company I often describe as the Blockbuster Video of the nineteenth century, check out this book: Mudie's Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel by Guinevere L. Griest (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970).

But without reading anything further about the circulating library, this label gives you a sense of the context in which this object circulated. Sam has all of your light reading needs covered AND you can pick up your perfume and "Genuine Medicines"! One-stop shopping, 1820s style.

The text inside? It's another one of those unknown gems:

Isn't it Odd? by Marmaduke Merrywhistle (London, 1822)

In case you can't make out the details in the image above, I will be leading a panel discussion about comics on Thursday, September 25 as part of the Book History Colloquium at Columbia University. 5:30 - 7:00 in 523 Butler Library.

The speakers are David Hajdu, author of The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (2008) and David Beronä, author of Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels

These two books are part of a growing body of excellent secondary works on comic history/graphic narrative. Other recent favorites of mine include Men Of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book by Gerard Jones and Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution, 1963-1975 by Patrick Rosenkranz.

In addition to these works, there has been an explosion of quality re-printings of comics from an earlier era. Thanks in large part to the success of The Complete Peanuts published by Fantagraphics, it is possible for fans and researchers to get their hands on complete runs of classics such as Krazy Kat, Gasoline Alley, Dick Tracy, and many more. Add to these the availability of DC Archive Editions and Marvel MasterWorks editions PLUS the lesser-known super heroes being reissued by Dark Horse, and it's clear we're living in another golden age of comics.

A golden age of comics history, at any rate.

Excelsior!

Let's take another trip back to the Old Weird America of the nineteenth century. I first came across Poor Mary Pomeroy several years ago:

Since then, I have kept an eye out for other examples of this cheap true-crime literature. Poor Mary Pomeroy dates from the 1870s, but these three are all from the 1850s.

Startling, thrilling AND interesting! That's quite a narrative. Fanny Danforth's story also features cross-dressing (she disguises herself as a man to go to sea in search of her lover) and pirates.

These aren't "dime novels" and they aren't "penny dreadfuls" -- they're cheap and sensational, but they all make some claim to being non-fiction. Except for Disappointed Love! which claims to be both FACT and FICTION!

I also suspect that these items were originally part of the Levy Dime Novel Collection -- years ago the Fales curators interfiled some of the Levy collection with the Fales American collection. One interesting thing about the Levy Collection is that Mr. Levy emphasized "feminine literature," hence the presence of such fine examples of crime, adventure, and heartbreak about women.

They remind me an awful lot of made for TV movies.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

– Herman Melville. Moby Dick.

I'm actually heading to the Adirondacks, which is much more William James than Herman Melville.

One of the projects I've been working on this summer is sorting through the Kishi Collection. Over the past four years we have added about 1,200 books from the personal collection of Mr. Yoshio Kishi to Special Collections, but there are still 136 boxes of unprocessed materials.

Here's a shot of about half of those boxes:

It's a great mix of stuff -- mostly books, though there is a chunk of material that will remain together and be described with an archival finding aid. I am opening each box then sorting through the contents to determine where the books will reside. Recent secondary works will be added to the circulating collection in Bobst, but there are a lot of amazing historical gems that will remain in Fales. Like the contents of this box:

If you've been following my blog, you know that I am a huge fan of decorative cloth bindings. I had a great day recently when I opened half-a-dozen boxes just like this one.

This title caught my eye:

Japanese Physical Training: The System of Exercise, Diet and General Mode of Living that has made the Mikado's People the Healthiest, Strongest, and Happiest Men and Women of the World. by H. Irving Hancock. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904.

The title alone is great, but the whole thing is illustrated with photographs:

It's a whole book about jiu-jitsu from 1904! And there's plenty more where this one came from. It will take a long time to get everything into BobCat, but it's going to be an amazing resource for all sorts of cross-cultural research. Watch this space for more select gems!

Deducing from the form of an object the forces that have been at work: this is the most elegant definition ever of what literary sociology should be. (57)

The sentence above is lifted from the "Maps" chapter of Graphs, Maps, Trees and I quite like this definition of "literary sociology." But I do have a problem with some of Moretti's data, particularly his data regarding the life cycle of genres and some of his map data. It seems to me he is working with highly subjective categories. While he admits the imperfection of his methods, it strikes me that there is plenty of work to be done that doesn't involve so much subjective data gathering.

Bibliography and book history are all about examining the forces that shape the form of any work or text. Forces such as printing technology, paper making, trends in graphic design, advertising, mass production, mass consumption, and many others. Think of the ways railroads altered the physical distribution of books, reading habits of travelers, and the contents of the books themselves, for example.

Try to imagine a map that displays all known printing establishments in North America in 1700. There's a nice chunk of quantitative data. Juxtapose that with a map of the same industry in 1800, 1850 and so on. Add to these maps details of roads, canals, and (eventually) railroads.

I keep coming back to the works of the great Edward Tufte

Like this one:

Tufte clearly demonstrates the insights to be gained through creative and intelligent displays of information. Here is a relatively simple, but very illuminating graph from Peter Garside:

This graph represents the number of novels written by men, women, and persons of unknown gender in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Moretti quotes it, but here's a link directly to Garside's work: http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/corvey/articles/cc03_n02.html

This graph has valuable information for both a student approaching Jane Austen for the first time and a senior academic of the Romantic period. The challenge for the library is how to empower users to manipulate the data that exists in our collections. Fales holds close to 200,000 books, many of them novels ranging from 1700 to the present. What patterns might emerge were we able to sort and graph and map them with flexibility and ease? What would such images reveal about the forces that shaped the form of these literary artifacts?